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.
I’ve been spending some time recently with top Democrats as they think about how to rebuild after the 2024 loss. And in the 20-some years I’ve been covering politics, I have never heard Democrats so confused: about who they are — aside from their opposition to Donald Trump — as well as how and why they lost.
Democrats are losing working-class voters. They’re seeing their margins among nonwhite voters erode and vanish. They’re losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party.
So I think it’s important that the conversation among Democrats is grounded on a pretty real understanding of what happened in 2024.
And someone whose analysis on this I have come to respect over the years is David Shor. He is the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, which is a big Democratic consulting firm that does a huge amount of political surveying, data interpretation and message testing.
Shor works with campaigns and progressive groups, so he has a perspective from the inside. But he’s also a very skilled interpreter of data. He has gotten a lot of things right before other people did, including that educational polarization was becoming the central fault line for democracy — not just in America but in other countries, too.
So when I saw Shor recently, and he began walking me through some of his slides — including some of the ways he was interpreting the 2024 election and trying to help people understand what had happened — my first thought was: Rather than this being a thing that Democrats are debating in backrooms with each other, what if we did this in public?
Shor was kind enough to come on the show to present the information for us. So this episode is a bit of an experiment. He’s walking me through this presentation, and I am interrogating it. It is worth watching in the player above if you can.
I found Shor’s insights really helpful, and it helped ground some of my thinking in the data. I don’t necessarily draw every conclusion that he does, but there’s a lot that can follow from having this conversation.
Ezra Klein: David Shor, welcome to the show.
David Shor: Excited to be here.
What do you do, and why should I trust the data you’re about to show us here?
I’m glad you asked. I’m the co-founder of a research firm called Blue Rose Research. We did 26 million interviews last year. We have a team of about 45 people, including machine-learning engineers and software engineers from companies like Google. We’ve done a lot of work to figure out what actually happened last year.
A lot of liberals I know feel really burned by survey data. There’s a sense that nobody picks up the phone. How are you surveying these older people if you’re doing it online? Putting aside the fact that you conducted a lot of surveys. Why are you confident those surveys reflect reality?
The fundamental problem with survey research is just that people who answer surveys are really weird.
There are two ways that you can try to fix that. One is that you could try to get a normal representative set of people. That’s just impossible in today’s day and age. And the other is that you can just try to collect a lot of information so that you can adjust for how weird people are.
The reason I feel fairly confident about this is that in our work, every time we make any change to any part of our system, we go back and backtest to see how it affects accuracy across every other election that we’ve ever surveyed. We can’t be fully confident about any particular thing that we say.
A lot of the data isn’t back yet, but I think that there’s enough to tell a coherent story. We have 26 million survey respondents from 8 million unique people, along with precinct and county-level election results. We’re also going to try to tie together all of the external data that other people have collected.
What I’ll say about this election is that our forecast this cycle was very accurate. Our overall error was about a third of a percent nationally, and I think that a lot of the things that we expected did bear out.
I also want to take a moment to answer something that you had asked a second ago — which is: Why look at survey data?
I think that superpolitically engaged people are overrepresented at every single step of the political process. I really think the only point, other than Election Day, when regular people get a say, is in polls.
I take that point. I always think it’s good to remind myself and everyone listening to the show that they’re weird. And if their intuition about politics were shared, politics wouldn’t look the way it does at all.
Where do we begin?
First, I’m just going to start it with this slide over here that just looks at support for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, 2020 and 2024 by race and ideology.
In 2016, Democrats received 81 percent of the Hispanic moderate vote, while in 2024 they received 58 percent. That’s only 6 percent more than the 52 percent of white moderates that they received in 2024.
The main story here is just a continuation of the trends that we saw four years ago. Throughout the entire Trump campaign, we’ve observed this racial depolarization.
The thing I find most surprising here is if you look at white voters in this chart — liberal, moderate and conservative — and at least in this data from 2016 to 2024, there’s a 0 percent swing in any of them. If you go back to the debates we were having about Donald Trump, it’s the return and resurgence of a coalition trying to protect white power in this country.
And I wrote about this. I think there’s good reason to believe that, even if that was part of the intention, it doesn’t appear in the results. Democrats lost a modest amount of support among Black voters in those years, but they lost a huge amount of support among Hispanic voters and a significant amount among Asian voters.
Why do you think that is?
I think that a lot of political analysis in America has been really centered around viewing everything through a very America-centric lens. Because there’s this story in American politics: If you want to understand 20th-century American politics, then the big story is that there was this giant Southern realignment in 1964.
Driven by the Civil Rights Act.
Yes, driven by the Civil Rights Act. And that carried forward. It took a really long time for that to work its way down the ballot. So it was tempting for American political scientists and many more detail-oriented Americans, political consultants and pundits to see everything.
People who wrote books like “Why We’re Polarized,” for instance.
Exactly. To see everything through this transformation. The most important political trend of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world — at least in Western countries with elections — has been this story of education polarization. Basically, we’ve seen highly educated people move to the left, while working-class people have moved to the right.
I think a lot of people’s analytical error when looking at Trump is that they saw Trump as this reincarnation of the 1960s — like George Wallace or something. When in reality, I think he was representing this global trend.
The other thing that I find interesting here is the shift in voters who self-describe as conservative. There’s no shift in white, self-described conservative voters between 2016 and 2024.
Democrats are winning 85 percent of Black conservatives in 2016 but only 77 percent in 2024. They were winning 34 percent of conservative Hispanics in 2016, but that falls by half, to 17 percent, in 2024. They were winning 28 percent of conservative Asians in 2016 — which falls to 20 percent in 2024.
It’s always a little bit weird for somebody who is a self-described conservative to vote for Democrats, who are quite a liberal party now. But what we’re seeing among nonwhite voters is people voting more by ideology and less by their ethnic group.
That’s exactly right. I would just say this shouldn’t be all that surprising. I think, now, we identify the Democratic Party as straightforwardly liberal. But the Democratic Party used to be a coalition between liberals, moderates and conservatives. And as liberals became the dominant coalition partner, it makes sense that the conservatives and moderates in the coalition — who were disproportionately nonwhite, given that this ideological polarization happened among whites 20 or 30 years ago — would start to shift.
Let’s move to Slide 2 here.
This slide here shows what I think is probably the most important story of this cycle. I have two graphs: The first breaks down 2024 support by whether or not you had voted in 2020. This data comes from the New York Times data and Nate Cohn’s Upshot polling — probably the highest quality public pollster in America.
What you can see here is that in 2020, according to their data, people who didn’t vote would have been a little bit more Democratic than the country overall had they voted.
But over the next four years, people who didn’t vote shifted from being a somewhat Democratic-leaning group to a group that Trump won by double digits.
The second graph here shows, for every precinct, the percentage of people who voted in 2022 and the change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024. What you can see here is that for the lowest-turnout precincts, Trump increased his vote share by about 6 percent, while in the highest-turnout precincts, Harris actually increased her support.
The story of this election is that people who follow the news closely, get their information from traditional media and see politics as an important part of their identity became more Democratic in absolute terms. Meanwhile, those who don’t follow politics closely became much more Republican.
It’s interesting because obviously, I get a lot of incoming from people who want The New York Times to cover Donald Trump differently.
Some of those arguments I agree with, some I don’t. What I always think about though, is that if your lever is New York Times headlines, you’re not affecting the voters you are losing. The question Democrats face, when you look at how badly they lost less politically engaged voters, is: How do you change the views of voters you don’t really have a good way to reach?
Yes, that’s 100 percent right. I just want to stress that this is a new problem.
This problem didn’t exist four years ago. It’s not just that the New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population — that’s definitely true. It’s that they’re more liberal than they were four years ago — even though the country went the other way. And so there’s this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don’t.
As a result of these changes, we’re seeing the reversal of a decades-long truism in American politics. For a long time, Democrats have said, and it’s been true, that if everyone votes, we win and that higher turnout is good for Democrats. But this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite.
I have some numbers here: If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points. And generally what you see now is that every measure of socioeconomic status and political engagement is just monotonically related to your chance of liking Trump.
What is monotonically?
Oh, yeah. Sorry.
This is why Democrats can’t win. [Laughs.]
That’s exactly right. I’m the problem.
It’s basically that the lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are. And that just wasn’t true four years ago.
Here’s something that I’ve heard from a lot of Democrats and very good election analysts, which seems to be in some tension here.
There’s an argument that what happened to Democrats between 2020 and 2024 is that their voters stayed home. So what happened then was a shrinking of the electorate that disproportionately sliced off what Democrats for a while were calling the anti-MAGA coalition.
How does that sit with you — the idea that Democrats didn’t lose to Trump, they lost to the couch?
It’s just not empirically correct, I would say.
Generally, turnout and support go in the same direction for the basic reason that there are a lot of people who didn’t feel ready to vote for Republicans but were still mad at the Democratic Party, so they stayed home in response.
If you just look at the demographics of the people who voted for Biden last time and stayed home this time, they’re generally less educated, fairly politically disengaged and much less likely to watch MSNBC and more likely to watch Fox.
Frankly, they resemble the voters who trended away from us.
So if you had forced them out to vote, they may have just voted for Donald Trump?
Exactly. And that does show up. If you look at African Americans, for example: Those who didn’t vote were much more likely to say that they supported Trump than those who did this cycle.
It’s true that overall turnout fell in much of the country, but in the battleground states that actually decided the presidential election, turnout was roughly where it was from four years ago. And it’s clear as day that a bunch of people changed their minds.
How much is this just inflation?
You’re dealing with people who aren’t paying a lot of attention to politics. They do pay attention and feel prices and the state of the country. You had a massive inflationary period, and they’re [expletive]. Being [expletive] about inflation moved them against the incumbent party, which, as in other countries, they held responsible for inflation.
I think that that’s a very reasonable explanation. It makes sense that the people who care the least about politics are going to be the most upset about prices going up, and there are a lot of academic reasons to think that makes sense.
I don’t think it’s necessarily true that it’s impossible for us to win those voters back. There have been dramatic shifts in the media consumption habits of these people in the last four years. So it may be a harder problem.
Before we discuss, I think it’s worth talking about the next chart, too, because it’s getting at the same question in a different way.
Here, we have a plot that we just took from The Economist. On the bottom, we have foreign-born population and on the top, we have the increase in Republican vote share. As you can see, there’s a very clear correlation.
This is by county.
This is by county. And as you can see, there’s a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much Trump’s vote share increased. In counties like Queens, New York, or Miami Dade, Florida, Trump increased his vote share by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy.
When we look at the precinct election results, we see that in immigrant communities of all races — particularly Hispanic and Asian communities. But Trump even increased his vote share in Haitian precincts in Florida.
Our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden plus-27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens makes up roughly 10 percent of the electorate.
So that means immigrants swung far more than the median of the electorate.
That’s exactly right. It’s really hard to know exactly what happened — working-class immigrants don’t answer a ton of surveys. But our best guess is that they swung 23 percentage points against the Democratic Party.
The crazy thing is, if you believe this — and there’s some uncertainty, but I think some version of this is probably true — then something like half of the net votes that Trump received came from immigrants.
This wasn’t efficient for him, and it’s one of the main reasons the bias of the Electoral College decreased by so much this cycle.
In the battleground states, Trump’s vote share swung by maybe half a percentage point, or one percentage point, and that was enough for him to win. But if you look at the four biggest states where immigrants are concentrated, New York, California, Texas — Trump did extremely well. It wasn’t very efficient for him, but in terms of people changing their mind, it was a massive percentage of the story.
This gets to another way that I think the data has proved conventional wisdom from at least 2020 wrong.
In 2020, you had an election where Joe Biden won, but he won by less than the polling predicted. One reason for this is that Donald Trump performed much better with Hispanic and Asian voters than expected.
I remember seeing some pretty strong research afterward and talking to people who study the Hispanic vote. They said that in 2020, the pandemic really scrambled what the election was about. In 2016, the election was about immigration. In 2020, it was about the pandemic, lockdowns and the economy.
Hispanic voters who had been driven away from Trump by his border talk in 2016 were more likely to vote for him in 2020. But that was weird, right? It was the pandemic, in a way, moderating Donald Trump’s appeal.
In 2024, Trump runs, I would say, to the right of where he was on the border in 2016. We’re talking mass deportations, more than a wall. And Trump did better among immigrant groups than he ever had before.
The Democratic belief that when the topic turned back to immigration, we would see some of that polarization around Trump return and that he would be harmed in immigrant communities did not occur.
No, inflation probably played some kind of role here.
Though the flip side is, if you look in the United Kingdom, it happened the same year. It’s just that the incumbent was right-wing instead of left-wing. And the Labour Party did also drop with Black, Asian and Hindu voters. So I think there’s some kind of globalized right-wing phenomena happening.
Now I’ll move on to the next slide.
Here we have Harris’s support by age, year, race and gender. One thing you can notice is that among 18-year-olds, women of color are the only of the four that Harris won. Trump narrowly won nonwhite men.
I find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations, and if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it was that young people didn’t like him. And Republicans had been maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors.
But if you look at this chart, 75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than 20-year-old white men.
That’s exactly right.
That’s a real shift.
It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by in the last four years — that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.
And so the next chart, to just describe it —
This chart, in some ways, convinced me to do this podcast.
Oh, thank you.
This chart shocks me.
I agree. To me, this is the scariest chart in this entire presentation, and again, something I’m very surprised by.
At the bottom, we have age, and at the top, we have the gender gap and support for Kamala Harris, comparing women and men.
What you can see is that, for voters over 30, the gender gap was fairly stable at around 10 percent, which is roughly where it’s been in American politics.
And for voters over age 75, it’s even lower. So a fairly low gender gap among older voters.
I think that a lot of people underestimate how recent the gender gap is. Historically, Republicans did better with women than with men. This was true across most of the West, that center-left parties did better with men than women. That shift happened in the United States during the Clinton era and has remained stable since then.
What’s crazy is that if you look at people under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. 18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics.
Is that abortion?
I think it’s still too early to say exactly what the cause is. What’s interesting, though, is that this is happening in other countries, as well. Obviously, different countries have different political systems, but I’ve seen similar patterns in Canada, the U.K. and Norway.
There’s a lot of research to do here, but it’s still very striking. It’s similar to how a lot of people talk about the Democratic young men problem — and it’s still somehow underrated, because the actual numbers are just a lot worse than people think.
The huge gender gap implies to me it’s not just inflation. Women pay high prices for eggs, too.
If you look at the U.K. election last year, the Labour Party did a lot better because the incumbent party was unpopular. What’s interesting is if you break it down by age, the Conservatives actually increased their vote share among 18- to 24-year-old voters by 2 or 3 percent, even though they did 8 or 9 percent worse overall.
I don’t think it’s just inflation or backlash against the incumbent governments, though I’m sure that’s part of the story, too.
I feel like the story you’re implying you believe here is that this polarization among young men and women is driven by young men who were in high school and online during Covid.
This was around the time when #MeToo was cresting, Jordan Peterson became a big figure, and Andrew Tate was rising. You have what’s now called the manosphere.
But there’s a sense the Democratic Party is becoming much more a pro-women party and in some ways, sort of anti-young men. And that, in turn, had a huge effect on young men’s political opinions.
I do want to stress that this seems to be a global phenomenon. And I don’t want to overcenter the specific things the Democratic Party has done but rather focus on the broader cultural shifts.
Peterson and Tate are global figures.
Exactly. I agree with that. We’re in the midst of a big cultural change that I think people are really underestimating.
If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.
If I were going to speculate, I’d say phones and social media have a lot to do with this. How that translates into partisan politics depends on what the parties do. But I think it’s a big shift.
It seems plausible to me that social media and online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. If you’re a 23-year-old man interested in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and online, you’re being driven into a very intensely male online world.
Whereas, if you’re a 23-year-old female and your interests align with what the YouTube algorithm codes, you are not entering that world. You’re actually entering the opposite world. You’re seeing Brené Brown and all these other things.
The capacity to be in highly gendered media worlds is really different in 2024 than it was in 2004, and that’s true worldwide.
I agree with that entirely. Online communities are much more gender-segregated than offline ones. In that respect, it should be unsurprising that suddenly shifting a bunch of young people’s social worlds to be entirely online all at once would cause the political situation to change.
Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters.
I do think that, even as the idea of the rising demographic Democratic majority became a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually going to save them. They thought that this was a last gasp of something and that if Donald Trump couldn’t run up his numbers among seniors and you had millennials and Gen Z really coming into voting power, that would be the end of this Republican Party.
That is just completely false, and it might be the beginning of this Republican Party.
I have to admit, I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems I was wrong. The future has a way of surprising us.
The flip side of this is that Democrats made a bunch of gains among older voters, and I’m sure that they’ll be happy that they did that two years from now, in the midterms. But if we don’t do anything about this, then this problem could become very bad.
Now I’m just going to move over to talking about how this happened.
Right here, I have this slide.
This is a very simple chart showing exit-poll favorability for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in 2020 and 2024.
I think it’s really important to ground any discussion of the election in the simple fact that Donald Trump was just as unpopular on Election Day last year as he was in 2020, and maybe even a little bit more unpopular. But what changed is that Biden had a net favorability rating of plus six, and Harris had a net favorability rating of minus six.
I want to play a clip from Mike Donilon, who was Joe Biden’s chief strategist. He was recently at a forum and made an argument that I think you could at least read this chart as backing it up. Which is that Biden was more popular in 2020 than Harris was in 2024.
Maybe the Biden-Harris switch was a mistake.
Here’s Donilon.
Archived clip of Mike Donilon: I think folks who had this view believed that Biden was going to lose. He didn’t have it anymore. He had to get out. That was the best thing for the party. I understand that’s their view. You know, I have a view too, right? And my view is, I think it was insane. I think the party lost its mind.
Did the party lose its mind, and that’s why we see this chart?
I think the best explanation for why Kamala Harris was unpopular can be found on this next slide.
The Biden administration was extremely unpopular for most of its term. They saw their approval fall off a cliff after Afghanistan. It dropped further with inflation, immigration and budget fights in the fall. And then it never recovered.
You can never tell in a counterfactual world, but I think that Biden would have had an even harder time distinguishing himself from his own record.
It would have been even harder for Joe Biden to run away from Joe Biden.
Looking at this chart, it looks like there is, by January, a plus-20 net disapproval. Maybe that was a little bit smaller in November, but it had been widening. If you go back to the beginning of 2023, it was narrower. People were really [expletive] at the Biden administration by the time we hit the election.
I think that’s the big, salient fact about this election.
I don’t think it was impossible for Kamala to do better. This was a winnable election at the end of the day. It was very close. But this was the big thing that was weighing Democrats down.
To explain why, in our polling, the way that we measure issue importance is by presenting people with random issues and asking which of these problems facing the country today is more important.
People pick, and when you model it out, anytime you have cost of living or inflation put up against something else, eight or nine out of 10 people picked the cost of living and inflation were more important.
What I find notable here is that you tested cost of living against immigration and border security, and around 70 percent of the voters said cost of living or inflation was more important.
That’s right.
You tested it against abortion. There, cost of living or inflation was more important to about 80 percent of voters. Against environment and climate change, 84 percent of voters picked cost of living or inflation.
One thing that the Biden people always believed was that this election would be very heavily about democracy itself. This is something I was told by top Biden strategists. I don’t see democracy on here or Jan. 6 and the stability of the system. Did you test those, as well?
We did. But we did a survey where we just asked people: What’s more important right now — preserving America’s institutions or delivering change that improves people’s lives?
It was 78 to 18: delivering change that improves people’s lives. One of the hardest things about being a political consultant over the last eight years is that every day Trump does terrible things — things that I think are objectively awful and scary and that [expletive] me off. Things he says, like: I’m going to prosecute my enemies.
Then we do a bunch of tests, and voters really don’t want to hear about it from us. I think Trump would do better if he didn’t say those things, for sure. But voters want politicians to talk about concrete ways that they are going to improve people’s lives.
There’s an argument you hear from many Democrats: There was no problem here except for inflation.
In fact, Democrats did better than incumbent parties in other countries did. If you look at the Conservatives in the U.K., they had a much worse election result. Look at what happened to the ruling coalition in France. In some ways, Democrats were doing fine; they had a fairly modest drop in support.
It’s just a shame for them that inflation happened on their watch. If Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, inflation would have happened on his watch, completely discrediting him and his administration, and that likely would have been the end of them.
How do you distinguish between: There is a broad structural problem the Democratic Party is facing that it needs to think about for 2028. And: There’s actually no problem here.
When we measure issues, we measure how important voters find it. Then we just measure: Do you trust Democrats or Republicans more on this issue?
What you see here is, if you look at the top issues that voters care the most about — cost of living, the economy, taxes, government spending, the deficit, foreign policy and health care — other than health care, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages of about 15 points on all of the issues that voters care the most about.
The story that I would tell in response to your question is that in this election, voters trusted Republicans way more than Democrats on all of the most important issues, but they also bought into this idea that Donald Trump was a terrible person who couldn’t be trusted with power. That’s what made the election close.
But four years from now, Donald Trump will not be the nominee. And maybe they’ll nominate somebody who’s just as terrible and unlikable, but if we don’t get out of this trust deficit, we’ll have a lot of problems.
This next slide is a chart divided into quadrants. The top-right quadrant represents issues that are very important and issues where Democrats are more trusted. It’s like an untilled bit of farmland up there. There’s mental health, which voters don’t rate that important, but they do trust Democrats significantly more on it. They rate it higher than they rate climate change, the environment and abortion — which struck me as surprising.
Democrats’ one bright spot is health care. That’s kind of it in terms of issues that are quite important and have a genuinely noticeable advantage.
It’s worth saying that four years ago, the No. 1 issues were Covid and health care. Those were the issues that people trusted Democrats the most on.
The strategy was really obvious: Talk a lot about Covid and health care. This time, we had a much harder problem — the issues that people cared the most about, voters didn’t trust us on. The issues that people did trust us on — climate change and reproductive rights probably the big ones — voters just didn’t care very much about.
That was a very difficult strategic position, and it’s also one that was just very different than it was four years ago.
I just want to tick off some issues voters ranked as important that they trusted Republicans on and then ask you a question about it. They thought the cost of living, the economy and inflation were very important — and had a lot more trust in Republicans. They thought national security and foreign policy were important and trusted Republicans there, too. Taxes, government spending and debt — trusted Republicans again. Crime and immigration — trusted Republicans. Social Security — trusted Republicans — which seems like a bad one for Democrats. A political division they thought was important — and they trusted Republicans a bit more on that in this data.
If I looked at 2016 and at 2020, would I see on all of these that Republicans had advantages and Democrats were just winning on health care?
How much of this is something flipping around as an incumbent penalty and a sort of reaction to conditions in the country at that moment? And how much of it is a durable situation where Republicans have a trusted advantage — where Democrats would have to act in a spectacular way over time to change voters’ impressions of them on that issue?
We saw in our data that as the Biden administration became a lot more unpopular, all of these things dropped a lot. So some of it was a uniform shift.
But over the last four years, there were some things that structurally changed a lot in every center-left party in the world. Generally, the left has its issues that it owns, and the right has its issues that it owns. But usually the economy is pretty neutral. During the Trump administration, the economy was fairly neutral.
Another really big shift was education has gone from being basically one of the best issues for Democrats to basically neutral now. We saw that in the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2021 be an advantage for Republicans.
The other big shift, on the other side, was reproductive rights used to be a fairly neutral issue for Democrats. Immediately after Dobbs, we saw party trust on reproductive rights shoot up.
These numbers do change. One of the big messages I want to get across is: The world has changed a lot in the last four years, and it’s going to keep changing. We have to adjust in response to what happens.
Tell me what’s going on in this next slide because, as I understand it, this is really connected to the work you do specifically. What are you doing here?
One of the big things my firm does, our biggest product, is that we do randomized controlled trials on ads.
The idea is that for any given ad, you take a thousand people and you split them into a treatment and a control group. Five hundred people see the ad, and 500 people don’t. Then you survey them after and ask them who they’re voting for. And then, the difference between treatment and control can be described as the causal effect.
Last cycle, we tested probably 4,000 or 5,000 Harris ads. I just wanted to call out two that were in the top 1 percent of ads that we tested. One is from Kamala Harris.
Archival clip of Kamala Harris ad: I get it. The cost of rent, groceries and utilities is too high. So here’s what we’re going to do about it. We will lower housing costs by building more homes and crack down on landlords who are charging too much. We will lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers who are keeping the cost of everyday goods too high.
I’m Kamala Harris, and I approve this message because you work hard for your paycheck. You should get to keep more of it. As president, I’ll make that my top priority.
Obviously, there’s a lot for several parts of the Democratic coalition there.
The other ad by Future Forward just shows: tax Trump.
Archived clip of Kamala Harris ad: He fights for himself and his billionaire friends. He intends to enact a national sales tax, the Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle-class families by $4,000 a year. Instead of a tax hike, we will pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit 100 million Americans.
These were obviously the best ads in the campaign. I think this reinforces the point that what voters cared the most about was the cost of living. The voters were really mad about the actual situation, and I think that Harris in this ad, acknowledging that things are actually very bad, is part of what made it so effective.
There’s a view out there — and I saw Jacobin, a socialist publication, recently did some research on this: At the start of Harris’s campaign sprint — she was only the head of the Democratic ticket for three months — she talked a lot about the economy. But by the end, she was talking a lot more about democracy.
There were phases of the Harris campaign: The first was more populist while the last one was more institutional.
From what you saw, was that true?
There was this big strategic question that Democrats faced — and it wasn’t just the Harris campaign — which is polling would tell them you should talk about the economy or voters care a lot about the cost of living.
But, one, it’s very hard to get media attention on those things. And two, I think Trump has done a good job of baiting us.
What’s really interesting about a lot of the democracy and authoritarian stuff is that how concerned you are about it really varies a lot by political engagement and education. The kinds of people who make media decisions at CNN or work in politics are the kinds of people who are going to be much more concerned about it than working-class folks.
The Harris campaign and Future Forward had access to all of this issue-by-issue polling and to all this randomized ad testing. Did they run a heavily economic campaign, and it didn’t work? Or did they not run a heavily economic campaign at the end, and it didn’t work? Because if they did the thing and it didn’t work, then maybe it just didn’t work. There’s a difference.
Asking the hard questions. I think that Democratic messaging last cycle was not economically focused enough. I think that it focused too much on narratives of defending institutions and democracy. And it’s just very easy for folks to fall into that trap.
But why?
David Plouffe is a smart guy. I’m not asking you to critique David Plouffe. I can watch you getting physically uncomfortable [Shor laughs] as I harm your business here. These people all wanted to win. They really did, every single one of them. And they had a lot of data.
This is something that’s been on my mind: If they weren’t running the optimal strategy, why not?
For instance, it’s very easy to get media attention for anti-price gouging policies because there’s a lot of controversy over whether they actually work. But they didn’t make people talk about whether or not you’re going to do an anti-price gouging policy.
This is constantly a Donald Trump move: announce a policy that probably doesn’t work or is outrageous or beyond the bounds of political possibility. Maybe it isn’t even all that popular when you poll, but you get people talking about it.
You’re going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Everybody knows Mexico isn’t going to pay for it. But now you are talking about how Donald Trump hates immigration, and it breaks through.
It’s not rocket science to get people to pay attention. If Bernie Sanders had been in the campaign, people would have paid attention to his economic messaging because he frames it in a way that creates conflict.
If the economic messaging is so much more effective than the democracy messaging, why did the campaign choose to emphasize was the democracy messaging?
The thing I’ll say, in terms of why I’m sympathetic to the people who had these jobs and had to make these decisions, is it just feels wrong.
I have a situation where donors will email me, and they’ll say things like: Look at this crazy, absolutely terrible and evil thing that Trump did. We need to test it. So you test it, and it really doesn’t work. People want to hear about eggs.
It’s very hard to totally shift direction, just because data tells you one thing.
I do think the campaign photo ops that we all remember at the end are telling: visuals of Donald Trump in a garbage truck and at McDonald’s.
There was a ridiculousness to those visuals. I saw a lot of liberals making fun of them on various social media platforms. But there was something about the way those visuals were being chosen by the two candidates.
Of the two of them, only Kamala Harris had actually worked at a McDonald’s. But she wasn’t the one who ended up putting on the apron and getting photographed at McDonald’s.
Each coalition’s campaigns are ultimately going to reflect the aesthetic and cultural choices of the people who staff them.
It makes sense. If you had said two years ago that Trump would end his campaign by showing up at a McDonald’s, it wouldn’t have been surprising. It’s hard to escape that kind of demographic pull. But we have to try because we have to actually win these people over.
I have a couple more slides I want to go through.
I talked about this before, but voters cared a lot more about delivering change than preserving institutions.
We have this other polling question here, which I think is interesting. It is asking people to pick between the statements: “Things could be going better in America and what is needed is a return to basic stability.” The other is the belief: “Things in America are going poorly and what is needed is a major change and a shock to the system.”
And when you have those two things, it’s 37 to 53 — which is a lot wider than the election result ended up being.
What really strikes me about this is that sometimes when I read polls, the wording is pretty clearly there to make something sound better than the other thing: “Things could be going better in America and what is needed is a return to basic stability from whoever becomes president.” And: “Things in America are going poorly and what is needed is a major change and a shock to the system from whoever becomes president.”
I would in some ways say the second there is worded to turn people off a little bit. It sounds disruptive, a crisis — a shock, right? It’s not just a major change, it is beyond that. And it dominates.
But I do have a question about this. On the one hand, we see lines like that outpolling the incremental change. On the other hand, if you look at the new split-ticket ratings for who overperformed in the election, very moderate House Democrats did very well.
There does seem to be a tension there between two forms of political wisdom, both of which have data to back them right now, which is: Voters want huge, massive change. And the optimal political strategy is Joe Manchin, Jared Golden, Ruben Gallego or Susan Collins — who are not the people who promise unbelievably shocking change. They are moderates who kind of tack between the parties a little bit and try to represent a center that wants something a little bit less dramatic than either side is offering.
How do you reconcile them?
There’s an enormous amount of status quo bias in politics. Campaigning on big policy changes can be pretty unpopular.
But I think what this is really saying is that voters were very angry about the state of things. And what they wanted tonally was someone who acknowledged that anger. Ruben Gallego did a lot of criticism of the status quo and was able to outperform.
So people want an angry moderate.
I think that’s exactly right.
I always think of temperament and ideology as being separate axes in American politics that we connect too much. So we think that people who are moderates often have a moderate temperament. What this is implying is what people want are moderate policies in a more revolutionary or certainly more upset temperament. We’re [expletive] but not ideologically extreme about it. It’s like a funny chant.
Yes, I think that’s right. When people think about moderates, they think of somebody like Joe Manchin. Someone who’s just down the line on everything.
I think that’s an accurate description of what highly educated moderates are like. But most low-socioeconomic-status moderates — they’re very extreme on some issues and very conservative on other issues. When you think of that, it’s maybe less surprising that a lot of them like Donald Trump.
Back in 2015, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump that has one of these headlines that now people will sometimes screenshot and be mad at me about. It’s called “Donald Trump Is the Perfect ‘Moderate.’”
The point of the piece was not that he’s not extreme — because he is extreme. But that the way his politics worked, particularly on the campaign trail, in things he said, was internally disorganized.
So he’d be extremely far right on immigration but compared to other Republicans much more centrist on things like Medicare and Social Security. He would talk about giving health care to everybody, even though Republicans wouldn’t like that. He talked about raising taxes on people like him. Though that’s not how he governed.
There’s a lot of research that people in the electorate who are moderate have an in-between the two parties view on everything. It’s not that they might believe in completely legalized weed on the one hand and mass deportations on the other. It’s like, if you could imagine positions as being very liberal or very conservative, they average out to moderate as opposed to being consistently moderate.
That’s exactly right. The way I like to put that in math terms: The issue correlations for highly educated people are just a lot higher than they are —
Your eyebrows get excited when you do math terms.
I’m sorry.
[Laughs.]
I’m glad we started talking about ideology because that dovetails to the next slide.
Here we just ask about each candidate: Do you think this candidate is more liberal than me, more conservative than me or close to my views?
Forty-nine percent of voters said: Kamala Harris was more liberal than me. While only 39 percent of voters said: Donald Trump was more conservative than me.
And so there was this big ideological perception gap where a lot of voters saw Donald Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris.
What did this look like in 2016 and 2020?
In 2016, it looked fairly similar to this. In 2020, perceptions of Donald Trump being too extreme went up relative to 2016, and perceptions of the Democratic candidate being too extreme went down from 2016 to 2020.
I don’t think that wasn’t a property of Joe Biden per se. Obviously his being moderate was a big part of his brand at that time.
But in our polling, we would ask: Do you think that Joe Biden is too liberal or too conservative? And we saw that over the course of 2021, as his approval ratings dipped, the perception that he was too liberal also went up.
It’s also true that Joe Biden became more liberal, in terms of how he governed and what he ran on. So you’re saying that in the 2020 election, you actually did see people say that they were ideologically closer to Biden than to Trump?
Yes.
Then over time that eroded?
That eroded.
The thing I want to say here before I move on is I’m really not trying to beat up on Kamala Harris. I think if you step back, you have a situation where only 42 percent of Americans trust the Democratic Party on the economy versus the 58 percent for Republicans. Obviously the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party is going to be perceived as too left wing unless they do a lot of stuff to try to counterbalance that.
People were living under the Biden-Harris administration. Whatever they thought of it, the line Trump would sometimes deliver on Harris — If you have all these great ideas, why didn’t you do them in the last four years while you were vice president? — was a pretty strong argument.
I think there’s a good argument that given that, it’s amazing that we did as well as we did. But it was a close election.
And so who knows what the counterfactual could have been?
I want to note something as a dog that is not barking across this presentation. If you look at punditry about the election, that if everybody agrees on anything, it’s that the election was a huge verdict on wokeness.
Famously, one of Trump’s higher testing ads was “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” I’m not saying you’re saying diversity, equity and inclusion programs are popular. But I’m not seeing it emerge as a major explanation for 2024 here.
I’m curious how you think both about the election and about the role it’s playing in the postelection narrative.
The “they/them” ad that everybody talks about was a good ad, but in our testing it was a 70th percentile ad.
When you look at Donald Trump’s best-performing ads, it was basically the economy, gas prices, immigration and crime. There has definitely been an overemphasis on D.E.I., wokeness and trans issues.
It definitely played a role in elite discourse and in why so many tech chief executive officers have shifted to the right. I believe Republicans are making a mistake to focus on these things instead of concrete issues that people actually care about.
There’s a big-picture point I want to make. Many people see the Trump administration as a break that shows that all of the traditional rules of politics no longer apply. To some extent, that’s wrong. A lot of what’s happening is actually easy to understand.
Donald Trump, to go back to the ideological thing, broke with his party and might have been dishonest about it. He disavowed Project 2025, said that he wouldn’t cut social programs and ruled out a national abortion ban. That kind of thing just plays a big role in his success.
And I think many of these newer things that we talk about might be less important than we think.
Here is the last slide of the retrospective.
What I have here is the share of voters who get their news from TikTok, broken down by year. The share of young voters who get their news from TikTok has more than quadrupled in the last four years.
This is the biggest and probably fastest shift in media consumption that has happened in my lifetime, and it closely correlates with support change. TikTok users are younger, they’re less politically engaged, and it’s not surprising that we dropped among this group. This is what you’d expect given these demographics.
But if you run the regressions, there’s clearly a causal element at play. And when you zoom in specifically on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.
By the end of the election, Donald Trump is promising to save TikTok. One possible explanation then for TikTok users shifting toward Trump is that they like TikTok and they didn’t want it to be taken away from them. Another that people have worried about quite a bit is that the company behind TikTok could very easily have been turning dials, just softly.
It’s not that nothing that is liberal doesn’t do well on TikTok — I’ve seen videos of me get posted there that perform very well. But it wouldn’t be hard to turn up the dial a little bit on issues that are tricky for Democrats.
When you look at this data, do you think it is something about TikTok? Do you think it is something about TikTok’s audience being young people who are seeing this movement? Or does it make you suspect dial-turning?
I don’t know the answer to that. But it’s entirely possible, given that we know TikTok does dial-turning on some topics, like Ukraine or Tiananmen Square.
TikTok represents something radically different from other social networks that came before it. There also could be some malfeasance on the part of the people who work there.
But I think TikTok is really the first social media platform that is truly decentralized. What I mean by this is: It’s not based on follower graphs. If you look at Instagram Reels or Twitter, how many people see a video or a piece of content is highly correlated with how many followers that person has. TikTok is a lot more random. There’s very interesting machine learning reasons for why. But I think that it really allowed a lot of content that never would have gotten a lot of views on Twitter or on television to suddenly escape containment and get directly into the eyes of people who don’t care that much about politics.
You could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok, and Democrats are going to do great now. I don’t really know.
But I think that, for whatever reason, this major shift really helped Republicans. It’s just one example of how the world has changed.
I hear a lot from Democrats about how to fix what they now call the media problem — sometimes you hear the TikTok problem.
When you look at this, do you think this is something that an established political party and a bunch of donors could do something about? Or do you think: TikTok is a vibes machine — and basically, for reasons like inflation, incumbency or a censorious Democratic Party that people have grown tired of — the vibes were bad for Democrats in 2024? And vibes machines like TikTok, along with other social media platforms, are going to amplify those bad vibes?
It’s not really a thing you do in a strategic sense. What you’re trying to do is be — both in terms of the candidates you have and the things you say and believe — a better cultural product. And the things that pick up good cultural products and amplify them are going to be friendlier to you.
There’s a lot of truth in that. I think that TikTok is genuinely different from other platforms that came before it. Its audience is more politically disengaged and more working class.
And as a party, we’ve really struggled to find creators and content that connects with people like that — because the people who work in Democratic politics are not like that.
In the old traditional media world, we were a lot like media gatekeepers, so it was pretty clear how to win that war — and I think Democrats did a good job of it. But now we’re in a completely different fight.
Let’s shift the focus to the present, as opposed to a long time ago — four or five months ago.
You’ve talked a lot in your previous episodes about Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy.
What we’ve done here is pull together all his executive orders and the policies he’s campaigned on. We have 60 dots here, and every one of these dots is a policy that we’ve pulled.
And what you can see is that there’s a lot of variance. A lot of the things that he campaigned on: no taxes on tips, deploying the military to the border, voter ID laws and ending remote work for federal employees, to name a few.
A lot of that stuff is very popular. While on the flip side, a lot of what he’s actually doing — which he talks about less — is deeply unpopular. For example, Medicaid cuts, repealing the Affordable Care Act and extending tax cuts to billionaires.
To be a little controversial, I think a lot of the challenge of the Trump era is that they’re going to try to bait us. And we should do everything we can to meaningfully resist and protect the populations that we care about. But I think we need to make sure that we’re preserving a considerable amount of time to attack Trump on the most effective issues that voters are concerned about.
You’ve used the term “bait” a few times. I think of a political party baiting you as dangling something in front of you that they know is going to make you mad — but isn’t that big of a deal.
They’re doing mass firings around critical functions, destroying U.S.A.I.D. and arrogating huge amounts of executive power. These are a few things that I find Democrats are really worried about at the moment. On the one hand, I suspect they’re not the issues that the public cares about or wants to hear that much about like making a podcaster the deputy director of the F.B.I.
But at the same time, they’re not baiting — they’re real and important. What is the point of a party if it won’t fight those battles?
There’s sometimes this idea that the party is just going to sit back: James Carville has been saying Democrats should basically play dead for a while — wait until the Trump administration’s unpopular actions destroy it, but don’t get in the way.
Some of the things Hakeem Jeffries has said at different points have sounded like this to people. I think his thinking is a little bit more complex. But the idea is we’re not going to run after all these things. Instead, we’re going to focus on the price of eggs and the price of goods.
You can really lose your own base if you’re not defending democracy — when they care about democracy — because you’re waiting for an opportunity to attack prices.
Am I getting what you’re saying right? Is there a way of threading the needle? What do you think about that?
I think you could imagine a theoretical world where we would have really hard and unpleasant trade-offs. But in the world we actually live in, a lot of the things we’re extremely concerned about are actually really unpopular.
Moving forward to the next slide, here’s some randomized control trial data that we ran, like I mentioned earlier with the ads, where we went through and looked at 58 different things Trump is going to do, and then we rank-ordered them by how persuasive they were in actually changing people’s votes and making them disapprove of Trump.
I think that a lot of the things that we’re most concerned about — like Elon causing chaos in the federal government, cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security or extending tax breaks for the rich — ranked highly.
Obviously, this isn’t the same as my personal top five concerns about the Trump administration. But I think that, because Republicans are making a lot of unforced errors, it’s actually easier to thread the needle on these issues than it otherwise would be.
These are pretty small changes in Trump disapproval. If I’m reading this chart correctly, when Democrats attack Trump for cutting or wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, his disapproval increases by 2.5 points. If they attack him for letting Elon slash budgets, hurting Americans and putting privacy at risk, that hurts him by 2.2 points. Passing a one-party power grab to cut government services without compromise, that’s 2.1 points. These all look about the same, and none of them creates a very big shift.
Can you just think about this scenario for a second: Can you imagine stopping a Trump voter on the street and you say 70 words to them and then there’s a 2.5 percent chance they changed their mind? I think that’s incredible and a big deal.
These two pieces of data tell a story of how we should try to shape the campaign against Trump in the next couple of months, which is that he is wreaking havoc in the federal government. I think that’s consistent with our principles and also something that voters are very concerned about.
A lot of this critique of Trump is actually very similar to the campaign we ran against Mitt Romney. And I think this ties back to what I was saying earlier: We were so shocked by Trump that we kind of forgot the old rules of politics still apply.
I want to read two of these because I think something you just said is important when we’re talking about these old laws of politics.
These are all high-polling and high-testing messages, but this is the lowest one on the chart. Trump is “working to repeal a law that lowers the cost of health care and prescription drug costs and caps insulin costs at $35 a month for seniors. By repealing this law, Trump will increase the cost of lifesaving medicine for millions and create more financial strain when costs are already too high.”
That increases Trump disapproval by 1.9 points. I think that’s about as straight-down-the-middle of a Democratic message as you could possibly imagine. But it doesn’t test as well as: Trump is “letting Elon Musk slash Federal budgets with no oversight, checks or balances. Musk gave $250 million to Trump’s campaign, and now Trump is letting Musk reshape the government in ways that advance Musk’s interests, even if they hurt working Americans by cutting the basics like Medicaid and public schools.”
I’m actually surprised that the Elon Musk attack is outpolling the insulin attack. And it’s interesting because I see this in Trump voters in my own life. Some of the ones I know actually are not happy with what’s going on in the Trump administration. There’s a lot they don’t like — it’s too much. But Musk creeps them out.
It’s really telling that the Elon stuff floats to the top here because it’s very hard for something to compete with protecting Social Security and Medicare. The fact that there are multiple Elon-related things up at the top really does tell a story that there’s something unusual about what he’s doing.
It’s very easy to tie what Musk is doing to harming individual people. One of the clearest patterns in ad testing is the best content comes from real people staring into a camera and talking about the ways Republicans have personally hurt them.
It’s funny — if you hire actors, it doesn’t work as well. People have tried. And that’s why, in some ways, I’m optimistic that Democrats will be able to thread the coalitional needle here — because we should.
The two things that we should do is fight against social welfare cuts and also attack Elon Musk for the chaos he’s creating. And I think that’s something that basically every wing of the party should be on board with.
Donald Trump is polling better than he was at this point in his first term. The vibes have really shifted in a pro-Trump direction — look at how much he and Elon Musk are doing. I’ve certainly talked to Republicans who feel like Trump has unlocked some kind of political juggernaut — that he’s cracked the code of American politics.
But you have a slide titled “Trump is Vulnerable.” So why is he vulnerable?
The biggest and most predictable thing in Democratic and American politics — and we get surprised every single time it happens — is that the president comes in, wins a trifecta, does a bunch of unpopular stuff, overreaches and then becomes very unpopular and loses big in the midterms.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t avoid the cycle. But I think that in order to avoid it, you have to look at the people who did the best job — Clinton in 1998 or Kennedy in 1962 — they managed to do it by engaging in an enormous amount of policy restraint. And that is just not what Trump has been doing at all.
You can just see it in the data: His approval rating is dropping pretty quickly, and he’s just [expletive] people off. A lot of what he’s doing and drawing attention to is really unpopular.
There’s this reality of the coalitional realignment you mentioned earlier — Democrats now have this higher-information and higher-engagement coalition. Those are the voters who turn out disproportionately in midterms.
If I were a moderate Republican right now or really any Republican in a vulnerable position — I’d be pretty worried. I know they’re all afraid of Elon Musk and afraid of primaries, but they should be afraid of losing.
As you showed earlier, if only 2022 voters had come out in 2024, Harris would have won. You’d have to be pretty confident in Donald Trump’s political skills to believe he can shift that dynamic.
I think that’s exactly right. But that said, it gets to this tension in all of these Democratic soul-searching conversations: If Democrats do nothing, they’ll probably be OK in 2026. All of these voters who get their news from TikTok, who don’t care about politics — voters under 25 — just aren’t going to turn out in the midterms.
But if we don’t fix this problem, then four years from now, we could be facing the same trust deficit on all these core issues. And the voters who didn’t turn out in 2026 will come back — but this time, we might be running against a candidate who is a lot less unpopular than Trump. And that could be a real pickle.
How about the Senate?
I did a big piece on debates about populism a couple of years ago, and it involved a model you had — one that was predicting a Democratic Senate annihilation in 2024.
Democrats are down a couple of seats in the Senate — 53 to 47. It’s not a good map for them in 2026. And they lost some really important seats, like Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
How do you see the future of the Democratic Senate?
If you had told me in 2019, when I first started worrying about the 2024 Senate election, that Democrats would have 47 seats, I would have jumped for joy.
I think the really big factors here were that the Republicans ran a bunch of terrible candidates in key swing races, and Democratic candidates did a good job of distancing themselves from the party.
I don’t want to spend too much time speculating about the 2026 map, but even though the bias in the Electoral College has gone down quite a bit due to the swing among immigrant voters, that doesn’t change the fundamental challenge in the Senate. It’s still very difficult for Democrats to take control unless they can consistently outperform expectations.
How Harris did and Biden did in most of the country show that these problems won’t be fixed unless we spend the next two or four years changing the party’s brand — especially among working-class voters, who are overrepresented in the Senate.
The one exception to this — and I know this is controversial, and it might get me in trouble — is Nebraska. If you look at Nebraska, the single biggest overperformance that we had was Tom Osborne running as an independent. He outperformed the top of the ticket by 7.1 percent. Now obviously, Nebraska is an extremely red state. But I think it’s worth noting that we’ve only ever really tried this strategy — running candidates who are formally not tied to the Democratic Party — in extremely red states.
I think the argument for doing that kind of thing in merely red states — places like Florida, Ohio or Iowa — is a tough question. And it’s not up to me to decide what we end up doing, but I think it’s something that we have to seriously consider.
And that also raises a really awkward question: What do we do with the reality that, by land area, in most parts of the country, it’s almost impossible for a Democrat — or even someone with a Democrat on their ticket — to win?
What do you do about the reality of the Democratic brand? It’s toxic in most of the land area in the country.
You always have to be careful about which conversation you’re having. Is the conversation: Can Democrats win in 2026 or 2028? If that’s the question, then the answer is yes.
If the conversation is: How do you get back to a place where you’re putting states in play that Democrats have just kind of given up on? — that’s a different question.
Mitch McConnell is retiring in Kentucky, and there’s a Democratic governor there. It’s literally not true that no Democrat can win. But no one seriously thinks a Democrat is going to take Mitch McConnell’s seat. Because the national Democratic brand — which is different from the state party brand — is pretty bad. And people understand that when they’re voting for the Senate, they’re voting for the national brand.
You’ve been thinking about this for a long time. If you were thinking about reversing these deeper trends — these educational trends — and your goal was to make Democrats competitive again in Florida, Missouri and Kansas, not the reddest states, but states where they were competitive a couple of years ago, what would you advise Democrats to do?
Democrats are not in power right now. That means we don’t have agenda control.
A lot of this will depend on what Trump does next — and who eventually replaces him. Looking back at the 2016 election and Trump’s first term, one thing that stood out in polling of noncollege whites, particularly Obama-Trump voters, was how remarkably stable their approval of Trump remained throughout most of his presidency.
The only time that approval declined was when Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But once that issue was out of the news, they switched back.
So at this moment, given that there’s no clear party leader, I think it’s mostly a question: If Trump does successfully push a bunch of welfare state cuts, might that change the realignment?
But realistically, at least until 2026, it’s mostly going to depend on what Republicans do. When we pick a new presidential candidate, that will be a reset. I don’t think it’s too early to start talking about that. You could imagine us picking candidates who would do a much better job.
I think that’s a good place to end. So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
First, I want to call out “The Hollow Parties,” by Daniel Schlozman, who is a good friend of mine, and Sam Rosenfeld.
Sam Rosenfeld, my old colleague.
I think it’s hard to talk about a lot of these questions — especially the ones I was kind of dodging — about why parties do what they do without reading that.
The other book I want to call out is one that was hugely influential in shaping how I think about politics. This is a really nerdy pick, but “The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion,” by John Zaller really gets at this key question: How much do people’s survey responses actually reflect their true beliefs, and how much of it is just downstream of what elites are saying?
And I think his answer is: It’s mostly elites — but both play a role.
The last book I want to call out is “The Victory Lab” by Sasha Issenberg. It covers the history of Democratic analytics and the industry around it. A lot of the numbers I’ve shared here come out of that machine.
So if you’re interested in the history of the Democratic Party’s internal analytics and research structure, it’s really the only book that’s ever been written about it.
David Shor, Thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to this 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.
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