Would Bernie Have Won?

As the Democratic Party debates where to go after its 2024 drubbing, we’re going to spend the next two episodes of the show featuring two very different perspectives on the way forward.

After Trump won the election, Bernie Sanders released a blistering statement saying, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

And Bernie’s advisers and allies have been making their own versions of this argument and jockeying for the positions that would help them rebuild the Democratic Party around this vision. Some have floated Bernie’s 2020 campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. And Faiz sent me an email after the episode with Patrick Ruffini, the Republican pollster who’s been tracking the movement of working class voters to the G.O.P., saying there was a friendly debate he wanted to have here: That Bernie, or at least Bernie-ism, is the obvious answer, and Democrats simply refuse to see it. And the fact that they refuse to see it says something very telling about the party.

At the same time, I’ve heard from a lot of Democrats who are annoyed, to say the least, about this attack from Sanders’s world: Democrats abandoned the working class?

Biden has been the most economically populous president of the modern era. He’s been the most pro-labor president of the modern era. And what did it get him — or Harris? And if democratic socialism, if Bernie-ism, is the answer to winning back these voters, why don’t you see democratic socialists winning in red districts?

So this is a rich conversation, and it’s a very real debate among Democrats right now. And Faiz Shakir, whom I’ve known for years, is a great person to have on to talk about it. He has seen the Democratic Party from every vantage point. He didn’t just work for Sanders. He’s worked in senior positions for Nancy Pelosi, for Harry Reid, for the A.C.L.U. He co-founded ThinkProgress, and he’s currently the executive director of the pro-worker nonprofit media organization More Perfect Union.

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode contains strong language.

Ezra Klein: So you emailed me after the Patrick Ruffini episode saying that we should have a friendly debate about why Bernie Sanders isn’t mentioned more in these conversations and the discomfort you feel that people — maybe me, maybe the Democratic Party, as you understand it — have with him and his politics. So let’s start there. What’s the shape of that debate?

Faiz Shakir: Do you agree with that? First of all, I think we should probably start with it. In my view, there are people who in the Democratic ranks, as a constituency, I find and feel as someone who has, as you know, worked for him for a long period of time, kind of a discomfort, a spin, a shun: Here’s Bernie talking again about the Democratic Party’s banning the working class, that kind of attitude that I roll and move on. And I’m saying, don’t I roll? Let’s talk about it! And that’s what I wanted to engage. But you tell me that I’m off base on that.

Well, I have multiple thoughts on it. One is that if you ask me who has been the most prominent member of Congress being heard in the media giving their postmortem on 2024, it is Bernie Sanders, right? He’s one of the most prominent members of the Democratic Senate caucus, he was very close to the Biden administration.

He was very woven into the Biden administration. Many of his people were, and Elizabeth Warren’s people from a similar wing of the party were, in the Biden administration. So sometimes it feels to me like the Bernie wing of the party still has this feeling of exclusion, that when I look around — I think most members of Congress would be pretty excited to have the level of influence over Democrats that Bernie Sanders has.

Did you hear or see Kamala Harris stand with Bernie Sanders during the course of her campaign? Did you hear or see any major Democratic candidates campaign with Bernie Sanders?

I don’t know. You tell me.

No. The answer was no. And that goes to the heart of a, all-in, all of the above strategy for the Democratic Party.

I would argue Joe Biden stood out from a crowd in which he always appreciated and respected that this vision of a Democratic Party has a progressive economic populist element to it and has value to the Democratic Party. Even to the end of the campaign, Joe Biden held an official side event with Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire during that course, I think it was sometime in October, to talk about prescription drug prices.

During that whole period of time, Harris’s campaign did not want to stand with Bernie Sanders. And it wasn’t just her, but there are other Democrats, too. And that’s where I sense and feel to your point saying, Oh, you know, you guys run the Senate Health Committee, and you’re an important part of the Democratic Party. I’m like, Hmm, that doesn’t always feel that way.

So are we talking here about Bernie Sanders? Are we talking about this thing one might call Bernie Sanders-ism?

Yes.

I think I want to talk more about the latter.

I think he’s a person who reflects, right, exactly. We’re moving into now that conversation.

What is Bernie Sanders-ism that you think is being rejected by the Democratic Party?

Well, fundamentally, it’s an economic-first style of thinking — that we speak to and appeal to working class Americans. We both do it in policy, but we also do it in politics. There are approaches in which you signal and send messages to working class people that they are part of this coalition.

You’re not only part of it but that we think of you first and foremost. And I straddle these worlds, a lot of different worlds. And one of the things I often do is interview people who work for me, people who are candidates. And I’ll ask him this question. I’m interested in what your response will be.

Which is: I blindfold Ezra Klein. I drop you into a random city in America for this. I’m going to say it’s Atlanta or Las Vegas or Baraboo, Wis. — Superior Wisconsin — Marquette, Mich. I’m going to drop you in.

There’s going be a hundred people in a room. You’re going to go in there not knowing anything about the people in this room. And your job is to persuade them.

You go in there. Ezra. What are you going to talk about?

I’m not a politician, so what I’m going to talk about is not, I think, what people should talk about to get elected. But I’m going to ask you what you are saying I should talk about.

Great. So that’s where I want to live. This is where I want to start. This is the Bernie-isms that I’m trying to drive at.

So I’m going in there to talk about economic populism in a certain way. I am making certain assumptions that when I am talking about economic populism, it is a supermajority issue. This is majoritarian stuff.

We’re going to not only talk about policies but we have to tell you a story about America’s economy. It starts with it being rigged against you. It talks about how hard it is as a middle class person right now to afford college to pay for child care.

While you are struggling to make it on a middle class life. There are people in the society who are doing quite well with their passive income. Making tons of money, finding ways to rig this economic system to benefit them. And our job in life as public servants, our job as candidates who want to own some authority within government, is to fight for you.

And so now I’m walking you into: Here are some stories specifically that I know are challenging in this modern economy, but that I have constructive solutions to. And I want to offer them up, and I want to pose them against you.

But I do think it starts with a theory of: What am I seeing in this economy? So that you don’t feel like you live in a different world than I do. I live in the same world that you do.

I see what you’re going through, and now I’m going to connect it to why I want to serve. And that just fundamental framework that we just talked about is not a principal way in which I hear a lot of Democrats thinking about how to campaign. Although I think some of the better ones who are doing it and winning are doing that.

So I want to stress-test this, and I guess we should start with the Biden administration. The Biden administration, in my view — I’d be curious to hear if you disagree with this — is without doubt the most economically left, economically populist presidential administration of my lifetime. More so than Bill Clinton, more so than Barack Obama.

He walks up the picket line. He’s very, very explicitly pro-labor. There is a focus on industrial policy, on manufacturing. They come in with the intention to run the economy hot. To hit full employment, to make sure the wage gains that full employment will bring are spreading to the more marginalized groups of workers who often do not get wage gains during expansions.

They do all of that. There’s also a lot of other problems — foreign policy crises, inflation — but they are without doubt coming in with a blended view of the, you might say, Obama’s and Sanders’s theories of the economy. And through this administration, they’re not popular. Biden routinely struggles to crack 40 percent in favorability. There is a working class loss that you’re seeing all the way through.

Why didn’t it?

Because the politics didn’t match the policy. All those things were correct, I think, in what you diagnosed there. And when I went out and I tested this proposition ourselves, pulled it and went out and talked in the country, and you ask people a basic question: What did Joe Biden and Democrats do on the economy? I would say that message of what you did on the economy is confusing and muddled out there at best. And I ask a lot of people this: What did you think Joe Biden helped you — what was his vision? What’s his theory? And people struggle with that question.

Like, well, in my view, it was pretty basic that you wanted economic freedom, economic security for Americans. That economic freedom, you get to call it economic democracy, had two major components to it: One was workplace democracy.

You mentioned it: Here the president goes to the picket line. He fights to ban noncompete clauses. He supports unionization. He stood with the Amazon workers — they’re organizing. He saved the Teamsters pensions. He wants a vision in which we believe in workplace democracy where workers have more power and freedom.

Secondly, he believes in marketplace freedom, marketplace democracy. He fights against big tech. He fights against big monopolists. He fights for right to repair. He fights for small businesses that have the ability to bring back to America supply chains and with their entrepreneurial spirit, grow their own market share in this modern economy.

That is what he’s fighting for. But the rigged economy is such that it isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s going to take some time. But we’re on the right track, and let us keep going down this track to continue to make progress for you.

Now, I’m telling you a story that I believe in my view, Ezra, most people don’t know. This is not the way in which people communicate or think or talk about Joe Biden.

They’ll hear Inflation Reduction Act. They’ll hear Covid economy. He said this thing or that thing about inflation. All missing the point of: What is your theory? What do you want to do about this economy. And that language in the modern Democratic Party is missing.

But not from everybody. So let’s talk about a particular election example, which is Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

Sherrod Brown is alongside Sanders, one of the party’s longtime and highly skilled economic populists. His voters know him. He’s a fixture in Ohio politics, has been there for a long time. They know what he stands for. They know what he fights for. He’s fought the North American Free Trade Agreement. He’s fought for years and in very much the terms that you’re talking about, And Sherrod Brown loses to a car dealer Republican candidate in Ohio.

It’s a hard-fought race, but he loses. Why does Sherrod Brown lose?

Well, I think there’s a Democratic brand problem that I’m trying to push at. I think Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, Amy Klobuchar — they all outperform Kamala Harris. In fact, the person who outperforms — if you look at the Senate map and you say: OK where was Kamala’s base line versus where did other candidates do? You know who’s the most blue in this scenario? It is Dan Osborn in Nebraska.

Archived Clip of Dan Osborn: It shouldn’t be this hard. I’m running for U.S. Senate because people aren’t getting a fair shake. I’m running for every Nebraskan. So we have enough at the end of every week to buy groceries, have a house, set money aside for Christmas and college. And all we have left to worry about is bake sales and Little League. Kind of sounds a little bit like the American dream.

You know, if you looked at a map of where the base line was, he turns Nebraska blue in many ways. My argument of why Dan Osborn does well and loses is this story. Because we get so stuck in win/loss.

Sherrod Brown outperforms. What is the problem with a modern Democratic brand that isn’t helping a Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, Dan Osborn get over the top — it’s that people don’t believe that whatever you might say here, Jon Tester or Sherrod Brown, this Democratic brand doesn’t fight for me.

It is not affiliated with my economic thinking and the concerns that I have in the type of governance I want to see that disrupts a system that works really well for the wealthy, doesn’t want to challenge powerful actors. And so therefore I am penalizing you — even though I might like you.

I think party brands are very complicated things to manage.

So Dan Osborn, for people who were not following that election, is an independent candidate. Runs an economically populist campaign, and does way better than anybody expects. Surprises Republicans, becomes competitive and doesn’t win — but, as you say, highly overperforms what you might have imagined.

And why — just to put a point on this, Ezra — why does he overperform? Because his only brand — for a long period of time, he was only known as the guy who led his Kellogg’s workers on strike during the height of Covid: We worked a hundred days straight. It was grueling. We were told we’re essential workers. We weren’t treated with any degree of respect, and now I’m running for Congress to fight for working people.

That’s all people knew for a long period of time about Dan Osborn, and it got through. And I would argue that would restore a Democratic brand, that kind of background and vision.

But I think this gets to this question of parties. Which is what we’re talking about here.

I’ve seen you float it for Democratic National Committee chair. And you’ve had a lot to say about how the DNC should actually act in this era. And one of the problems with being a party — this is also true of the Republican Party, which is a, a trashed brand, as well, which Trump then was able to take over and hollow out — is that you have to pull together groups that don’t necessarily agree. Not just on everything, but in some cases on anything.

So something Bernie Sanders often says is: Why aren’t Democrats running in all these popular policies? And when he’s in control of the interview, he’ll say: You know, everybody else has health care for all residents, but we don’t. And we could have free college. And we could raise the minimum wage much higher. And it’s completely true that if you pull those policies in the way he talks about them, they’re very popular.

Of course, when he ran in 2020, and he was a candidate who might actually win, what you had was also a lot of discussion of the parts of those policies that do not poll highly. That you would be abolishing private health insurance under his single-payer plan, that you would be raising taxes on middle class Americans, forgiving student loans, which people talked about as a very popular policy. Did not end up being a political winner for Democrats.

And that reflects inside the Democratic Party, but also inside politics, broadly, a mix of people who would like to see the system upended and also people who don’t want to pay higher taxes, who don’t want to lose their health care. Maybe they want other people to have better health care than they do, but they like what they have, and they don’t want someone coming and taking it away.

So I do want to push this into relationship with the complexities of parties that don’t get to run. One guy unsullied by all the compromises that a large coalition actually has to make.

Yes, I agree with all that. And I’m not here to litigate whether Bernie would have won in 2020 general election — although he would have. But I think that

No, no litigation, just assertion.

Exactly.

To be fair, a lot of litigation is just that.

But what you and I know about Bernie, because you know, you’ve known him for a while, too, and obviously work with him and know a lot about how he actually thinks about managing politics: One of the things that you know about him and I know is that there’s a high degree of pragmatism there.

So while he’s pushing, let’s take Medicare for All. Then he gets into Congress: And can we at least lower the age from 65 to 60? Can we talk about Medicare expansion so that it covers home care, dental, hearing and vision — even if you can’t all move with me to Medicare for all?

That actually is how we’re President Bernie Sanders would have governed. And what it would have done, of course, is change how the Democratic Party is perceived all across this country. Because here comes a president, first stop is: Wait, spending Medicare is what we’re going to be doing at the front end? Oh, I love that. That sounds phenomenal.

He’s going to say, Here’s my North Star. Here’s my vision. And where can we get the votes to get the best version of this outcome? And he would have just set the agenda accordingly.

But that might be how he would govern. And I have tremendous respect for Bernie Sanders. And one question we will get to is, I actually think, one hard part about talking in this sort of “Would Bernie have won?” is that just some politicians are really good at what they do. And Bernie Sanders is really good at what he does.

And Obama-ism doesn’t work that well without Obama. And Donald Trump-ism doesn’t work that well without Donald Trump. And I’m not sure Bernie Sanders-ism works that well without Bernie Sanders. But in terms of the things that are exportable, like the policies, I don’t want to let you move to this: Well, in practice, he would be a pragmatist.

Because we are talking about how you run and win in elections. And when you run and win elections and put out the big vision, then the people who don’t like you, the people who are worried about you, come and point out all the things that are going to scare people about your vision. Which is what Kamala Harris had to deal with and what Bernie Sanders had to deal with in the 2020 primary and would have dealt with in the general election.

You don’t get to then just say: Oh, I didn’t really mean that whole thing about abolishing private insurance. Don’t worry: I’m a pragmatist when I govern.

No, no, it’s when you get into presidency. Hear me as saying the orientation of fighting for working class people is the thing. That is what we’re after right now. That Bernie Sanders, more so and better than I would argue a lot of the people with whom he ran against, would have put that question, that framework, that mentality — and still does — at the front and center of how the Democratic brand is received.

And you’re right that he has certain talents and abilities. But there are certain parts of that that I allow: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a Blue Dog or Jared Golden, who’s a Blue Dog, or Pat Ryan running in New York or Chris Deluzio in Pennsylvania. Or a whole bunch of other people who have similar frameworks of fighting for working class people, concerns about corporate power that they can articulate in their own ways. And when they do, they can win.

And the Democratic brand would be better restored and in a stronger position if we put this first and foremost.

I think this is a place where what I would like to see is more broad-based evidence. And here’s what I mean: I would find no answer to the Democratic Party’s problems more congenial than this one if the answer is simply that Democrats can embrace bigger social programs, a more economically populist agenda, more pro-worker rhetoric. I think that would be great. When I look at Democrats winning in red districts, I don’t typically see it.

You’ve mentioned people like Jared Golden there. I do not consider Jared Golden’s politics a close match for Bernie Sanders’s.

You should talk to Jared Golden. See how he thinks about him.

Yeah, but that’s where the —

But —

I know —

But this is where the actual policies that people are proposing matter. Dan Osborn also had a much more trimmed sail in terms of what policies he was actually proposing. I agree with you that there’s something to the orientation of being pro-worker, but it matters what signals you’re sending and what governing space you’re in. I look at Europe, where there’s been a real rise of other authoritarian right parties that have symmetries with what we’re seeing in America. And you don’t see left-wing populist parties winning in response.

And in fact, in a bunch of the places you’re seeing —

France?

I mean, they’ve had to come into a weird coalition in France. It has not been a consistent answer that has worked there. We’ve watched a lot of those parties lose.

Which does not mean one shouldn’t run on some of those ideas. But it does make me wonder if the actual appeal of right-wing authoritarianism as practiced by people like Donald Trump, where you have billionaires like Elon Musk becoming aspirational and central figures, is really the “Who’s on the side of workers?” question that people like you or Sanders want to phrase it as.

And now you see where I am, my kind of own emotional slog is with how you framed all of that, which is: I struggle with not seeing great models of pro-labor working class-oriented progressivism — wherever it might be.

Obviously, there’s some evidence maybe in Mexico that counters some trends, but there are not great models. And we’re going to concede that.

And I’m pushing for a movement that more people push corporate power to the front of your conversation, labor power at the front of your conversation, push on a different style of working class orientation of progressivism.

And we need it. We desperately need it right now to rebrand the Democratic Party.

One person who’s always been interesting in this conversation is Senator Joe Manchin. And if you were looking a couple of years ago at who was overperforming the most, who was holding the seat that Democrats really shouldn’t be holding, it was Joe Manchin. His politics has long been about curbing the excesses of — or at least what he saw as the excesses of — the Democratic Party. Famously had this ad shooting a gun at the cap and trade bill that the House was trying to pass.

He was somebody who cut how big the Inflation Reduction Act was. He’s sort of a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party. And it allowed him to win elections in a very, very red place for a very long time.

What do you make of Joe Manchin’s success?

I associate that more with a couple of things: One is Joe Manchin is a terrific politician. If you’ve ever seen him, he really engages with his community and is all over the place on the ground — and for a long period of time. But the other point I’d say is: Old-school Democrat, right? Like, you look at Kentucky: Why is Andy Beshear still the governor? You look at North Carolina: generally still have some Democrats still at high office. Because there’s still the ethic of people who generationally were Democrats affiliated with it — for whom it is getting harder and harder to continue to stay associated with that brand.

Which obviously circles me back to the basic class-based populism that I’m arguing for.

But West Virginia had become very red and very anti-Democratic.

Yeah.

While Manchin is still running —

You’d agree with me, right?

I agree that he’s a good politician, but the way in which I think he would say he’s a good politician is that he understands that you have to not get out of step with your constituents. And he believes the people you are talking about — not the people Bernie Sanders wins in Vermont but the people he wins in West Virginia — are not that liberal. That they think the government spends too much money, not too little money. That they feel that Democrats are way out of step on cultural issues.

Look, Joe Manchin’s politics are not my politics —

It’s certainly not my politics at all.

Joe Manchin has personally killed a number of things I really cared about.

He killed child care. He killed home care. He killed a whole bunch of things.

But I think it is worth really grappling: When you’re saying that the way Democrats will perform in a way they haven’t been among people whom they are losing, is to move into this much more class-based, much more left space.

And then you see, Joe Manchin is not the only person I could name like this. But a lot of the people who perform in these places look sort of more like he did. I think his success has to be grappled with a little bit more than: He’s good at retail politics.

I don’t mean to go on the whole screen of Joe Manchin here. But he’s very good at making him sound like, I’m fighting big pharma in Washington, D.C. Was he? Sure. Inflation Reduction Act had pharma components. They were very valuable. But he goes home and he talks about it in a more compelling, theatrical way, an effective way. Not saying: Hey, I also helped kill tax cuts that would have been on the rich, that would have been effective in getting us more revenue. That’s not the way he’s going and talking campaign. We know a lot about that. You and I know a lot about that. But that’s in terms of how he delivers —

I don’t buy this. Because Manchin — here’s what I understand Manchin’s politics to be: Manchin’s politics are about demonstrating constant independence from the liberal wing —

From the Democrat brand —

Not just the Democratic brand, but the liberal wing of the Democratic brand. By publicly, and in a way that people keep hearing about and seeing him do, standing in the way of things Democrats, including Bernie Sanders — specifically, things that Bernie Sanders wants to do.

So I, again, I’m going to keep pushing this because I think it’s a good —

I hear you —

I think it’s a good counterexample. He’s not going home and running like a light socialist. And hiding that he has been holding up the Inflation Reduction Act and cutting it in half. Moderation was his brand, and he believed and proved out at least among his constituents, that moderation allowed him to stay afloat in a seat no Democrats should have been able to hold for even a minute.

This gets at, to me — I know you don’t love the answer — but: Why does Donald Trump sometimes have great working class appeal is not always a policy discourse with them. You can have working class appeal in the manner, in the performance art, of how you go and talk to them, how you’re at — in the political industry we refer to this as candidate affect.

How do you come across? To people and I do think he comes across and fights in interesting ways that have a working class dimension to it.

You’re right that the push off toward the left is one of them. The shooting the gun at the cap and trade bills — one of them. These have affect: knowing your state, finding ways to campaign according to your constituency. It’s healthy in a political ecosystem.

When you’re a populist, hopefully you’re learning a little bit from how everybody is finding their own interesting ways to campaign. But I would disagree with the notions that what people want is corporate friendliness, that they want to sit down with billionaires and negotiate tax bills.

That’s how actually Joe Manchin has taught us the future of the Democratic Party — I would disagree with.

You’d emailed me after this interview I did with Patrick Ruffini, who’s a GOP pollster who had written a book that was pretty prescient on the voting realignment we’ve seen. I want to play you a clip of the interview that has been on my mind.

Archived clip of Patrick Ruffini: I did a poll in Texas, of Hispanics in Texas, where I asked them: What is the number one problem that you see today with the Democratic Party?

The answer they gave wasn’t that it was too woke or the buzzword of socialism. The answer was very interesting, and it’s something you don’t see come up with virtually any other group you talk to. And that is: They perceive the Democratic Party as being the party of welfare benefits for people who don’t work.

And if you look at how the Democratic Party has been perceived in the last four years, in particular, in terms of: We’re letting immigrants into the country, illegal migrants into the country. And there’s a perception that they’re getting government benefits and not working. And all of this is coming at the expense of people who made their way in America, started from the very bottom of the rung and worked their way up to up the economic ladder. Through their own hard work and not necessarily through government policies.

What do you think of that?

Well, as a campaign — you know in the primary, we overperformed with a lot of Latino people, went to South Texas a number of times. And I think Bernie has a unique appeal. And people often asked: Why is it that Bernie Sanders among the Democratic primary camps would attract all these Latino working class people to him?

Part of it was that the immigrant mentality — I’m one of them — come to America with a vision of what America is: a land of opportunity, great freedom. Here’s why I came here. And slowly you learn, or maybe quickly you learn: Holy cow, this place is brutal, rough, to try to make it as a working person.

The bosses don’t care about the ethic that I’m putting into this. There’s no protection around basic retirement security or job security. There’s nothing. And you realize how brutal the economy is. And I think the vision of Bernie Sanders — this is where you cross ideological spans — the vision is: There’s somebody looking out for me. He’s got a vision for me. It matters.

You know, we could disagree whether: Does Social Security speak to them? I think it does. Expanding Social Security. Does expanding Medicare speak to them? I think it does. But if Patrick is also saying: Does tariff speak to them? Yes, it does. Does certain immigration policy speak to them? Yes, it does.

It’s a lot of those things. But fundamentally, it’s that they see in someone who understands their life and has a vision for society in which they’re central to it. Not back-seating it.

How much is this built around policy vision and rhetoric? And how much of it is the affect and signal?

Because I think people get a lot of signals from candidates that they can’t quite articulate. But we meet people and we know who they are and what they’re like.

Yes.

The Democratic Party is a much more educated party. Now if you look at the people who run at its top levels, they do not come from the working class.

They have gone to college. They have not this particular year but in many years been to many elite colleges. It’s also true on the Republican side, where JD Vance went to Yale Law and Donald Trump went to Wharton. But nevertheless: How much is the problem that the Democratic Party is having trouble connecting to working class voters because it’s not running working class candidates?

I think working class candidates would help us. But why would that help us? Because we’re fundamentally not a populist movement. And that matters. And when I say populism, it means something to me. It means that you’re very connected to the emotions of people. Feeling that emotion and pain means being something of a populist, and then turning that into a majoritarian sentiment — don’t mean to dispute however many academics out there would give me a different definition of populism.

But that’s what it means to me: finding that majoritarian sentiment around that emotional pain, suffering — or happiness or excitement — of the communities that you’re fighting for. And we have become detached from that in the way in which we both politic and do policy design. That you can’t just spout rhetoric on a teleprompter, put some thoughts on there about how housing and here’s a home buyer tax credit and assume you’ve done the job.

You’re not going to do the job without the affect, the political affect, that this is something that animates me. This is something that I am concerned about. This is something I can tell you a story about. I can go on “Joe Rogan” for two hours or any other pockets or on Ezra Klein for two hours and talk at length about the housing-market problems that I see.

I think that there’s a hunger in America for understanding how the economy is rigged against them. And they expect government leaders when you enter into the forum to unpack that: You’re fighting for — you better understand this than I do.

And you’re going to tell me that, OK, federal interest rates — let’s just do housing for very briefly. I promise we’ll move off from it. Federal interest rates go up.

You don’t have to promise you’ll move off housing on this podcast. You can be on housing as long as you want.

But correct me if I’m wrong, Ezra. Like a basic story — people are hungry for it. And I think, and my assumption — I’m speaking politically for a moment — is that people will respect that I can disagree with Faiz about what he’s saying, but I understand he cares about this and he’s fighting for it and he understands. He had a theory. And maybe I’ll put him into office just because I know that this is his orientation. And as compared to the other person, maybe he would care more about housing.

So my answer would be — you push me on housing, OK. Federal interest rates go up. It locks the housing market, as you know. If I’m a homeowner, I’m not selling because I can’t afford to buy my next one. So it’s all prices now go up.

What happens in that market? Well, unless you’re a cash buyer, no one can really buy a house. Guess who comes in and buys houses at cash? Well, there’s large institutional investors. So we’ve got the growth of institutional investors who are buying in the housing markets. They are now raising rents, raising prices.

People like Invitation Homes, who don’t care. You don’t know your landlord. There’s a limited liability company. You don’t have a relationship with the people who are owning your homes. Increasingly, that’s one of the problems in this rental market: You’ve got a whole problems of RealPage and other algorithms being stacked against you, used by landlords to raise prices and keep lots empty just to maximize their profits.

How am I going to deal with this? Both going after price gouging by landlords and big institutional investors, creating ordinances that stop institutional investors from coming into communities.

I’m not asking you to agree with the policy solution. We can have a debate about policy. But I’m not telling you a story about what I see and why I care about this that I think would more resonate than telling you, Hey, you know, I want a 25,000 home-buyer tax credit.

So I’ll say a couple things. Because I don’t think here policy and politics are as separable as you as you’re trying to make them there. When you said a minute ago that populism means to you someone who has a majoritarian approach to politics with an authentic connection to the ways in which the working class is struggling, what seemed missing in that definition, to me, was, I think, what actually separates populism in all of its forms from any other forms of politics: which is it’s cut of an us versus of them. It’s decision to create enemies.

And if you’re looking at Donald Trump, his enemies are immigrants. His enemies are the left. His enemies are other countries that are ripping us off. His enemies of media. That’s a sort of standard right-wing populism.

And if you look at left populism, the enemies are billionaires. They’re corporations.

And one difficulty with that is that it makes some kinds of solutions and problems easier to point out than others.

I know housing policy quite well, and I just flatly do not agree that the problem is that you have more corporate or private-equity landlords that are pushing up prices.

The problem is that you cannot build homes. And many of the people stopping you from building homes are not billionaires, and they’re not private equity magnets. They’re people within the Bernie Sanders coalition or the Democratic Party coalition. They are people who don’t want an apartment building with affordable housing going up nearby, to say nothing of a homeless shelter. God forbid a homeless shelter is going to go up nearby.

One problem is that if you can’t identify them as a problem because they’re not your chosen enemies, it becomes hard, sometimes, to tell people the thing that they see in their own lived experience. Which is that there’s no building going on around in places Democrats govern.

And is that really because of private equity corporations? Maybe. But I’m not sure that works out as well in practice as people want.

And don’t hear me to dismiss — I think I agree with what you’re saying now. But what you and I are trying to do is merge for many candidates how to go and talk about housing — and win elections off of it.

You moved us, rightly, into: Now you’re in office governing, wreck some barriers, be somebody — and I have lots of thoughts about that — be someone with conviction who is willing to disrupt the status quo when in government to get the outcomes that you need. If we need three million units or plus of housing units, probably affordable housing units, what does that require such that you would be a bulldozer to wreck bureaucratic logjams? And all kinds of concerns.

There is that alpha quality that is still missing in the Democratic Party that says: Not only do I care about housing and tell you a story and campaign about this. But that if you put me in government, you will see in my DNA and my character, I am willing to take on people, even with whom you mentioned, who I generally would agree with.

Maybe there’s labor unions here. Maybe there’s environmental leaders here. Part of my job is to come in and say: We got to get this done. I’m going to be a bulldozer for this.

So that I think you’re putting your finger on something. But I would say if we’re winning elections, you’re still motivated by a degree of populism that can combine the story of how I also plan to govern.

But I don’t want to leave people with the idea that I think that you can have a good academic conversation about the municipal zoning laws in a certain community and that that’s going to resonate in a town hall setting that I dropped you into.

I think if you followed the growing alienation between the Democratic Party and the working class, one of the things you come to really fast here are cultural issues.

And, I mean, famously, this was the subject of the most effective ad of the Trump campaign: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” But you see this to some degree on abortion. You saw it around a lot of questions that got called wokeness a couple of years ago.

One way in which the Democratic Party has trouble representing the working class isn’t that it won’t talk about pharmaceutical prices. It’s that it has just become culturally different, religiously different, et cetera. How do you think about that while recognizing that is the case?

While recognizing that is the case, I start with a different assumption and be humble about acknowledging — maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve been doing this a bit, and I feel like I have a strong view on this. Which is: People will respect your disagreement as long as they think it is honest and sincere, that you can explain it and that you are also simultaneously fighting alongside and with them on something they care deeply about. They’ll give you allowance for disagreements in certain realms.

You take a lot of the social racial justice issues: I mentioned to you at the beginning of doing a town hall, and I drop you in and you go and talk to people. I intentionally started it on economic justice issues.

That is where I know I’ve got a supermajority here. I’m going to talk about how hard it is to be a middle class working class person in this economy and give you some prescriptions. But then I’m also good — I’m not going to leave you there. We’re going to walk through abortion, and we’re going to talk about immigration.

We’re going to talk about some racial justice issues. We’re not going to just end the town all at that. We’re talking about some of those things, recognizing that when I get to some of these, the orientation of my values — you’re going to see why I care about some of those things.

And I’m going to give allowance as I talk about them to say: You can disagree with me, but I want you to know where I’m coming from. In that language, that way of not telling them that you’re wrong, I’m right. But rather that we’re all on our journeys. This is where I’m at. This is where I believe, this is why I fight for, what I fight for that.

I think that’s what people really desperately want is: Stand by your convictions. Tell me what you really believe. Maybe you’ll persuade me. Maybe not.

Yeah, but how much with Bernie Sanders specifically is some of that allowance is he is a cranky old white guy with a political profile from a very different era in politics. And also a political profile that used to be different himself.

Something that the people in the party frustrated at Bernie Sanders are saying right now is: Sure, he used to outperform Democrats in Vermont, but he doesn’t anymore. He ran very, very slightly behind Kamala Harris in this election.

It’s not quite — if you dig in — so he outperforms her in all the Northern country, but third party candidate run who outflanked to the left on Gaza and got 7,000 to 8,000 votes. And that’s the reason. But to be clear, because she didn’t have that. So he —

But wait, I don’t really buy this, because you have third party candidates running. Was Jill Stein not on the ballot in Vermont?

Yeah, no, no, no, no. But the third party candidate was a well-known commodity or known commodity who advocated — had an actual campaign.

And the point I would make about this is that Bernie Sanders: He used to be much more pro-gun. He used to be somebody who seemed to have very little patience for some of the cultural, or what gets called by the academics, post-materialist turn in the Democratic Party. And over time, he’s become more part of the much more coalitional left, and the people who follow him in politics, the Squad, etc. —

He’s moved with the country on guns. You just take, I mean — you’ve got to parse these out one by one. But the country has moved on guns itself. But if you do a talk about background checks right now and universal — not only universal background checks but also getting guns out of schools and just safety measures — that is very strong majoritarian sentiment.

I’m not arguing about the politics of guns. What I am arguing about here a bit is that one of the reasons for Sanders’s success in politics is, as I long understood it, that he just seemed like he was from a class-first wing of the Democratic Party. The people come up after him don’t feel as much like that to me.

Given that we see a lot of these divergences happening in different countries at the same time, I’m not sure the reason it just keeps happening is nobody has figured out how to show that they disagree with conviction. I think that there is a disagreement here between a lot of working class voters and a lot of, not just the center left but the actual left, which is in a very much further along with some of these questions than much of the country is.

And I don’t just mean here, by the way. I’m not just talking about trans rights. Bernie Sanders was out there calling to ban fracking. His position on a lot of green energy things is very, very strong. I might agree on 80 percent of what he thinks there, but there’s no doubt that if he ran in a general election, these would be things that he would get attacked on in Pennsylvania.

There is a tendency for the left to not just believe in a higher minimum wage, which is what he talks about in interviews, but to believe in a huge basket of issues, with very little compromise, that a lot of people don’t believe in, and they’re not there on, and they don’t want to see their gas-powered car taken away, and so on.

But you glossed over the class-based prism quickly. That, to me, is the divergence, and that why I would argue Bernie Sanders could go into a fracking community in Pennsylvania and still get respectful disagreements: See, oh yes, you support my right to join a union. You support my right to a just transition. I believe you’re going to give a damn about me if there is an opportunity to get new jobs that come into these communities. You do want a better life for me.

I think that class-based orientation helps you in a lot of these issues, even immigration. It’s the same base. That class-based prism, I’ve heard Bernie Sanders talk about a bit. Not many others. That we have Hyundai or a lot of other companies in Alabama and Texas who exploit low-wage workers and depress wages of workers, create an uneven playing field. And that should matter. That should matter to all of us who care about rewarding work and dignity of work.

Where was Sanders in 2020 on the question of decriminalizing border crossing?

Well, you’re putting me on the spot, because I can’t remember the question. Because we were supposed to go — this tells you about our campaign. You were saying: Did we — are we willing to say no?

I came as a A.C.L.U. national political director to the campaign, and we were asked to go to an A.C.L.U. forum at which to discuss this. I think all the other candidates did, but we said no, we went to a Philadelphia A.F.L.-C.I.O. event on the same day instead.

But just to be clear, I just asked my producer, and Sanders supported it.

OK. I trust you. [Laughs]

And the reason I ask this is: So there’s a famous interview I did with Sanders years ago. And I asked him what he thought of open borders, and he says: It’s the Koch brothers’ plot.

Archived clip of Bernie Sanders: If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or U.K. or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation, in my view, to do everything we can to help poor people. What right wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy, bring in all kinds of people who work for $2 or $3 an hour — that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.

It’s funny because people always think that was me demanding to support open borders, but I’m always interested in what cuts people draw in their politics. And Sanders had always been much more skeptical of various forms of immigration reform than a lot of Democrats were.

He had a different profile on that than a lot of Democrats did in that era, and he would come at it through this class-based prism. But the reason I think the question about decriminalizing border crossing is interesting in 2020, is that as these broader trends took hold in the Democratic Party and in the left, they took hold on him, too.

Yeah, and it’s fair that, and I think one of the things you saw happen during that period of time is the family separation, the asylum seeking during the period of Trump, in which the really heinous, inhumane efforts by him to attack immigrants did have an effect on policy, on the entire field.

You’re right that people wanted to distinguish in a bolder way from what Donald Trump was doing on family separation.

And so I guess this brings me back to this question, which is whether one of the dimensions of populism has to be taken seriously. One of the dimensions of representation isn’t just having honest disagreement but actually representing, in a bunch of ways the people you are trying to win over. If working class voters —

Well, what point do you want to drive? I wouldn’t argue — I mean, it’s fair to say we should reflect on policy choices —

I guess here is the point I’m trying to draw on. It’s always very hard to work with the “Would Bernie have won?” and “Would Bernie-ism win?” questions. Because in a way it has never truly been tested at the general-election level.

Yes.

So Bernie didn’t win the primary in 2016. He didn’t win it in 2020. So he didn’t have to run a general election campaign where he wasn’t even just talking to Democrats, but people are really coming at him on these questions of banning fracking, on these questions of undocumented migrant crossings and whether or not you’re going to keep that criminalized.

And on one level, there’s a version of this that is a very convenient answer for the Democratic Party: Disagree honestly and with conviction on everything where you disagree with more working class voters, but be much more forthright and populist in your economics, and that’ll win it for you.

And the other argument is: No, that wouldn’t win it for you — that in some ways, the downsides of that have not been tested, and you have trouble with some of the voters you’re saying you represent — because you don’t actually represent them. Because culture is not something people downgrade. They want candidates not who disagree with them honestly. They want candidates who represent them authentically — and agree with them. And if you ended up having to test that out, that’s what you would find.

Hear me to say that I want class-based populism testing of different kinds. I love people to be like Bernie — great, that’s fine.

You can also not be like Bernie and do class-based populism, to be very clear. Let’s put a point on this, right? Could you argue against: Ticketmaster is a giant monopoly. And it burns me that Shein, with its importation of clothes from China, has wrecked our American clothing industry. That I could go down the line of prescription drugs and cancer drugs that cost a hell of a lot of money.

Bank fees are gouging me; noncompete bans are depriving — stopping liberty in the workplace. There are so many forms of populism, class-based populism, that are available. If you look at the political consulting industry of the Democratic Party, if I raised many of these things, the I.R.S. is now auditing the wealthy in private-jet loopholes. It’s not even — I would be like, speaking a foreign language to them. That this is not the thing —

I feel like I hear the Biden administration say stuff like that all the time, and they actually passed a bunch of that.

What we’re arguing here is going and campaigning before the American public to win elections about a particular story that the Democratic brand is affiliated and associated with. Not that there is a nice technocratic point made by the National Economic Council on CNBC.

I’m saying: Go before a town hall, that 100-person crowd. What is that story that you want to tell them about: Hi, I’m Democrat. This is my orientation, and these are the problems that I’m going to address and concrete solutions that I’m going to be a wrecking ball in government to deliver for you?

In order to do this, does the Democratic Party need to unwind itself from what is now partially its coalition?

So there’s this quote from Chuck Schumer, it’s become kind of famous, where he says, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania — ”

Archived clip of Chuck Schumer: We will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin. The voters who are most out there figuring out what to do are not the blue collar Democrats. They are the college-educated Republicans who lean Republican or independent and in the suburbs.

And I’m not sure exactly even he believes that anymore. I mean, this is from some election cycles ago. But there is an element of reality in this, which is that the Democratic Party is now a much more affluent party than it used to be.

It wins college-educated voters by very significant margins. And it has become a party that likes institutions. And I’m not saying Bernie Sanders loses all those people, but there is presumably trade-offs among some of them.

If you want to send a signal clear enough that you really hate the way things are in this country, and you are going to be much more class based in your politics, and you’re running inside a party that many of its voters come from the more educated and affluent classes, that you would lose all these suburbanites because they don’t want to have their private health insurance abolished. They don’t want to pay higher income taxes.

Is there a period of losing while you’re realigning your coalition?

The assumption that I am making — again, I would love to test it and have candidates run on it — is that you would maintain a large part of the vast majority of that coalition. You would keep Liz Cheneys in the tent.

Would it make some of them uncomfortable? Sure.

I think we are wrongly assuming that there’s a trade-off. We don’t know because we haven’t tried. We aren’t putting it first.

I would like to try. That is the fight. That is the tension that I’m having with the Democrats who say — they’re almost prejudging the outcome and saying: Well, if you go and campaign against big banks and you rail against big pharma and you say that there’s big oil collusion on raising gas prices, that somehow — Oh man, you know, we’re not going to get Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger might run and all these other people.

I’m like: No, that’s not the reason they were there to begin with. They would like to win. They would like to prevent Donald Trump from winning. And let’s find the best way to win.

And we’re talking at the end of the day — I really firmly believe this, Ezra — is that we’re talking about 3, 4, 5 percent on the margins. And we’re talking about — that’s the difference between that gets us to majorities of the House and the Senate and the presidency.

I think it is this class-based populism that gets you to that 3, 4, 5 percent. If we don’t do it, it is more likely that it continues to drift in the JD Vance direction in 2028.

Putting aside the Adam Kinzingers and Liz Cheneys and putting aside the very specific threat Donald Trump represents to institutions, can you really have a class-based politics that doesn’t — if you’re going to flip the comfortable, aren’t you going to repel some of the comfortable? Does that create a push around things like taxes and just more old-school issues in American politics? Maybe one you want to make, right?

I think in some ways the argument I would almost like to hear somebody say is: Yes. I would like to trade out some of the coalition because there are trade-offs. I just think this part of the coalition is bigger and more just.

Exactly. Just to be on the math side of the equation: You are correct. Just to make that point that if you’re talking about the working class, that’s a two-thirds of the workforce without a college degree. And then now you rightly reference this other one-third who are doing well.

And so when you start to leak from the two-thirds bucket — yeah, you have a math problem there. And that’s why the Schumer math doesn’t add up: Once you start leaking, you don’t know where the bottom is. And we find with Donald Trump that enough leakage of votes in the working class will cause you to lose an election.

So you want to fight for that. You don’t want leakage there. And you’re right that it may come to a point where some of the movement — and Google is a good example. Google donors: If you look at Google employees, I think they’re one of the highest among employers, donors to the Democratic Party. Whereas on the other side of this, it’s amazing.

I think Bloomberg did the study: U.P.S. workers were one of the biggest constituencies of small-dollar donors to Donald Trump. I would like that to flip. Not like a wholesale flip, but I would like — I don’t mind losing a few more Google employees to gain more U.P.S. drivers and workers.

You’ve got to make that argument. Yes, I’ll tell you: I’ll make that trade and tell you clear indirectly. That’s a direction I would go because it would be good for the Democratic Party. It’d be good for the path of our future sustainability in politics. It would lead to good policy outcomes.

So there’s been a discourse that has emerged after the election, and I’ve been part of it, where people are saying that one problem is that Democrats at many levels of government have stopped saying no to the groups. They have stopped saying no, and the way this codes is that you’re saying they don’t say no to the left.

When I say they don’t say no, I actually mean something much broader than that. Many of the people they need to say no to, many of the people they need — not to demonstrate independence from but be independent from — are actually what I would think of as on the right of the party.

Some of those are corporate interests. Some of them are local interests. Sometimes they’re unions. Sometimes they’re not unions. But all sorts of things create problems in different areas of governing.

Something that I think connects candidates from very different directions who succeed is that people believe they are independent. People believe Bernie Sanders is independent. And that, to me, is part of the work of him not running as a Democrat, running as a kind of independent democratic socialist candidate.

People believe Donald Trump, because of his billions, is independent. When Barack Obama ran in 2008 — people forget this — but he was a new face to politics, and he ran very much against special interests, who he said were the ones who were ruining our politics. One of the things that I think was difficult for Kamala Harris is that people didn’t believe she was independent. Not that she was necessarily bought and paid for — just that she was a normal party politician.

And in many different ways, what connects populists to me is that they’re able to send some costly signal, not joining their party, coming from the outside, etc., that signals to people they’re going to be somebody in there who says no in all kinds of different directions in order to solve problems in the way they should be solved.

Because people believe politics is fundamentally corrupt and idiotic. And if you’re too much a creature of politics, then you’re going to reflect that corruption and idiocy, too.

I’ll flesh out deeper on “independence.” I think you’re right to say the word, but I will say that independence comes from a sense of a vision, a sense of conviction, and a sense that you mean what you say.

That this isn’t a game; this isn’t theater. Somebody didn’t just put some words in front of me and I read them. I’m telling you something that I deeply and honestly believe. And when you see that I deeply and honestly believe it, that that conviction resides in me, then I — when I go and advocate for it, it will manifest itself.

So often when I talk to candidates, we might have differences of opinions, all kinds of different views. The first question is, What do you honestly believe? Give me a place of conviction. My view on this kind of inside/outside thing that you’re raising of groups or whatever the case might be, is that groups have play a role to just advocate sincerely with conviction.

That’s what you expect them to do. If you believe deeply in Gaza, fight for Gaza, explain and advocate for it, build a political movement. But when your candidate in the arena, you make the judgments about what you believe is majoritarian, what is consistent with your values. So, for instance, Ezra, you know, we went on the “Joe Rogan” show, as you remember, in the 2019 campaign —

I defended you in this. People got very mad at me.

I mean, well, at you?

Imagine how they felt about —

I mean, I had literally — I think the Human Rights Campaign launched a whole campaign against us. MoveOn, said like: You know, Bernie Sanders is like a disgrace to the communities for which he fights.

And that’s what we dealt with in real time.

It didn’t — we didn’t back — we didn’t say sorry. We didn’t apologize. This is the vision that — we thought we were going to go speak to a general-election populous, people with whom we disagree. Have long defended it. Continue to defend to this day. The job of being in the political arena is to speak to people who aren’t already on your side.

And to help make a case. That’s why we’re even having this conversation. But you’re right that you need that conviction of being willing to say no.

Are we really so different, Faiz?

[Laughs] See, I can persuade you.

If we are counting as people who disagree. [Laughs]

No.

But is this a cultural problem? Well, let me ask you this differently. Because I am going to say this is a cultural problem in the Democratic Party.

I was just having this conversation the other day with somebody. The disagreement feels harder and harder. I don’t know if you feel that way. And that’s why I kind of reached out to you, is like, can we have disagreement? Where I don’t say you’re a terrible person for disagreeing with you?

Where do you think this culture that fears or avoids certain kinds of disagreement came from? You and I are about the same age. We came up in digital media around similar times. People may not know this about you, but you are a founder of ThinkProgress. I don’t feel like it felt like this then.

I agree. And we rose up at a time where it was actually disagreement that prospered. We’re going to say names — I’m going to say names that people don’t remember. But like, whether you’re Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald or Kevin Drum or Marcos or, you know, Matt Yglesias — whoever it might have been writing at the time — there was a desire for disagreement. And it’s particularly in the Iraq war era and national security issues and tax cuts and Medicare Part D.

You remember all the stuff there — all kinds of issues going on. And there’s a desire to grapple with it. The sense at that time was that we were in the wilderness, and we need to have honest conversation. I think right now we are lacking in that. I refer to that word as populism, and you may have a different word for it.

But that populism reconnects you with actual sentiment among regular people and that whatever, wherever — that is missing. I don’t see a lot of organizations on the left, as opposed to the right, whose job and desire is to reach scale, to talk to as many people as possible. And when you’re trying to rescale, you have to grapple with this disagreement, different points of view.

How much do you think this is a story of media forms changing — that then change the cultures of at least, in this case, the Democratic Party? And what I mean by that is, when we’re talking about 2005 to 2010, that area, you have the mainstream media — these big platforms that are trying to be quite mass in that era, particularly wherever they dominate. Newspapers: They want everybody in what was then their geographical area to read them. And so they want to be broadly acceptable.

And then you had blogging, which was very fractious. But I would describe blogging as: You were in conversation with the people you were disagreeing with. Blogging was a highly conversational form, and the people you were most angry at, you were writing back and forth, and the two of you were often linking back and forth.

And the movement to me to social media: One of the things that it brought with it was, instead of talking to the people you were angry at, you talked about the people you were angry at to the people you disagreed with. And you got, you know, the likes and got retweeted. And this culture emerged of: You got engagement by drawing who was outside of your circle, who you didn’t have to talk to.

And at the same time, at the mass level of culture, there was a fracturing. And everybody was in competition with everybody: every newspaper against every other newspaper and against every magazine and ThinkProgress and Breitbart. And everything was playing, and it created a push to focus on your niche.

When there was that much competition, it created more push, even among the mass players, to define who they were for. So was this simply the result of the internet? Making media more about talking to the people who agreed with you and differentiating yourself in terms of who you were targeting as your audience? And that also became how politics worked?

I think this Substackization — I love Substack people. I read them. I’m sure you do, too. But what we’ve lost in a Substackized world, in the media environment in which everyone has, you know, small islands in which they talk to, is that we haven’t found that supermajoritarian outlets of how we convey news.

On the right, I would argue it exists. I watch them. I not only watch Trump’s speeches. But like, a lot of conservative media — you’ll see YouTube, itself, has millions and millions of subscribers and millions and millions of views. There aren’t that many corollaries on the left.

Who are you thinking of on the right there?

So PragerU, The Daily Wire are certainly doing —

You would describe what they’re trying to do as supermajoritarian?

No, no, no. I’m saying that’s scale. When Trump is building a movement and he’s trying to reach large numbers of people, I would argue to you, Ezra, you have the ability to reach scale with their vision and their arguments much better than right now we are prepared to do on a center left.

To just reach millions and millions of people. If tomorrow, Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders went out and had an important thing to say, we are still reliant largely on, you mentioned, some traditional news outlets, or you would pay media. This is why paid media matters so much to the Democratic side of the aisle — because that’s a chief method of communication.

Whereas I would argue on the right, you look at avenues — that they just have millions and millions of people with whom they can start to just seed arguments, thoughts, ideas. And then they can grow from there. And I do think it matters, Ezra, that scale issue.

Is this really such an advantage for the right? This is this huge blowout election for Donald Trump, the greatest win anybody could have imagined him having. And he’s going to win, what, a point or two in the popular vote? It’s a win, right? And when you win, you get the power in American government. But I could imagine a much stronger Republican performance given international trends in 2024 and think that is a party and a side that is figuring out how to talk to the people who don’t find them appealing.

Respecting where you’re coming from. I think I’m operating off a different base line. I think given what I believe of Donald Trump and both his record and who he was and the types of things he wanted to campaign upon, I don’t believe he could or should have gotten to a majority in this country.

And what I would say — I’m somebody who watches lots and lots of Donald Trump speeches — probably well over 100. I watched them. I want to learn. I feel like I want to learn what a populist candidate is trying to say and do out there.

And I do tend to think on the left, the center left, we’ve stopped listening to him. And so you’ll get like versions of: Well, Donald Trump, all he’s doing is spouting this anger and meanness of the enemy from within and Arnold Palmer jokes.

To be fair, it’s all there. But the thrust, if you listen to a lot of Donald Trump’s speeches and where he’s kind of galvanizing working class, if you listened — even just the “Joe Rogan” conversation — it’s around an economic vision that when you listen to it: Here’s no tax on tips. Here’s my terrorist plan. I’ve got a plan idea to do something about it.

And I would argue to you that those things that we’re often less talking about in the center left, he’s able to actually reach regular people with his outlets. More effectively get that message across.

And that when you go to a town hall in Wisconsin and you talk about Social Security — this came up a lot — I stress-tested myself — go around and say, Hey, what’d you hear about Donald Trump on Social Security? Well, Democrats keep saying they’re going to protect Social Security. But Donald Trump says he says no taxes on Social Security. What do you think about that? And like, Right, we’re not. We haven’t even engaged that conversation.

They hear no tax on Social Security. It sounds good. It sounds like an expanded benefit, right? My point is that they’re able — he’s able — to get a message out like that, that you and I may not even be living or seeing if we’re not dialed in to what they’re talking about.

I think in this way, I would make a cut between two things in the Donald Trump media strategy or the Republican media strategy, which is: On the one hand, I think that the Balkanization into outlets like PragerU and The Daily Wire has not been good for them, does not be good for them intellectually, is not good for them politically.

This year, the Trump campaign concentrated much more on outlets that are fundamentally nonpolitical, like “Joe Rogan,” but have become alienated from —

Like Elon, himself —

Democratic politics. Say that again.

Elon himself has a platform in his own right. And you’re right: Adin Ross, Jake Paul —

Theo Von —

Lex Fridman.

I mean, there was a whole variety. You’re right. I mean, this is the way Donald Trump does the media: He’s willing and wants to reach out to a lot of people and have these conversations. Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest that — I didn’t mean to take us down this road, just PragerU or whatever on the right.

But I think they’re part of an ecosystem in which the conservative arguments are dominating a center left style of arguments. That may be a better way to put it.

Bernie Sanders was on “The Daily” recently talking to my colleague Michael Barbaro, about some of this and specifically about “Rogan.” And here’s what he said when he was asked whether Harris should have gone on “Rogan.”

Archived clip of Bernie Sanders: Am I afraid of being on your show? I am not. Am I afraid of being on the “Joe Rogan” show. No.

Bottom line is what every communications director knows is that there is a new world of media out there. And it’s not just NBC, CBS, or The New York Times. It is podcasts. It is “Joe Rogan.” It is Fox News. It is young people who nobody in the Democratic leadership has ever heard of who have YouTube programs that attract millions of people.

That is the reality. Can you ignore that? That is insane. Anyone who thinks you could ignore that reality is crazy. In my experience, not that I’ve been on millions of these shows, the people that I talk to treat me with respect, and I think you cannot be, you know: Oh, Joe Rogan said this or he says that.

Yeah, so what? You know, my wife disagrees with me on this or that issue. So what?

You can’t run away from somebody because they may have said something stupid or something that you disagree with. That’s life.

But most importantly, when you go on the show, what do you say?

So Joe Rogan asked you: What do you think about the fact that we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before? Oh, well, I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.

What do you think about the fact that we’re the only major country not to guarantee health care? Well, gee, I’d like to not talk about that; I don’t want to offend the insurance companies.

Why are we paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs?Well, no, I can’t talk about that because, you know, I get money from the pharma.

That’s the problem. So yeah, you’ve got to go on different outlets. Of course, you do. But most importantly, you’ve got to know what you believe. And what you’re prepared to fight for. And what your vision for the future of this country is.

I was reminded of, during that appearance when Bernie sat with Joe Rogan that — not to be a promo for that show. But there was a moment which Bernie is doing his conversation that you’ve heard a number of times: The system is rigged, and the tax rates for corporations is lower than you and I or any working class person is paying. And Joe Rogan just, as a regular person says, “Why is that? Well, but why? That seems it should be illegal.”

And he goes, “Joe, it’s because they write the laws.” [Laughs.]

It was just so just genuine and honest. That that’s what you get out of people wanting this type of conversation that Bernie Sanders is referencing — in a setting in which he is correct: that people are so hungry for education in these spheres.

Like, they’re hungry for knowledge. That’s what you see people trying to gravitate to online is: Give me some honest discourse beyond what I hear is platitudes from political actors.

I want to catch on that “platitudes from political actors.” Because on the one hand, I so agreed with the first half of what Sanders said there. And on the other hand, sometimes he talks about a Democratic Party that I don’t really recognize. When he says, when he’s implying there that if you asked a Democrat, I guess in this case, Kamala Harris — but you really pick any generic Democrat, what they thought about high-income and wealth inequality, and they would say: I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.

I mean, that is not actually what generic Democrats say to that. Or: Why are we paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs? Well, I can’t talk about that because I get money from pharma.

I mean, but you’re taking him too literally.

So what he is saying, I’ll unpack it for you —

But this is what I’m pushing you on a little bit. Yes, go ahead.

I mean, what he’s saying, obviously, is that when we make choices to campaign, it’s fine to say: Hey, put a line in prescription drugs into your rally address. But the issue is so salient among so many people that they want to hear you really talk about, especially if you’ve been governing for three and a half years: Go and tell me this story of what we have been doing and what is next. That we haven’t just came, we saw, we conquered — insulin prices are now capped for people on Medicare. And that’s it.

Bernie Sanders was pushing Kamala behind the scenes, the whole campaign to say: You suggested, or Biden did in the State of the Union, a cap for people who aren’t on Medicare. So basically, the people on Medicare are going to get this great benefit this year. But what about the people who aren’t? Why don’t we continue to push that?

And if you do, that policy design that we’re now talking about blends itself into a story. That’s the power of it — not to stick it into the prompter and read it one time.

This goes to something you’ve said a couple of times in this conversation, which is that you have to mean it. And one of the reasons I think that Bernie Sanders is not scalable in the way that Donald Trump is and in the way that some, a lot of great politicians aren’t, is that he means it.

Sanders is just genuinely appalled by the nature of American capitalism and the corruption of the American political system in a way other candidates who might actually support many of the same ideas aren’t.

And that I keep referencing the word “populism.” That is what I mean, right? It has come from a realness. Not that we fed it into a 30-second ad, and we put it in front of you.

The 30-second ad works best when it works off of the authenticity of candidates who people already believe to some degree what you’ve been saying, what you’ve been doing — and now I connect it with the way in which you advertise.

We’ve been talking about individuals here: Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and this person and that person. What about the party itself? You’ve talked about listening tours. What do you understand the Democratic Party institutionally to be now? And what would you like it to be? And how would you like to show up in people’s lives?

When I talk to most people around the country and say: What is a Democrat? What does it ask of you? It asks nothing of you. It says: Give me $20. Give me $35. It is a fund-raising vehicle.

And a Democratic Party — I think it has to be reconstituted to be of service in communities. You know, when you’re thinking about — in a period of inflation, when people are dealing with high utility rate hikes — I would love to see a Democratic Party that says, Hey, on the ground here, we’re fighting against an unjust rate hike in your community. When Starbucks workers organize in their local community, that’s an immense act of courage to go up against an employer and say, Hey, I would like to be recognized. I want the Democratic Party to stand with them.

When East Palestine, Ohio, happens, I want a Democratic Party that says: Hey, you know, we here rally in support of a community. Because fundamentally our ethic is that we want people to be in service of one another, but also structurally, we need institutions that represent us so it does. It reconceives a bit of what our value is in society — beyond the tactics of door knocking, phone banking, small-dollar donation.

All good. All fine. But to reclaim what the Democratic Party brand is, is in consistency with what our values and our aims of improving government — has to make us much more involved in society.

And you see on the right, arguably, that better civic organization. Whether it’s a home-school association, gun club, you name it. There’s a lot of churches. It facilitates and aids them.

And when you look at rural America and what’s going on, people desire to be part of something. Right now, the Democratic Party and the left and the decline of unionization has meant there aren’t as many avenues for being part of something.

And how does the Democratic Party start on that? How does it reconnect? How does it begin to build muscle or civic infrastructure that it doesn’t currently have?

We’ve got to open the doors. I mean, it is a closed club right now. And most people don’t even know who the voting members are within the D.N.C.

It’s fine. But you do want to open the doors. Particularly at a time when you feel like you’re starting to lose your currency with people in New Jersey, New York, California.

Look at the sways of this: Large numbers of people in most populous areas moving away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. It should send an alarm bell. Right?

And it’s open the doors and get out into communities and hold listening sessions. That’s why I love going to U.A.W. town halls or union town halls — because it brings people of different walks together — and just listen and ask questions, basic questions: What does being a Democrat mean to you? What does the brand mean? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? What do you want us to hear? What do you want us talking about? What do you not like us talking about?

And just let that help inform this process.

Why do you think they haven’t been doing that? Why do you understand the Democratic Party has — and parties, in general — have deteriorated from being as muscular in people’s lives as maybe they once were?

Yes. I like that word, Ezra. It’s a good one. “Muscular.” Because it requires that. And we’ve been comfortably winning to a degree without it.

Because of the Trump era and what it does — and you could say all kinds of effects that the Trump era has had on the Democratic Party — you’re able to win in a lot of ways on the overreaction, disapprovals of him. And that false comfort of winning can pull you apart from where our actual community attitudes are about an affirmative vision and brand of a Democratic Party.

You’re just saying: Hey, what the other side is offering up is just so unacceptable. And that can get you through. That’s where we’re losing the “populism.” And that’s the word. And I welcome other people having different words. But that gets you closer to and compels you to go into forums and have dialogue, have disagreement.

It just pulls you into these zones. The best politicians we’ve got going on in the Democratic Party are just genuinely and organically interested in doing that kind of thing.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

The post Would Bernie Have Won? appeared first on New York Times.