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 Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The ongoing government shutdown is the first real strategic test of Democrats in President Trump’s second term. It is the first time they’ve overcome enough of their internal divisions to choose a fight, choose a message, choose a set of demands and take a risk. Behind this fight are a bunch of strategic schisms in the party over whether it makes sense to confront Trump in this way, to use what leverage they have to take this kind of risk, schisms over whether to fight on lawlessness, authoritarianism and democracy or to focus only on pocketbook issues.
And now we’re in the shutdown, and the road out of it and toward the midterms and toward 2028, is going to require Democrats to face not just these divisions but also schisms in their party over what kind of strategy works for them, what kind of voters they’re trying to win back and what those voters actually want.
To talk through how we got here and where the Democratic Party is going, I wanted to invite Jon Favreau on the show. He was the director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama and is a host of the hit podcast “Pod Save America.”
Ezra Klein: Jon Favreau, welcome to the show.
Jon Favreau: Hey, there.
It’s good to see you.
You, too, man.
I want to start with the strategic divide that led to this. You go back a couple of months, there’s a debate inside the Senate Democratic caucus and the House Democratic caucus about whether to have a shutdown, whether that is a safe thing for Democrats to do. What are the two sides of that debate?
I think the side of the debate where people did not want to shut down is that the party that causes the shutdown almost never wins, that it was going to be impossible to wring any concessions out of the Trump administration, so why are Democrats closing down the government? What is the endgame? What counts as a win? How do you get out of it once you get into it? And would Democrats, who do not have as big a megaphone as Donald Trump and do not use it as well, really be able to make their case about the shutdown in a way that is as effective as or more so than Donald Trump?
The other side of the argument is: Donald Trump has basically usurped the power of Congress on a number of levels — whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s rescissions, whether it’s impoundment, whether it’s all of his immigration policy, whatever else — but he is, on a number of those fronts, possibly violating the law, and things are getting pretty scary in America right now.
This is the one leverage point that Democrats will have between now and the midterms to potentially not just force changes in how Donald Trump behaves but also grab people’s attention.
Also, that argument is: If we don’t shut the government down, if we don’t move forward, then Donald Trump is just going to continue governing exactly as he’s governing. He’s going to continue to impose tariffs. He’s going to continue to do immigration enforcement exactly as he’s doing it now, and nothing will change.
Then we’ll have the midterms, and maybe that will be enough for Democrats to win — people’s dissatisfaction with the way that Donald Trump is running the government — but maybe we shouldn’t bet on that, because right now the polling shows a Democratic lead, but small enough that it’s not something that we can be confident about.
And the Democratic brand, in tatters.
Yes.
Then there’s another division that opens up between “Let’s have a normal shutdown” and “Let’s have an abnormal shutdown.”
Which is to say: When you were describing the pro-shutdown side, you were focusing on Trump’s lawlessness, the authoritarian tactics, masked men in the streets. This is a profoundly abnormal time. You can’t run politics as normal.
But a big faction of the Democratic congressional wing, even among people who believe all that, who say: Our voters — or the voters we need to win over — don’t care. Our best issue is health care. And talking about democracy, talking about lawlessness, is a loser. We should talk about something bread-and-butter. In some versions it was tariffs, but usually it was health care.
Health care won out. That’s the shutdown we’re in. Talk me through how that happened.
I think that Democrats are absolutely right on the substance of what they’re fighting for right now. If they voted with the Republicans to pass a Republican funding bill, the price of health care would go up for 20 million Americans. If they did nothing and they just went along with it, 20 million Americans would see premium increases of double to quadruple.
And this is at a time when the price of everything is still way too high, and mostly because Donald Trump also raised taxes on everyone with his unconstitutional tariffs. They’re likely unconstitutional.
Politically, Democrats are already convincing people, like: Look, the government is closed right now, and, like, 750,000 people are furloughed. Donald Trump is continuing to cut more programs, threatening mass layoffs. Air travel is getting delayed. And all he would have to do to stop this is to stop people’s premiums from going up, which everyone wants or most people want, most voters want.
By the way, a lot of Trump’s voters want it.
Most MAGA voters want it. I saw a poll — I think it was 58, 59 percent of self-identified MAGA voters wanted the premium tax credits extended.
Especially because the premium increases will disproportionately hit people in red states, hit Trump supporters. And so the politics isn’t on the Democrats’ side; the substance is on the Democrats’ side here.
My question is: If I’m the Republicans, it’s in their interest to make a deal and to keep the government open again, because they are now on the other side of an issue that the Republicans don’t want to be fighting about in 2026. They don’t want to be fighting about this in or ahead of the midterms. Their voters want an extension of the subsidies. It’s a losing issue for them. They want to take it off the table. Why not just let the Democrats take it off the table with them and solve a political problem that they’re facing right now and then just go on their merry way?
Now, to your larger question about Trump’s lawlessness, of masked men in the streets, of the authoritarian takeover, my concern is: OK, we get a deal on this in the next couple of weeks —
“This” being health care?
“This” being health care. We get a deal on this. It’s off the table. Politically, does it benefit Democrats at that point?
Democratic voters have now seen that their party will fight for something. That’s good. They now know that health care was an issue where their party stood up for what people wanted and Donald Trump did not. In fact, Donald Trump not only didn’t stand up for it but tried to punish other federal workers and other people because he so badly didn’t want to bring down premiums. That’s good politics there.
How long does that effect last? Do people remember that in the midterms? And then did we also miss our last chance to actually push back on Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover and what he’s doing around immigration enforcement, which is very frightening and very un-American?
A couple of pieces of that I want to pick up on, but one just about the question of whether success here is actually good or bad for the Democrats: Your former colleague Brian Beutler wrote on his Substack, “If we get health care subsidies without any new constraints on Trump’s abuses of power, I believe we will come to regret it.”
He goes on to say, “Democrats shouldn’t have rescued Republicans from the pain of their own policies, and they should have insisted on a return to the rule of law when the leverage was there.” The argument here basically is that Democrats will have worked with Republicans to prevent a huge increase in premiums that would have made people very mad at Republicans.
So they will get this win in the shutdown, and already there seems to be some increasing willingness to do something about this on the Republican side but at the cost of taking arguably their strongest issue — and the proof of how much better they are on their strongest issue — off the table.
I think there is something to what Brian wrote there, yes. And look, this is really tough, because I’m not just a political hack here. I’m someone who, like you, genuinely wants to make sure that premiums don’t rise on 20 million people. I think that’s crazy. If you can help people, you help them.
It’s not necessarily like, “Oh, you’ve got to touch the hot stove. Everyone voted for this, so now we should let people’s premiums go up because maybe that will help us beat Trump later.” It’s also, “Could you have made the shutdown about health care and still fought the fight over premiums but also included that we have to reform the way that ICE is behaving?” Absolutely.
And you need a judicial warrant if you’re going to do a raid, no more militarized tactics and militarized style, no more flash-bang grenades, no more long guns, no more middle-of-the-night raids. If they detain a citizen or a legal resident, you must release them within 24 hours.
There are proposals that you could put in that would tie ICE’s hands and in some cases force them to obey the laws and the policies already on the books. And if they don’t do it, then you cut funding, you make sure you have more congressional oversight than we have now, you make sure they turn the body cam footage on and report back to Congress. There’s a whole bunch of proposals that you could have put in there.
Now, is Donald Trump likely to accept those proposals? Much, much less likely than he is to accept extending the A.C.A. subsidies. But that is one way that you could call attention to the lawlessness and the militarization of our cities right now, which is only going to get worse.
But this goes back to the strategic divide I was asking about a minute ago, which is: There is a division in the party about whether you want to call attention to it. There are many who say: Look, Trump is not popular right now on immigration, but immigration is still a better issue for him than health care, than tariffs, than cost of living.
Immigration is an issue where Republicans are more trusted and Democrats less trusted. This is true on crime. This is true on a number of places where the Trump administration is deploying its most lawless and frightening methods.
The argument from this faction is: You do not want to make American politics about this, that the path of wisdom is: Yeah, criticize it. But do the smart things that will allow you to take back the House in about a year, and then you can start reining this in, but a shutdown is not really leveraged to rein anything in; it’s leveraged to draw attention, so draw attention to your best issue. Try to use that, try to win the midterms. You already see the way the Trump administration wants to make this about illegal aliens. Don’t let them.
What do you think of that?
It is a compelling theory that is predicated on politics and elections working as they have in the past.
We have U.S. troops from red states deployed on the streets of blue states, over the objection of people’s elected representatives. Those troops are ostensibly there to defend the government’s paramilitary force that now lands Black Hawk helicopters on Chicago apartment buildings in the middle of the night and drags people out, who are citizens and legal residents and children, half naked, screaming and crying, who have committed no crimes.
There was a pastor who was merely praying outside an ICE facility — it’s on video — and they just shot him in the head with a pepper ball. He was doing nothing. He was a pastor. He was praying.
We might not want American politics to be about this, but American politics is about this. The Trump administration has decided to make American politics about this, and they have used the federal government to make sure that American politics is about this.
Am I surprised that the median voter, that the average American isn’t as concerned about this as they are about their own premiums? No, of course not. Because if it’s not happening in your city and if it’s not happening in your apartment building and you’re not paying as close attention to the news as political junkies like us, you are, of course, going to care more about your premiums. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important, and that doesn’t mean that if we let this slide and we just ignore it, Trump is going to stop at deployments in Portland and Chicago.
Remember? People thought maybe he would stop at deployments in Los Angeles and D.C., and then he realized, I guess, that he didn’t get the reaction he wanted. Chicago seems like the one city where he is getting more of the reaction that he wanted because ICE’s tactics have been so militarized and so aggressive.
The question is: We get to 2026 and the midterms, and are there troops stationed by the polls? Are there paramilitary ICE agents running around the streets around the election? And do we have faith that if the results are close and that there was some kind of problem at the polls and there was intimidation, that everything’s going to be OK if there’s a close election and we going to do a recount and Mike Johnson isn’t going to decide to seat the Republican in a close race, because the House ultimately gets to decide who is seated in a really close election? I don’t know. I hate being the doomer person. I don’t like getting people alarmed unnecessarily. And I don’t think we should be alarmed, but I think we should be cleareyed about what’s happening here and what it’s going to take to stop it.
It is possible, like I said, that people being dissatisfied with the way that Trump is running the economy, the tariffs, cost of living, everything else, is enough to just win us the midterms comfortably. But that is a bet that we’re taking that I don’t think we need to, because we have a year until the midterms and Donald Trump is moving very fast.
I’ve been talking to members of the House and Senate. And both politically and morally, I’ve been on the side that says you can wrap health care and tariffs and authoritarianism into a single argument. And it is worth doing that, if only to set up the argument you’re actually making, if only to make American politics about what it is really about, partly if you believe this is an attentional event.
I was talking with my staff, and we were looking at coverage on the front pages, and it’s interesting how few front pages every day are running the shutdown. In fact, in the most recent “Pod Save America,” at the top is the occupation of Chicago.
Yes.
And the shutdown, instead of becoming the focusing event that ties together what is happening in American politics, is one hermetically sealed event in American politics. And then there are these other events happening simultaneously, and coverage is splitting between them.
Which is new, by the way, for a shutdown.
New for a shutdown?
It’s, like, the first time we’ve had a shutdown where it’s not the attentional event.
It feels like it is getting less attention than other shutdowns. The perception in the House — or at least what you hear from them — is they’ve been just desperately trying to get the Senate to do something, going back to March, when there could have been a shutdown some months ago. The House wanted it; Schumer and a crucial number of senators didn’t.
In this case, the House has wanted the Senate to hold strong. And then in the Senate, what the people running this will tell you is this was the argument that they could hold their members on. Already, they’ve lost about three senators — Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto from Nevada and Angus King from Maine, who is an independent and caucuses with the Democrats — and they can’t afford to lose them anymore.
And it gets to something that I’ve been hearing this whole time from people in the Senate, that the biggest divide in the caucus is between the Democrats who think we are in normal times and the Democrats who think we’re not — the Democrats who think that you could kind of just wait this out and win the midterms and the Democrats who think something more like what you were just saying, which is that if you wait this out, the midterms might not be on a fair playing field. Christopher Murphy is probably the loudest proponent of this view in public.
I think this is a hard argument. Also because, even if you hold the Murphy view, it’s not exactly clear what you do about it without more power.
Right. I think there are some Democratic senators who do believe that we are in a different kind of moment and that we are beyond normal politics. But they also think that the best strategy is to do —
Yes, that’s another group in this.
And I actually think that that’s probably the biggest group. And they have said: Look, it is just too risky to fight on issues that are not our best issues, because at the end of the day, it’s going to be people going to the ballot box and the median voter there is going to be caring about cost of living and health care more.
Again, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive issues. I see this as building an argument against what Donald Trump and this regime is doing. It starts now. It goes through the midterms. It goes through ’27 and ’28.
I see this as building a movement and building a story and an argument for the movement, and for that, you need to start laying the building blocks now. Making the fight the fight and making it bigger.
You mentioned immigration. Everything I just said to you about the Black Hawk helicopters and all that and the troops in the streets — I didn’t even mention immigration. We knew that’s what it was about. But I think the point is: I don’t think people who know this is going on think it’s about immigration anymore. I don’t think they think it’s about crime anymore.
And you’ve seen this in some of the polls. They asked if crime was a big issue in the CBS poll, and, like, 9 percent said crime is their biggest issue. Immigration was down on the list, too. Majorities of voters, nearly 60 percent, don’t want troops in the street right now. And I think if you made the argument about what ICE is doing, that they are these masked federal agents trampling on Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights — your right to walk down the street without proof of citizenship, your right to call a lawyer or your family if you’re suddenly thrown in the back of a van, even if you are here legally — like, if you ask someone: Would you rather your premiums go up, or would you rather your child be ripped out of his apartment in the middle of the night by masked men and then released a couple of hours later after he was traumatized? I think they would take the premium increase.
I know that we can say these are important to the broadest number of people, but authoritarian takeovers start at the edges of society, and then they work their way in. And one thing we’ve seen from Donald Trump this year is if you give in, he’s not going to stop. He’s going to keep going.
It’s working its way in quickly.
Yeah. It hasn’t even been a year yet.
We got to the occupation of American cities quickly.
The president’s most powerful adviser calls the opposition party “a domestic extremist organization” and has announced and talked about, along with the vice president, how they’re going to start investigating nonprofits that are left-leaning, funders, individuals.
And they throw around words like “domestic terrorism” very loosely.
“Insurrectionists” is another word we’ve begun to hear.
They are cracking down on free speech. They’ve tried to get rid of comedians who’ve mocked him. I mean, I don’t know what else we’re waiting for here.
I think the comedy vote is going to swing in the next election. We’re getting the comedians in 2026 and 2028.
I agree with everything you’re saying. And for most people following this podcast or who listen to “Pod Save America” or if you’re following politics on the liberal or leftist corners of X or Bluesky, this is what politics is about right now, and this is how it feels.
I am so struck, when I talk to members of Congress, by how much it does not feel that way, how much Congress is operating completely normally. Giving Republicans cloture votes on all kinds of normal bills to do various appropriations processes and fund defense and all the things that Congress normally does, it is simply doing normally.
And one thing I have been hearing often during the shutdown fight — in a way that feels strange, but I take it seriously — is from people who want to escalate the level of confrontation. They’re almost describing this to me as a learning experience that they and their colleagues have to go through, that the Democrats in the House and the Senate, particularly the Senate, need to convince themselves in a safer and more contained battle that they can stand up to Trump without political disaster resulting. And that if they do that, if they win the health care fight, well, they’re going to pass a continuing resolution, and then they’re going to need to come back in some months and do it again and do it again. I mean, this is how Congress works now.
And maybe, having developed more confidence, the next time they fight over tariffs, which is a place where the corruption and the bread-and-butter pocketbook issues come together a little bit more, or maybe things get worse in Chicago and Portland or he deploys troops to New York — whatever it might be — and they have more confidence to fight on that.
I find it hard to describe this because I’m pretty much at an alarm level of 11 — and I wonder if you’re hearing this, too — that there is a sense that the Democrats in Congress are in this fight, however many months into this as we now are — eight or nine months — learning that they can fight. But the point is that they have to learn that in order to have another fight in two or three or four months, when and if they need to.
Yeah. And the way you just put that makes me want to pull my hair out. [Chuckles.]
Are you not hearing that, though?
Yes.
[Laughs.]
Because I heard it before. But honestly, it’s the most persuasive argument, to me, for them. As much as I wanted the other strategy and didn’t want the health care strategy, I am very happy with Democrats for deciding to go forward and not give the votes to fund the government without this. But I also hope that we don’t learn the wrong lesson from this, which is: We can fight only on cost-of-living issues, and we should ignore the masked men in the streets.
That’s true. But let me flip this and make a more affirmative argument for something they do seem to be achieving, which is: I have seen huge amounts of polling that it’s not just that Democrats’ strongest issue is cost of living but that if you look at what the voters they need to win care about, what they care about is cost of living. And they don’t really think Democrats care about cost of living.
And Democrats, a genuine political imperative for them is to convince voters not just that they support health care but that it drives them. It drives them as much as immigration does, as much as democracy does, as much as L.G.B.T.Q. issues do, as much as all the things that have become more associated in the minds of many voters with Democrats, a little bit to their detriment.
And something that is true is that there is a lot more coverage over the coming premium shocks than there was a month ago. I just did a full episode with Neera Tanden about how this is going to work. Would I have done that if they hadn’t moved to a shutdown? Probably not. Without there being a live fight, it would have been hard to decide to devote the whole episode to that, as opposed to the troops in the streets.
So the way the coverage of this is looking, I think this fight is going better than I might have expected.
The Republicans, in choosing vengeance in the Trump administration level — canceling grants and threatening mass firings — and then this weird “health care for illegal immigrants” attack they’ve decided to settle on — that’s also helped.
The two sides agree that it’s about health care. Trump said the shutdown is about health care. To the extent a shutdown is an attentional event, it has focused attention on health care. Whether this will matter in a year, I don’t exactly know. But they wanted to move attention to health care, and they’ve moved more attention to health care than was there two months ago. For them, in the structure of this that they set up, that’s a win.
I think what I hadn’t anticipated is how the coming notices from the insurance companies would be helpful in the fight. And I don’t know that you’re going to get that on other cost-of-living issues. Like, this is a cliff, basically. And people are going to start getting notices in the mail that they’re going to get premium increases.
This isn’t even something we had when we were arguing over Trump’s economic bill in the summer, because those Medicaid cuts very purposely were pushed to 2027. And yes, there were rural hospitals closing before then that we can point to, but people weren’t feeling the effects of the Medicaid cuts for a couple of years.
The fact that the premium increases are going to happen — or at least people are going to know that they’re going to happen within weeks — is very helpful to making this a big fight that gets more coverage.
Where we are in the shutdown is early. There isn’t a lot of pain being felt. And right now, Democrats have not had to withstand real pressure. And Republicans are not seeming eager to start negotiations to get the government reopened. We feel in a holding pattern.
I have one particular fear about the position that Democrats have staked out, which is that they seem obsessed with the polling question of who is being blamed for the shutdown.
I know. I know.
They really want to make the argument that they are not the ones shutting down the government. I don’t think that argument holds a lot of water. I think that the correct argument is that it is worth shutting down the government: We are refusing to reopen the government until we see these health care subsidies extended because that is worth doing. We are not going to reopen a government just to see you get screwed.
But already we have begun to see — it’s different polls, so it’s hard to tell — but maybe some slippage on that question. And I’m worried that the degree to which they have been bragging to me privately that on the polls, they’re not being blamed for shutting down the government, that the moment they see that poll number move — and it certainly could move — they’ll begin to lose their nerve because they have decided that not being blamed for it is the measure of winning in the court of public opinion. And it just feels, to me, like a real vulnerability or fragility in the way they are telling the story to themselves right now.
I think the vulnerability is: If only they were just saying that privately. But that message has come through very clearly publicly as well.
They’ve gotten a little better about it since the very beginning of the shutdown. I think there’s less of that now. But you heard me when we started the conversation; I talked about Democrats shutting the government down. I’m not pretending the Republicans shut the government down.
I do think an honest argument you can make is: We are not going to give our votes to fund a government that is going to jack up premiums on 20 million Americans and cause them to lose their health care. And if you want to keep that government open without giving anyone help on premiums, you are free to change the rules in the Senate. You have the 50-plus votes that you need to pass it and get rid of the filibuster. You are free to do that. You control the presidency, the House and the Senate — go for it. But we are not providing votes for that because we are fighting to make sure that people don’t have health care premium increases.
You lose moral high ground if you start saying: Oh, I got blamed. You got blamed. It’s their fault. It’s our fault. The KFF poll shows that we’re winning.
I would not be reading polls if I were them. I would not be talking about how they’re winning. I would just be talking about: This is a core moral issue for the Democratic Party and for people in this country who are already suffering from high prices and high taxes because of Donald Trump’s tariffs, and we are not going to let this happen anymore.
But I just think people have gotten a little obsessed with a very Washington way of thinking about this.
I was just going to say: One thing we’ve learned over the last decade or so is people don’t give a [expletive] about process arguments. This is why you were out there years and years ago — and I was right behind you — on getting rid of the filibuster. And I think it is substantively the right thing to do in order for Democrats to pass an agenda ever again with the way that the Senate map is.
But I also think, politically, I was never afraid of that fight, because most people in the country don’t give a [expletive] about the filibuster. They don’t know what it is. They don’t care about arcane Senate procedure. And I think that the government shutdown — who shuts the government down when, who’s supporting the C.R., and who’s not? — that all gets lost with people.
To the extent that they’re paying attention, they are going to know that there are disruptions in government services, which will happen, especially with air travel. We’re already starting to see some of the delays. They’ll know that, and then they’ll know that Republicans don’t want to do anything about health care and Democrats do. That’s probably the message that’s landing with people, to the extent that they tune into the shutdown.
So I don’t think the blame game is important. I don’t think Senate procedure is important or what Republicans do. I just think you’ve got to make it about health care, and that’s it.
I want to talk about the Senate map, which you just brought up. Why don’t we talk about the House briefly first, because I think it’s more straightforward, and then let’s talk about the Senate, because all of this is leading to the midterms. The next moment of political accountability, the next moment of power shift is the midterms.
Democrats are in an OK position to take back the House, with the big question being redistricting. And so you have Texas moving to do this midcycle redistricting. Now you have California moving toward a ballot initiative — I think those are beginning to go out in the mail pretty soon or even now — to suspend the nonpartisan redistricting maps they have there, in order to counter Texas. You then can have this chain reaction of other states countering each other.
How do you rate what that looks like right now? The people you talk to, the conversations you’re having — how does the fight for the House look to you?
I think the polling for Prop 50 here in California looks good. Republicans just pulled some money back on that campaign because I think they believe it’s not going well for them. So I feel good about that.
The best estimates I’ve seen, if Prop 50 passes and California gets to redraw the maps to partially neutralize Texas and then all these other states go, Republicans could pick up anywhere from six to eight seats, I think I’ve seen.
But if Democrats win the generic ballot by three or four points, then that’ll still be enough to take back the House. But it’s close. It’s not 2018 blue wave territory, at least not right now. It’s a full year away, so who knows?
The people that I talk to that are working on these House races, these frontline members, they want to talk about costs. They want to talk about the cost of living. That’s what voters care about. That’s what they’re focused on.
They feel confident about the House. I think the Senate is more of a reach, but there’s more optimism there now than there was when Donald Trump took office.
Recognizing that we don’t know how the midterms are going to go — it’s also my sense from the polling and from talking to people working in House races that it is not feeling like 2018 or 2006 blue wave territory.
I’m curious why you think that is. If you compare this Trump administration to the first one, this Trump administration is inflicting much more real pain on people than Trump did in his first two years of his first term. The tariffs are real pain. There are ICE agents in the streets.
They passed something that is tax cuts but also has embedded in it something more like Obamacare repeal, given how profoundly they gutted Medicaid — the kinds of destruction of health care that was very mobilizing for Democrats in the first term.
Trump isn’t popular. He is looking about as bad as he did in his first term. He’s about 42 percent, which is more popular than I’d like to see him be, given what he’s doing, but it’s not a great number. So why doesn’t this look like blue wave territory?
A few things. I think the shock value has worn off. When Trump was doing everything he did in 2017, it was the first time. Think about family separation. Talk about an attentional moment. He actually had to walk that back because of political pressure.
And we are so far past family separation now, in terms of what he’s doing on immigration enforcement. But I think people get used to it, unfortunately. I think people are used to the pain of a Trump administration, which is a really depressing thing to say, but I do think that’s playing a role.
I also think people are exhausted after a decade. I talk to people in my life all the time who, in the first Trump term, were very politically active, paying attention to the news all the time, wanting to get involved. And this time around, especially after the loss in 2024, there’s just this feeling of defeatism.
There’s always been cynicism, but the cynicism has almost morphed into nihilism with some folks. And people are like: I just can’t do it. I can’t pay attention anymore. I can’t do it again. It’s been too long. I’m tired. I have to go about my life, and maybe we should just wait this out, and at some point he’ll be gone, and things will be normal again. I don’t want to be involved in politics because politics sucks.
That explains why you don’t see the level of resistance organizing you did in the first term. I get that. And you do have No Kings marches and other things that have been significant.
But when people are asking the question of why there doesn’t seem to be as much resistance as there was in the first term, I think a lot of people in the resistance feel it failed. I don’t totally agree with that, but the sense that Trump got back in, we gave it our best shot and now they don’t really know what to do — that’s very real.
That doesn’t explain why Republicans haven’t collapsed on the generic ballot. They are battering the economy with tariffs. They’ve slowed the labor market. They have done things that are genuinely unpopular and are causing people pain where you wouldn’t need people’s reaction to be “I’m going to be out in the streets every single night.”
Right.
You could just have people saying, “I wanted to give these guys a chance, but when a pollster calls me, I don’t like what’s happening, so I’m going to tell them I’m supporting the Democrats.”
You’ve not seen a collapse in Republican support, even as Republicans have signed on to some pretty profoundly unpopular things — and on tariffs in particular, the idea that they came through a cost-of-living election and they decided to increase the cost of goods all across the economy. It’s a wild political decision to make that has not had particularly wild consequences for them, at least as of yet.
Do you have a view on why that is?
I think we’re early on the effects of the tariffs. I think those will get worse.
But if you look at the polling, who has Trump lost? He’s lost some of the younger voters, the Black and Latino voters that moved his way in 2024. The core of Trump’s support, as it has been for the last decade, remains — because even if they are feeling pinched on cost-of-living issues, he is doing what they want him to do.
I think that for a good portion of his base, they like seeing all this. He has that support solid.
If you look at his numbers with independents — and the independents that are left are going to be more left-leaning anyway because some of them have already voted for Donald Trump and become Republicans over the last decade — but with the independents who are left, he has collapsed in a big way. He’s probably sitting closer to mid-30s, low 30s than he is in the 40s, and, like, 2 percent of Democrats approve of Donald Trump.
In a lot of ways, the support among the core base of Trump voters where he’s delivering what he talked mostly about delivering, outside of the economy, the support’s holding up.
But again, it’s not a year yet. And I do think that the pain from the tariffs is going to get worse. The economy is not, by any means, chugging along. And before the midterms, there is a year left of Donald Trump sending troops and masked men into the streets all over the country, which could cause a lot of chaos.
How much do you think the Democratic Party’s brand is part of the problem? In polling, Democrats have never been lower, at least in modern polling. Elections are ultimately a choice. How much of why Democrats aren’t doing better on the generic ballot is that people don’t really like Democrats?
Democratic voter dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and its leaders is at an all-time high. The last time voters of either party were this dissatisfied with their leaders was with Republicans in the Obama era, right around when the Tea Party basically took over the Republican Party.
I do think a lot of this is Democratic voters and people who would tend to be Democratic voters, to the extent that they vote — they’re probably very unhappy with what Trump is doing, if not alarmed, but have not heard much from Democratic politicians.
Part of that is that we’re the party out of power, so we don’t have one leader. Our congressional leaders aren’t necessarily the most effective communicators — Schumer and Jeffries.
That’s why you have the 2028 potential contenders — you’ve got Gavin Newsom out there and JB Pritzker making a lot of noise. But even a lot of the 2028 contenders are relatively quiet, aside from Newsom and Pritzker.
They’re quite quiet. I found it strange.
Me, too. And I assume that’s a strategy to be like, “I’m going to hold my fire until we have a primary, and I don’t want to piss anyone off early.” I don’t know. I can’t tell the strategy.
If anything is being rewarded in American politics recently, it’s caution. [Laughs.]
OK. Well, there was just a poll out of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, more popular than he has ever been in Pennsylvania, would beat JD Vance in that state by double digits, according to that poll.
Maybe Josh Shapiro was right to stay out of this and he could just sit there as a figure who was quite popular in one of the most important swing states in the country, if not the most important.
I get that, but I also think that the information environment, the attention economy requires you to be communicating all the time. If you want to build a following — not just in your party but in the country — at this moment in politics, people expect their leaders to be communicating constantly about what’s happening, especially people who decide primaries.
You’re talking a bit about the relationship between the Democratic Party’s leaders and the Democratic Party as an organization and its base.
But I’m also thinking here about the people who are not Democratic primary voters or maybe people Democrats could win over or have won over in the past but have soured on Democrats. And that brings us to the Senate map.
In order to win the Senate in 2026, Democrats would need to successfully defend seats in Georgia and Michigan. They would need to win seats in Maine, where they have often thought they’ll beat Susan Collins and failed. They would need to win the Senate seat in North Carolina that former Gov. Roy Cooper is running for. That seems plausible to do.
Then they would need to win in two states that Trump won by big margins. The ones you hear mentioned are Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, Florida or Texas.
Alaska.
Alaska. Tough states for Democrats. What would it take for Democrats to win two of those?
First of all, you need a national environment that is much better for Democrats. I think you need the generic number up much more than three or four points. You need a national environment that is quite poor for Republicans and quite good for Democrats.
Then you need candidates in those states that are well known, which is why you’ve got the Roy Coopers of the world running and people excited about that — candidates who are well funded.
And people who have strong communication skills, maybe most important in this environment, right?
Wait, who are the well-known-enough Democrats? Ohio is where Sherrod Brown is running. That’s the answer there. But Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Florida …
In Nebraska, you have Dan Osborn running again, he at least ran statewide before, so he has the name ID.
Colin Allred in Texas has name ID. James Talarico in that primary is getting some national notoriety. Mary Peltola in Alaska won the House seat from Alaska, which is statewide. If she ran for the Senate there, she’s well known.
In Maine, Janet Mills is the governor , and now Graham Platner in that primary is also generating a ton of national attention. We’ll see if that translates to attention in Maine, as well.
But I do think you need these candidates that are well known within their states, either because they’ve held office there statewide or they’ve run before.
The thing that’s been on my mind is how many states the Democrats were competitive in — just normally competitive in — a dozen years ago, in the 2012 cycle, say, now feel like these incredible reaches.
When Obamacare passed, Democrats held Senate seats in Iowa, in Ohio, in Nebraska and in Florida. That wasn’t long ago.
I am not that old, nor are you. You’ve been in politics this whole time. What happened, in your view, that so many of these states became so much tougher for Democrats to compete in? That Florida and Ohio, say, went from the canonical swing states to red states, that Iowa went from a place that Barack Obama wins to a place that Democrats lose? What went wrong?
I think most of it is the result of a political realignment along lines of education. I think two-thirds of the electorate does not have a four-year college degree, and a third does.
When you have states like Ohio, like Iowa, where there are more non-college-educated voters, then you’re getting a realignment that has probably been lagging for a while because to the extent you did have Democrats in those states when Obama was president, they were very conservative Democrats.
At some point voters think, “Do I want a conservative Democrat, or do I just want a Republican, the real thing?
But that just restates the question: Why are Democrats — the party that sees themselves as the party of the working class, the party that is still much more pro-union, the party that is still trying to expand your health care, that is raising taxes on billionaires rather than cutting taxes on billionaires — why are they hemorrhaging voters who don’t have a college degree?
I think that the economic policies that Democrats have passed over the last couple of decades, while they have improved the lives of millions of people, they have not improved them enough to neutralize the effects of an economy where wealth inequality continues to grow.
I think that their view of the national party has become — and part of this is the fault of the Republicans or the success of the Republicans — they view the national party as a party of elites, obsessed with cultural and social issues and not focused enough on economic issues.
This has basically been the Republican message and the Trump message for many, many years now. Cultural, social issues, identity-inflected issues, they get more coverage, and they generate more attention than cost-of-living issues and fights over cost-of-living issues.
If you are someone who is more conservative on immigration, trans issues, abortion, whatever it may be, and you tune into the national debate, you’re likely to see Democrats stake out progressive positions on that. Republicans fight them on it. And you’re not as likely to see fights about health care like we’re seeing right now.
This very dynamic is what led Senate Democrats to the strategy that they’re pursuing right now. So do you just run an economic populist like Sherrod Brown, and maybe that’s enough? Possibly.
But I also think that ignoring the identity-inflected issues at this point is not feasible because, again, Trump and the Republicans have a vote and they get to make the election about something as well.
The way that the information environment works, those issues are going to generate attention, so you do have to have a message on all those issues. And it has to be a message that resonates with people who may be more conservative than national Democrats or more moderate than national Democrats on those issues.
This is not about that we have to change all of our positions and moderate all of our positions. But at the very least, let’s try telling a story about our position on those issues that is open to people or that appeals to people or at least doesn’t push them away.
I don’t think we’ve done a great job of that.
A debate that you’re getting at here, which is a pretty big strategic debate in the party is: Is economic populism enough? Or in order for your economic populism to be heard, do you have to, in these states, run Democrats who are more culturally in touch with their own state, who share the views of more of the people in their states?
I think Dan Osborn is interesting. He runs in Nebraska. He’s an independent. Every Democrat I know wants Osborn to win. No Democrat I know wants Osborn to run as a Democrat, because the Democratic brand is trash and it would destroy his chances.
But Osborn runs quite far to the right of where the Democratic Party is on immigration.
The last time you had a Democrat representing Nebraska was Ben Nelson, who was a pain in the neck during Obamacare but was also the crucial vote to get it passed.
He was a pro-life Democrat from Nebraska. And there is a pretty big divide in the party over whether you can hit the economic populism button so hard that you don’t need to do anything on the other stuff. Can you maybe tell a bit of a better story, maybe de-emphasize it? Or do you have to run candidates who make liberals in New York and California uncomfortable with their cultural positions?
You have to reregionalize the Democratic Party and have much more variation in the actual positions of the Democrats running, in the way Joe Manchin was quite different from other Democrats. How do you think about that?
The one gift, politically, that Donald Trump and Republicans have given us in the second Trump term, especially, is that they have become so extreme on so many of these issues that we’re talking about, whether it’s immigration, whether it’s trans issues, whether it’s abortion, that Democrats simply staking out positions that are mainstream, that are reflective of where most of the public is or reflective of where the party was under Barack Obama — I think you just need to do that.
Arizona and West Virginia are very interesting to me. In Arizona we had Kyrsten Sinema, who became an independent and was a pain in the Democrats’ [expletive] for quite some time.
And then you have Joe Manchin in West Virginia, who got a lot of [expletive] as well.
I think we all wish we still had Joe Manchin in the Senate right now, as opposed to the Republican Jim Justice, who now has that seat. We don’t know when there’s ever going to be a Democrat again in West Virginia.
And would Joe Manchin have been voting to keep the government shut right now, or would he have been with Angus King and Catherine Cortez Masto? He’d probably be with them, but I don’t know.
I’d rather have that vote in the Senate right now. He voted with Democrats on the Inflation Reduction Act. He voted on judges. That’s the best we’re going to get in West Virginia.
Arizona’s a different story. Ruben Gallego is culturally in tune with his state, including on the issue of immigration, but is much more progressive than Kyrsten Sinema was and is much more mainstream Democratic — and won that state, which is a tough state.
Yeah. He ran to the Democratic Party’s right on immigration but would support health care and child care in a way Sinema was incredibly difficult on.
I remember interviewing Gallego right after the election, and we talked about immigration — and it was right when Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador — and Gallego was in the camp that thought: This is a trap. We shouldn’t be talking about this too much. This is what Donald Trump wants.
And as Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda has become more extreme and they have been picking people up off the streets, I check out Gallego’s Twitter feed, and he is much more forceful these days on immigration. I still think he has this position on immigration that is pretty mainstream and where most of the country is, but that has not stopped him from speaking out forcefully about what’s happening right now.
Issues change in relation to events.
Yes.
I think people think everything is stuck, and you don’t want to rerun the last election. I do, though, think this issue of the Democratic Party’s national brand is an important one.
What I would like to believe is that Democrats could find candidates in these states that match the states and that would be enough to win. And I think that’s increasingly untrue.
Yeah, because everything’s nationalized.
Everything’s nationalized.
Sherrod Brown, he held the Ohio Senate seat for three terms. He is as economically populist as you get, not just as a Democrat. He was one of the anchors of economic populism in the Senate and before that in the House for a very, very long time. He knows his state. He is trusted in his state. He’s beaten by Bernie Moreno, a wealthy owner of car dealerships, who had to settle a dozen wage theft cases, before he beats the sterling economic populist Sherrod Brown.
And what I take from that and what I take from Dan Osborn — who, whatever he is or is not in his soul, absolutely cannot run as a Democrat under any circumstances — is that even good candidate selection is not going to work if people feel the Democratic Party’s national brand has so little room or respect for them.
I don’t really know how you change it. I have some thoughts that I’ll probably expand as the weeks go on, but it needs to be understood as a more central concern. A world where the Democratic Party brand is so bad that it is an anchor that will drag Sherrod Brown down with it — that’s a problem you need to find some way to fix, versus just never having the Senate or never having it with more than 51 votes ever again.
Democrats have gotten used to having a lot less power than they used to be able to have.
Yes. They’ve also gotten used to — and partly, this is Trump’s fault — being primarily a reactive party to what Donald Trump does.
Then there’s this conversation that we need a positive agenda. And then it goes right to policies. And I do think we’re missing a story to tell about where the country is and where we want it to go.
We are on the cusp of revolutionary technological change, again, that’s going to reshape the economy and how we interact with each other.
And we didn’t do so great the last time at figuring that out. We’re still dealing with the effects of the attention economy, and now we’re heading into artificial intelligence.
I think Democrats have to figure out a story about what kind of country we want to be, how people are going to work, how people are going to interact with one another.
We are in a political crisis right now. It’s not enough for Democrats to say, “Vote for me, and the political crisis will end.” How are we, as a country, going to get out of this political crisis together? In a New York Times poll, the cost of living is now being eclipsed by political division as the issue that people bring up that concerns them the most.
Telling a story about where we want this country to go, that we want a path for every American to make a living, make sure there’s a living to make and make sure that we have a government that protects our rights and freedoms, no matter who we are, no matter who we voted for.
And you don’t want a country where people who don’t vote for the right leader get punished after the election. I actually think that’s quite a popular position that would really resonate with people.
I do think that Democrats who have something to say about the moment we’re in, the crisis we’re in — in the economy, in politics and in how we interact with one another technologically and culturally and how we can get out of that — that’s the story we need to figure out how to tell.
Someone who tells a compelling story about that is going to help the brand more than any number of [expletive] polls and research and focus groups.
Let me try out a thought on you. Part of the problem the Democratic Party is facing, part of how it ended up in its current ditch, is that it really hasn’t had a strong party leader since 2016.
Hillary Clinton loses in 2016, so she doesn’t become the party leader. Joe Biden in 2020 is just a very strange kind of candidate. He has already at that point suffered a significant deterioration in his communication abilities. It’s not as bad as it’ll be four years later, but he doesn’t have the energy.
He’s a consensus candidate in a strange way. People flood to him after South Carolina as a safe bet, but he’s not a candidate the party falls in love with in any real way.
And he is acting, in his own way, from a place of coalition building and a certain insecurity, so he’s really trying to keep his tent broad.
The Joe Biden of 15 years before would have had much stronger views on what the Democratic Party should be and how it should sound and act than the Biden of that era. But then four years later, he’s in no shape to craft his administration into an argument about what the Democratic Party is and isn’t.
Then you have this crazy period after the first debate. Kamala Harris ends up as a nominee with 107 days to go or whatever it is. She, obviously, doesn’t win. But you don’t have a full primary of people to fight out what the party should be and what its direction should be and how it should work and what issues it should emphasize and what it should let go of.
She makes a series of moves to the right on immigration and fracking but with no explanation ever of why this huge change from her 2020 campaign to her 2024 campaign is happening.
So the party doesn’t have the fight about itself that leads to change.
Meanwhile, Trump is changing the Republican Party in all kinds of ways. He’s bringing in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he has changed it on immigration and changed it on Medicare.
It’s very hard for parties to change without an agreed-upon leader who decides on the change. The Democratic Party has been leaderless now for a long time, and as such, it’s ended up in a space of drift.
I think that a lot of Democratic politicians — and this spans generations — lost confidence and do not trust their gut instinct anymore about politics. That was true, to some extent, after Trump won the first time. I think after Trump wins again, after everything we’ve been through, they’re like, “Well, I have no idea what works. I have no idea what people actually want in this country anymore.”
And when a leader has come along and changed their party — like Barack Obama or Donald Trump or even leaders who don’t make it all the way to the presidency, like Bernie Sanders — it is because they believe something so deeply. They have a theory of the case. They have a story they want to tell about the country and where it should go.
And if it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But they’re going to try it out. They’re going to have confidence in that story, and they’re going to be able to sell it.
You don’t have to worry about which medium you go to and what shows you’re doing. We have a million conversations about media and stuff like that, but everyone knows what Bernie Sanders stands for. Do you agree with his policies? Do you not? He knows what he stands for, he feels good about it, and he’s going to keep talking about it.
To be a leader to change the party, you have to have a story, and you have to feel confident in it.
Right now, too many Democrats don’t feel confident. They are looking around and asking too many people and looking at too many polls and too many focus groups to try to figure out where they should be, as opposed to deciding, “Where do I think the country should go? What do I believe about the country?” And then “Let’s look at the polls and the focus groups to figure out how best to message that.”
But you have to start with the core conviction. You have to start with the core conviction, and I just don’t think we’ve seen that yet from a lot of Democrats.
And they don’t project confidence, which makes it hard to get people to follow you.
Yes.
Do you think it matters that the Democratic Party’s leadership and its best-known figures over the past decade or so have ended up completely concentrated in New York and California in a way that wasn’t true before?
You had Tom Daschle, who was a Democratic Senate leader from South Dakota. You had Harry Reid from Nevada.
Now the leader of the Senate Democrats is Chuck Schumer from New York. The leader of House Democrats is Hakeem Jeffries from New York. The most prominent House Democrat is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The biggest Democratic name in campaigns this year is Zohran Mamdani.
Prior to this, you had Pelosi. The last Democratic nominee was Kamala Harris. Currently leading in the polls is Gavin Newsom.
I can’t really remember a time when the party seemed quite so concentrated. And look, I am a Californian who’s currently living in New York, talking to somebody in California. I’m noting a problem I’m part of.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Good leaders can come from anywhere, but it seems weird, and I wonder if it, in ways that people don’t quite want to face up to, affects the party, the way it sees politics, its instincts, its sense of what strategies are acceptable even to try. Do you think there’s something worth worrying about there?
Yes. And I think most people would say that it’s ideologically related. Perhaps that’s true, but I also think when you are in New York, in L.A., in San Francisco, in Washington, especially, you’re ensconced in a bubble of people who don’t just think like you do in terms of your position on a given issue but also how you see politics.
To the extent that politics is nationalized, it is very nationalized when you’re in one of those cities.
When people hear, “We need more Democrats from the middle of America,” a lot of progressives, their mind goes to: We don’t want some conservative Democrat like Joe Manchin.
But some of the most promising leaders in the party who speak in ways that I find compelling — I think of Jon Ossoff in Georgia. We talked about Gallego. I think, to some extent, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. Some of these younger Democrats in states where they have had to win the votes of Trump voters and have done so while still maintaining their political identity as mainstream Democrats, not conservative Democrats.
I think that those leaders, especially the younger leaders in those states and those purple states are probably where we’re going to find the next leader of the party.
Let’s leave it there. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
I’ve gone from reading about what life is like in authoritarian countries — I feel like we’ve already passed that — and now I’m trying to be more hopeful and trying to figure out books about nonviolent protest and resistance.
“Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know” by Erica Chenoweth — had them on “Pod Save America” a couple of months ago. They have the 3.5 percent rule, which is that no authoritarian regime has been able to withstand a nonviolent protest movement that is 3.5 percent of the population or more.
Martin Luther King’s “Stride Toward Freedom,” which is his firsthand account of the Montgomery bus boycotts. I was reading that again, and I find it just a fascinating study in the strategy and discipline necessary for nonviolent resistance and protests and political movement and social movement building.
And then this is not a book that’s out yet — it’s out next week — but I just read a long essay by the author in The New York Times: John Fabian Witt, “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” It’s about a very wealthy philanthropist who decided to donate all of his money to progressive causes back in the 1920s and seeded the ground for a lot of the most progressive policies that we would end up seeing in the New Deal.
The 1920s was also a time when we were seeing a lot of the political and social and economic conditions that we are seeing right now. I thought the essay was excellent, and I’m excited to read the book.
Jon Favreau, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez and Sarah Murphy.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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