This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
How did Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, come from nowhere to so thoroughly dominate a primary in which his opponent, Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, suspended her campaign, and didn’t even come back in, even as Platner was rocked by even more scandals?
The answer is that Platner had the most important political resource right now, and Mills was not able to grab any of it.
That resource is attention. It’s a constant theme now for me on the show — that you need to see attention as its own substrate of American politics.
Attention is working in really unusual ways this year. In the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate, where Abdul El-Sayed is now in the lead. In Texas, where James Talarico, another person people hadn’t really heard of a couple of years ago, is now the Democratic nominee for Senate. In Los Angeles, where we actually saw all the attention fail in the mayoral candidacy of Spencer Pratt. And in what’s happening with Jon Ossoff and the sudden rise in interest in what he’s doing. All of these cases contain lessons for how attention is working right now in American politics.
To help me unpack them, I wanted to have on my favorite person to talk about this particular topic with: my friend Chris Hayes. He’s the host of “All In With Chris Hayes” and the author of a great book on attention in the modern moment, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”
Ezra Klein: Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show.
Chris Hayes: Always great to be back.
I wanted to have you here for one of our every-so-often check-ins on how attention is working in American politics. I want to start with a Wall Street Journal interview with the people who recruited Graham Platner.
Archival clip:
Interviewer: How did you find Graham Platner?
Recruiter: Well, we went through thousands and thousands of prospects. We went through a number of means, we assessed just a huge amount of people. Then Leanne pulled up this video of this guy with an oyster farm.
Clip of Graham Platner: My name’s Graham Platner, and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company.
Recruiter: And then she pulled up his F.E.C. history and saw the money he’d given to Bernie Sanders and some other people. And that was enough information to know that we had the best prospect that we’d maybe ever seen.
I want to flesh this out because I’ve been told the story of how this played out by multiple people.
This group, they were like: Who could run in Maine? A lobster farmer, oyster farmer, some kind of fisherman.
Yes.
And so when he says: We looked at thousands of people — the computer looked through occupational and other forms of records. It was like: Who has donated to a populist candidate?
Which is to say that we normally think of candidates as being recruited because they’re important in their communities: They’re a lawyer, they run a hospital, something like that.
A lot of people grow up wanting to run for office. But Graham Platner was cast, right? It was like Hollywood was looking for somebody to fill a role.
There’s a long history there. The Democrats are running someone in Tom Kean’s district — who’s a former Navy helicopter pilot. Mikie Sherrill was a helicopter pilot. [Laughs.] That’s a bio that’s ——
Abigail Spanberger was a former C.I.A. officer.
Exactly. So that part of it is an interesting version of a grass-roots, lefty, populist group doing what the D.C.C.C. will do, or the D.S.C.C.
But the reason this worked was because of the charisma. I do think there’s a kind of full-circle thing happening in politics, which is that, of course, charisma is important to politics. But I think particularly at the level of scale. There was a period where the formula really didn’t take into account charisma.
Yes.
It was like bio, social capital, connections, ability to raise money, all that stuff. Then we’ll cut some ads for them, we’ll get them a good team, and they’ll be fine.
I think charisma matters much more now because attention matters more, and charisma is the talent for grabbing and holding attention.
I want to hold on what you just said about the D.C.C.C., because I think we both know a fair amount about the way they recruit.
Yes.
And one of the grim realities of how they recruit is they very heavily emphasize how much money you can raise. One, they will force you to sit on the phone six hours a day, and they will punish you if you don’t. You want to be on things like their red-to-blue lists.
So I know candidates who are just browbeaten into being on the phone raising money for hours and hours and hours a day. And the D.C.C.C., which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, isn’t doing that because they’re cynics ——
Or they have a fetish for it.
Or they love money. You need money. But the thing money is buying, largely, is attention. It also buys field and organizing and other things. But it buys attention.
The biggest thing is it buys TV.
So what this group is doing when they cast Platner — he’s not a person who you go to and think: Can you raise the money to buy attention? He’s a person you go to and think: Can you unleash the charisma to earn attention?
Yes, exactly.
Which then will bring in money.
Yes.
But even if it doesn’t, attention.
This is the point. You have to have a theory of attention for a successful campaign right now, in a way like when that formula was as dead set as it was in the high point of broadcast TV ads — raise as much money as possible, hit the airways with a ton of broadcast TV. And that’s the recipe. That’s 90 percent of a campaign.
As broadcast TV and broadcast TV ads decline in their salience, you have to have some alternate theory of how you’re going to get to people.
In some places, like in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, everyone in the state knows who Roy Cooper is. He doesn’t have the same problem. The guy has been elected statewide, I think, five times at this point, or something like that. So he doesn’t have to do that.
But if you’re running another race, you do have to come up with some theory of how you’re going to do it. In this case, it was casting, and then it was finding a person who genuinely has real, obvious raw political talent and charisma.
OK, but we’re underselling here the accomplishment of Platner, because they are running in a race, ultimately, against a Roy Cooper-like figure in Janet Mills.
Yes.
This is not a situation where there is an open primary of nobodies. It’s not a situation where they’re going into a place like Nebraska, where they recruited Dan Osborn, the independent who ran a cycle ago and is running again this cycle.
This is a situation where Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had a candidate in mind. They have a Democratic governor of Maine, and they’re going to run the Democratic governor of Maine against Mills to pick up that seat.
And what happens very, very, very quickly is that Platner squeezes Mills out attentionally. Just the charisma gap between them and the ability that he has to command attention, particularly online, that then translates into all other forms of attention. The newspapers follow it, the cable news follows it. He’s on your show.
He knocks out a sitting governor.
The other part of it is he out-campaigns her in that state on the ground. It’s not just the online part of it. And again, this is part of attention, too, particularly in a small state.
Maine is a state where Susan Collins, at this point, literally knows a shockingly high percentage of Mainers. It’s just the way it works when you’re an institution like her. It’s the kind of state where you can make inroads in retail politics in a way that you can’t in the California governor’s race.
So part of it, too, is that he just outworks her.
He’s also much younger than she is. Mills is a 78-year-old candidate.
Yes.
I think there’s actually an interesting relationship here between attention and risk appetite, because I think the two are so related. I think a lot of the things that have guided Democratic politics around attention have also related to risk aversion.
Don’t get negative press. If you’re choosing between no press and negative press, minimize downsides. Other people could have run in that primary.
They knew that Schumer was trying to recruit Mills. She actually got in after Platner, officially. Almost all of the big-name politicians in the state of Maine went for the governor’s race, which was going to be vacated, it wasn’t going to have a sitting incumbent, and you weren’t going to take on the electoral colossus of Susan Collins. That’s a lower-risk choice.
Platner made a high-risk bet, and I do think there’s a relationship between risk appetite and attention that’s very much part of Democratic politics, which is there is an institutional low-risk appetite.
I want to pick up on the word “institution” there. The Democratic Party — the Republican Party pre-Trump is like this, too — chooses people who succeed in institutions.
If you think about the candidates after Barack Obama: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. In a different way: Kamala Harris. They were not electoral juggernauts. Clinton lost to Barack Obama, but she was beloved within the Democratic Party at that time. Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, and it goes down like this.
I think that there is an inverse relationship between the personality type that succeeds institutionally and the personality type that succeeds attentionally.
Yes. That’s often true.
And I think it is related to what you’re talking about with risk.
But I think it has created an almost structural problem in party recruiting. Because parties, as you were noting, look for all these signals that are fundamentally signals of institutional capacity: social capital, ability to raise money, jobs that tend to have risen through the institutions.
Platner is a downwardly mobile oyster farmer whose oyster farm doesn’t really make money and sells to his mom’s fancy restaurant. You wouldn’t just look at him and think: That guy is the most impressive person in Maine.
Right.
It’s not like Mikie Sherrill as a Navy pilot.
But the people who succeed in institutions often do not have personalities that are spiky in the way the attentional moment currently rewards.
I think that’s true. I think there are a few things going on. One is we should talk about success in institutions and credentialing, which are sort of two different things.
It means a lot in the world of Democratic progressive politics if someone went to Yale Law. So there’s the credential part of it, there’s actual success in institutions, there’s relationships to those institutions, and then there’s the kind of personalities that succeed in those institutions.
The old term that you would use in the ’50s and ’60s, in a different era, was a “company man.” And a company man is someone who gets along well with others in an organizational setting, doesn’t make waves, doesn’t upset people.
I think the idea of a company man is what has been the template, almost necessarily. As you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, the Democratic Party is an institution.
One thing that Platner is able to carry, in a way that feels authentic, is a genuine feeling that the system is hollow at its core ——
Which is not a put-on with him, which is the key part of this.
Yes, I think that’s important. You can say a lot about his life and what he has done or has not done — and we’ll talk about some of that, too. But he is somebody who believes the institutions have failed because they have failed for him, and he has failed out of them. The hostility is authentic.
Yes.
And when you listen to him on the stump, more than he is carrying a message about single-payer health care or a Green New Deal, he is carrying a message about — in a very different way than Bernie did, but using similar language — an unspecified political revolution.
He’s carrying a message that this is all wrong somehow.
What you need is somebody who fundamentally believes it is all wrong somehow.
Archival clip of Platner: The world that we live in today is not natural. We do not live in a political and economic reality that is organic.
It is a system that is built by policy decisions, policy that is written by establishment politicians in Washington, D.C., at the behest of their donors and their supporters, and it is a system that was made to make sure that no matter how hard you work, you will never feel like you have power.
Power is for these people, and they’re up there. They’re qualified. They have the pedigree. They have the background. They’re the ones that are allowed to make decisions for us. Don’t worry ourselves. Let them take care of it.
Well, I’m going to tell you right now, that story is [expletive].
You can look across a lot of the candidates who are succeeding right now — here, I do think Mamdani fits in. We’ll talk about Abdul El-Sayed. Donald Trump was obviously like this.
A large number of the candidates who have broken through are breaking through with a message, more even than with an agenda, of genuine disillusionment and anger.
Yes. I think there are a few related questions.
One, I think people use the term “populism,” which gets probably as close as any to what we’re describing as a tendency — disillusionment, frustration with the failed status quo, elite failure, particularly.
So there are a few interesting questions that flow out of that. One is: Does that have a specific ideological valence? Can you be a moderate populist?
Another interesting question is: Can you be a centrist populist? Another is: Can you channel the attentional politics when you are suddenly in the incumbent position?
I want to pick up on something you said about being a moderate populist. You can be a moderate populist, and you know how we know that? Because there was one in Maine.
Right.
The Democrat in the House representing the reddest House seat held by a Democrat is Jared Golden. He’s a Maine member of Congress. He’s a populist. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter. He is also a moderate.
He famously wrote this Op-Ed about how Donald Trump wouldn’t be the end of the world. He supported Donald Trump on tariffs, but he is also very, very pro-labor. He’s very disgusted with politics. And he has existed in a politically miserable existence.
Yes.
He’s been holding a seat probably no other Democrat could hold.
And, in fact, he’s leaving now.
This year, he is getting primaried from the left, and he decided: I’m done. I’m retiring. You could have imagined a world where the Democratic Party fell in love with this guy, embraced him and elevated him to run against Susan Collins. And in that world, I’d be like: Susan Collins is gone.
But I think the issue you see with Jared Golden and moderate populism is that you become very vulnerable in primaries. The right but now on the left — the polling on this is really fascinating — if you look at the number of Democrats who said they were very liberal in 1995, most Democrats were not liberal or very liberal in 1995. They self-described as moderate.
Now it’s liberal and very liberal. It’s very hard to survive, and it’s also just very unpleasant.
Yes. That is a big part of it.
Even if you can survive the day-to-day of being yelled at by the advocacy groups on your side, by your own friends. But the thing that you cannot seem to do right now is hold that together with being a successful candidate in primaries where you’re having to appeal to a high-attention electorate with very, very, very sorted political opinions.
Right, particularly in this nationalized attentional atmosphere. That’s part of it, too. In another universe, no one online is paying attention to what Jared Golden is doing. You could be Jared Golden for your district, and the local news would cover you. The local TV news, the newspapers, maybe some nerds would read about you in “Roll Call.”
Because we’re all operating in one attentional sphere, there’s less and less room for that sort of variation that used to just come about because people just didn’t pay attention to what the Maine 2 congressional candidate was doing.
This brings up some of the flip side of Platner. One reason I think Platner is such an interesting figure to start with is he represents both sides of the gamble being made. The high-risk, high-attention charisma on the one hand. On the other hand, the point of getting this high-risk candidate with an anti-institutional life story is you’re not getting somebody who has been watching his step for a long time, and you’re getting somebody who has maybe misstepped quite a lot.
You’ve got the Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on the chest and this pulsing question about whether or not he knew about that. I’m honestly a little skeptical that he did not know about it for as long as he says he didn’t.
I share that skepticism.
You have him sexting what seems like about a half-dozen women during his marriage — or at least, texting with them in an effort to set up some kind of relationship.
Also you have the recent claims from an ex-girlfriend, the one who works in Republican politics, that he was borderline abusive when they fought.
I’ve had this trouble with Platner because, on the one hand, he’s very charismatic. Much of what he says, I like. There are also these very politically incorrect Reddit posts — maybe the best way to put it.
No particular thing that has come out about him on its own has been disqualifying for me. I don’t think he’s an antisemite. He was so politically incorrect on Reddit that if he were an antisemite, I think we would know.
[Laughs.] That’s a good point.
I think that one would have come out pretty clearly.
That’s well said.
I think he knew what the tattoo was earlier. And this is not based on anything but my read of the situation: The spirit in which he and his friends got it was edgelordy. It was about it as a signal of a vicious badassery, not a signal about Jews or Nazis.
That’s my view. I cannot prove it, but I’m telling you what I think.
The thing that worries me about Platner isn’t any one thing. It is the sense that there is just bad judgment in the guy. The sexting with the women was early in a marriage, and that’s pretty recent.
The thing that worries me about Platner isn’t any one of these things individually. One thing about a guy who has failed out of a bunch of institutions and has kind of been downwardly mobile and has made a bunch of weird decisions and had a kind of Nazi tattoo is you might think: Yeah, I want the best for him. I hope for all the best for him.
Should he be a U.S. senator?
Should he be a U.S. senator is a very different question than that.
Yes.
If I were appointing people from Maine, would I appoint Graham Platner? I would not, but that’s also not how elections work.
Yes. We have the 17th Amendment. [Laughs.]
Yes. But here’s the thing. He has not run in a general election yet. Susan Collins overperforms in polls.
He has been generating attention and energy among Democrats and among, particularly, the online left. Whether or not it creates an attack surface that you can attack this guy as fundamentally unreliable ——
Which is what they will do.
Which is what they are doing, with a lot of money.
Yes.
If Democrats win that seat, maybe this all looks genius. If they lose that seat, I think there’s going to be a level of factional hell to pay.
So let me say that I essentially share everything you said. I could and I have made those arguments. Let me, just for the sake of this conversation, take the other side for a second.
They did run someone in 2020 who was the most standard possible: state legislator, no scandal to speak of, raised a ton of money, a woman, and she got her butt kicked.
Yeah.
In fact, she lost by, I think, nine points,
When she was up in all the polls.
She was up in all the polls.
Which is part of why people are so nervous about this race.
They’re nervous about the race, but the other thing is it’s not like that was not tried against Susan Collins. It was tried. It didn’t work.
The second thing I would say, and this goes back to our risk thing, is there were, like, five people in that gubernatorial primary. They could have run for Senate.
Yes.
The big names of Maine all ran for governor. So part of this is that everyone is sort of wringing their hands. You have to have people running. They didn’t run. He ran.
What is the magic wand that makes them run? They didn’t run because that was a harder race.
The third thing I would say is I think there’s a theory of the case here — and I’m not saying this is true, I’m just presenting it as a possibility — that part of the brand problem for the Democrats has been excessive conscientiousness. That this is the party of essentially schoolmarm tsk-tsking.
Now, that’s extremely gendered. I want to be very clear about that. I think a lot of the conversation about Platner on both sides of the very intense, polarized debate within the Democratic coalition is very gendered.
That said, I think there is a post-Covid hangover of the idea that the Democrats are just quick to cancel, tell you what you can and can’t do, kicking people out who talk a little salty, etc.
I think there’s something to that. I think there’s particularly something to that with a certain subset of cross-pressured swing voters.
And maybe this is a kind of antidote to it.
Yes, maybe none of this is negative for him.
Right. In the sense of the Reddit posts, people have shown me this joke that the Reddit posts are the median voter. That’s the joke people have made.
When I saw the Reddit post, I was like: That’s an asset. I don’t have to agree with them or like them to be like: That’s a political asset.
This is a line I say all the time and at some point need to spin out into an essay: The personality type of the left is bureaucratic, and the personality type of the right is autocratic.
Yes.
And those are failures. Another version of it that I use is: The left is over-formed by institutions, and the right is underformed by institutions.
Yes, I think that’s well said.
But you can imagine a world where Platner loses or doesn’t win by as much as he could have, and the answer is simply: You almost got it right with him.
Yes.
You just picked somebody a little too underformed. You don’t want the straight-A student, and you don’t want the kid smoking pot in the parking lot. You need something in between there.
We’re going to see a test of whether or not this works in Maine. It’s going to be very, very interesting to see how that plays out.
Totally. Can I say two more things about him?
Please.
One is I also think there’s something interesting in how he has handled the last few weeks. He has been doing a lot of press. And I think this is another thing where, if you’re going to do it, you have to be all in — you’re going to go and face questions, and you’re going to talk to people.
That is, I think, one of the lessons of our new era of the dynamics of scandal, whatever they are, is that attention moves very quickly. If you embrace that and talk to people, you can move through things in a way that used to be very difficult.
And then the last thing I’ll say about Platner, and I think this is a really important aspect of his appeal: People have talked about the fact that he went to a private school, and his grandfather was this famous architect, and his mom has this restaurant.
Dad bought his house.
Dad bought his house. This is a guy who was enlisted. An enlisted Marine during the global war on terror in multiple tours, fighting in really brutal circumstances.
Here is why I think that’s politically salient. He has an ability to, for lack of a better word, code-switch. I think code-switching is actually one of the superpowers of a successful Democratic politician. Because the Democratic Party is so varied and diverse and pluralistic, you have to move between different groups, and it’s hard to learn how to do that without some organic experience in different worlds.
Graham Platner really, genuinely has that. It gives him that thing where he’s able to talk to different audiences. Barack Obama really had it.
Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of these people.
That’s interesting. Does Ocasio-Cortez have code switching at that level?
I think she does, actually.
One of the things that you see also — they used to call Barack Obama, in the right-wing press, Barry, because he was Barry in high school at a certain point.
The idea being: This guy’s inauthentic. He’s not really who you think he is. He’s pretending to be this thing.
The flip side of that is that this is a person who’s had many different experiences in radically different life worlds that has given this person an organic ability to connect across differences that proves to be the superpower in Democratic politics.
I’m going to take a beat on Ocasio-Cortez here because it’s something I’m really interested to see with her. Nobody knows if she’s going to run for president. I’m not sure she knows if she’s going to run for president. She is a tremendous political talent by any measure.
But unlike, say, a Bernie Sanders, or, as we were just saying, a Graham Platner, she stays away from disagreement. You do not see her doing what Bernie does, what Ro Khanna does. She’s not on “Flagrant.”
No.
She’s not out there with Lex Fridman.
No.
She just did a thing with More Perfect Union, which is a lefty content producer, talking to Trump voters, but in a very ——
Controlled environment?
Controlled environment.
She’s not on Jubilee, which Ro Khanna — and for that matter, James Talarico — went on. I think one of the biggest questions for her is actually whether she is comfortable either switching into places that are not natural alliances for her or being herself in those places.
Gavin Newsom is doing this everywhere right now. He will go anywhere he’s asked, and he particularly wants to go to places where it’s going to be unusual to see him there.
She runs a very, very, very, very careful operation.
Yes.
And often, when she is in spaces where she’s not comfortable, like the Munich Security Conference, it can get hairy for her. She can fumble.
Archival clip:
Moderator: And Congresswoman, I’ll start with you. Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Um, I think that, uh, this is such a, you know, I think that this is, of course, a very longstanding, um, policy.
If I were her adviser, and I’m not, I’d have a problem that she’s not doing enough, so she’s not getting the sea legs, and not getting comfortable with things going wrong, and also not getting the swiftness to rescue them when they do.
You remember that Gavin Newsom thing a couple of months ago, where he’s doing a book talk to a mostly Black audience, and he’s like: I’m just like you.
Archival clip of Gavin Newsom: I’m like you. I’m no better than you. You know? I’m a 960 SAT guy.
My SATs sucked, and I can barely read. [Laughs.]
I can barely read, yeah.
It looked really bad. It was everywhere for a couple of days, and he just keeps moving forward.
You just go do something else.
Partly, though, I think all of these calculations about risk, reward, control, lack of control, how much you’re going in — is what your own personal position is with respect to attention, right?
Because she is so commanding of it, she has the luxury to take much more conservative stances about what press she does. I think that’s a trade-off. I agree with you that there’s probably a degree to which more would be better for sea legs.
Yeah, Taylor Swift doesn’t need to do a lot of interviews.
Exactly. That’s exactly it. She doesn’t have to go chasing around Jubilee.
Whereas Ro Khanna is everywhere because he is trying to build attentional strength.
I want to move to Michigan. Let’s start here: Do you want to just give an overview of the Michigan Senate Democratic primary?
You have a situation in which you have a departing incumbent Democratic senator, Gary Peters, who’s retiring. So you have an open seat.
You have a, from the Republican perspective, high-quality recruit in former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, who is truly out of normie Republican central casting. If you’re trying to win a swing state, he’s not some Peter Thiel weirdo who’s going to do an ad with his gun silencer.
[Klein laughs.]
Archival clip of Blake Masters: This is designed to kill people. I’m Blake Masters, and I’m running for U.S. Senate in Arizona.
And then on the Democratic side, you’ve got Abdul El-Sayed, who is a really fascinating dude who was a public health official in Detroit. He’s a Rhodes scholar ——
M.D., Ph.D. ——
M.D., Ph.D. Incredibly credentialed dude.
He has run statewide and lost for governor.
Exactly. And is very, very charismatic. Extremely bright, too.
Had a Crooked Media podcast.
Had a Crooked Media podcast. I don’t know if you have, but I’ve spoken to him at length.
Yeah.
He’s an incredibly impressive dude. Yeah, incredibly smart guy. He’s a really smart guy who knows a lot of stuff.
You have a state senator, Mallory McMorrow, who has been a charismatic up-and-comer in national politics, even when she was a relatively obscure state rep.
Yeah, starting with this big speech she gave after being accused of being a groomer.
Yes.
Archival clip of Mallory McMorrow: I want to be very clear right now, call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service mean, and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.
But she also has good video content.
She’s very charismatic.
A year ago, if I were doing this, I’d call Mallory McMorrow one of the big, emergent attentional stars.
And then you have Haley Stevens — I think there’s reporting to indicate that this is probably true — who’s a sitting congresswoman and probably the establishment choice.
Yeah, it seems like she was recruited by the establishment, in part.
Yes. And what’s happened is she has not taken off. Of the three candidates, whatever you think about Haley Stevens’s issue positions, her qualifications, whether she’d be a good senator, I think she’s the least attentionally gifted of the three.
I think the polling indicates that right now Abdul El-Sayed is probably in the lead. He has gotten a huge amount of benefit from the Bernie faction of the party. Streamer Hasan Piker came and did a rally with him, which was both controversial and got a ton of attention.
And in a first-past-the-post primary split field, what do you have to get? You have to get 30 percent, 35 percent, 38 percent of the vote.
I want to talk about this primary, because first, in one way, Abdul El-Sayed is like the opposite candidate from Graham Platner. He is attentionally capable, but he is not outside the institution. He’s a guy who taught at Columbia.
A Rhodes Scholar.
Rhodes Scholar.
The ultimate brass ring of credentialing in the American meritocracy is worn on his hand.
He has run before and lost. When people talk about candidates who have wanted to be in public office for a very long time, he is one of those candidates.
Yes.
And if you look at the polling in this race, you look at Polymarket or Kalshi in this race, you can see that he did not walk in and start dominating it.
What happened was that he started centering Israel and Gaza. Hasan Piker coming was part of this, and the role Piker played in this — at least the way at least I observed it happening — is not that it was Piker’s endorsement or something that mattered.
It’s that Piker himself was so controversial that outside groups like Third Way, and then the other two candidates, attacked — and in attacking, they centered Israel and Gaza, which is an attentional superconductor.
Yes, it is.
There is no other issue, with the exception maybe of Donald Trump himself, in American life. And for an engaged Democratic primary electorate, Abdul El-Sayed is more on the right side of that issue.
Yes.
So I think you’re seeing something that’s going to be very important about attention. There are certain issues at any moment.
His background, the way I came to know him as a political figure, is Medicare for All. He emerges in politics, a Bernie Sanders guy, and his whole thing is Medicare for All. He still believes in that.
From a public health care perspective. Yes.
But what has happened here is that there’s a lot of attention on Israel and Gaza, and it has become the defining issue. Michigan obviously has a very big Arab population.
And also the Haley Stevens component of this. We should give the backstory here. Haley Stevens primaried Andy Levin. Andy Levin was this labor organizer and very two-state solution — Israel-critical, Jewish, lefty, labor ——
Synagogue president?
Synagogue president who had a ton of AIPAC money dumped on his head because he was insufficiently loyal to the Netanyahu line, and Stevens knocked him off as part of that effort.
The other thing I would say is — and I think this is incredibly dangerous for the folks who spend their time worrying about America’s relationship to Israel and defense of Israel — you have a situation in which you have stacked these different things atop each other, like money and politics, the establishment, the failed status quo, the pro-Israel lobby — all stacked atop each other and very hard to disentangle.
So being the populist insurgent against the status quo, your criticism of Israel, your criticism of the war on Gaza, your views on that put you across these incredibly salient divides that reach up and down from the actual issue of Gaza and Israel.
I wrote a piece on this when all the attacks were centering on Piker, and one of the points of that piece was that it is going to be very, very, very important to break the effort to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
And it is going to only become more important as Israel’s actual actions make anti-Zionism a more popular and morally compelling position.
Among progressively minded people.
You can look at the polling of young Jews. How many of them want a one-state solution? It’s pretty high now. I will say also — and it’s worth playing this — I thought Abdul El-Sayed himself had a very, very good answer disentangling this.
Archival clip:
Interviewer: What do you say to the Jewish community, who you’re going to want to vote for you, about your positions on Israel, on AIPAC funding, etc., and how they shouldn’t feel alienated by a candidate like you?
Abdul El-Sayed: Well, Kate, I’ll tell you this: Nobody understands what it’s like to be discriminated against for how you pray like someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. Most of the time, we don’t ask how we pray, most people are asking: What do you pray for?
And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they’re Jewish kids, who are neighboring a couple of houses down from me, or my kids, who are Muslim.
And I’ll tell you that it’s really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this country — which are vast — and AIPAC and Israel. Those are two different things.
When I’m elected, I will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. Now my family immigrated from Egypt. That doesn’t make me anti-Egyptian. That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people.
And I apply the same exact principles to Israel. I don’t want my tax dollars being spent to backstop apartheid and genocide when they could be used to provide things like glasses or health care or schools for our own kids.
I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word “antisemitism” to defend a foreign government, and I think it’s just really important for us to differentiate between those two. Because I don’t want to be held accountable for what another government does simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there, and I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers.
I saw a picture in 2008 of a sign that was put up in Los Angeles. It was on a lamppost, and it was during the Hillary-Barack primary.
The sign was a campaign sign, and it had one sentence. It said: She voted for the war.
And it was like: That’s all you need to know. That vote for the Iraq War, that was the thing. That was the reason Hillary Clinton lost that primary, ultimately. There are a million reasons, and she came very close and could relitigate it, but that was the thing.
I know a lot of particularly older Jews who will say to me: I don’t understand why Israel gets so much attention. Look at what China is doing to the Uyghurs.
And one of the things I say is that they are making themselves the center of attention. They really pushed hard to have America join them in a war. They’ve expanded the scope of that war.
In addition to Netanyahu saying he now wants 70 percent of Gaza, they have allowed and enabled and protected and caused a constant stream of atrocities out of the West Bank.
You can support what Israel is doing, but I don’t think you can deny that it’s going to come with a tremendous cost. And if you are not willing to have Israel pay the cost of its actual actions, I don’t think you should be supporting its actions.
I mean, let’s talk about what happened in the Israel Day parade here in New York, in terms of attention.
You’ve got the Israel Day parade. It has happened every year, and in the context of New York, it has been a cross-ideological day of Jewish unity and solidarity. Now this year, it’s controversial — for reasons. The mayor’s not going to attend for the first time in a long time. Other politicians will be there.
What happens in that parade? Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most far-right ministers who’s in the Israeli government, who has pushed for, along with Itamar Ben-Gvir, the law to execute people by hanging, who has been a proponent of the settlers and excused ——
Well, more than that — has put out a functional plan for the expulsion of Palestinians. What I think is reasonable to call the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
Yes. He shows up at the Israel Parade with a bunch of also hard-core extremist right-wingers ——
His attentional politics.
His attentional politics. And they do a bunch of interviews, and he even says to one of the interviewers: Oh, I love this parade, it reminds me of Jerusalem Day. Which, of course, is the far-right parade that happens every year in Jerusalem, where very extremist right-wing Israelis march through Jerusalem in an act of very clear provocation.
Yes, chanting horrifying things.
“Death to Arabs,” things like that.
Jerusalem Day parade is a ——
Yes. But Smotrich says this because he’s playing his own attentional politics. But after that it’s like: Well, whose fault is it that people are paying attention to the parade?
Yeah.
And you could say: Well, he’s an extremist, he doesn’t represent — he’s in the Israeli government.
He’s got authority over the West Bank.
Yeah.
It actually drives me completely insane.
I know, right? [Laughs.]
And it happens all the time in conversations I’m in, but it drives me insane, the effort to say that what the sitting cabinet ministers in Israel are doing is irrelevant or they’re controversial or — it is what it is. They’re in power.
They’re in power. There’s this Southern expression I love, which is: Throwing rocks and hiding hands.
This isn’t the Israeli government but AIPAC and groups around them and associated super PACs — there are a lot of throwing rocks and hiding hands.
You’ve just played in a succession of the most expensive congressional races in history, a set of record-setting ones, where you have spent the money that has made them the most expensive. That’s fine. It’s America. In the post-Citizens United era, people get to do that.
What you can’t do is be like: Why is everyone focused on us? [Laughs.] You spent tens of millions of dollars to knock people out.
You could do one or the other. If you play in these races, you play in these races, but then you get to be criticized for it.
I want to move on to Texas ——
Texas is so interesting right now.
And I want to move on to James Talarico, because I think he reflects maybe something different than what we’ve been talking about. He is the one case in which you can really see an attentional superstar who rose during this cycle, but did not rise because he was so far left or so far right.
Yes, great point.
I had him here on the show. It’s a great interview — people should check it out.
He has bog-standard progressive politics. It is connected to a beautifully articulated Christian moral framework.
But he’s somebody who has broken through attentionally not by being very far left or very far right, not by choosing a highly controversial issue, but actually by front-loading a religiously rooted decency that, in part, got him on Joe Rogan’s podcast and became this signal that maybe he could do something other Democrats couldn’t and win Texas. So I’m curious what you’ve made of him.
Again, I would start with the thing that we’ve been saying about a number of these people, including Platner and Abdul El-Sayed: Talarico is charismatic in the ancient Greek sense.
Obviously, the sort of pastoral tradition that he’s coming out of means that he’s both naturally charismatic and also has access to a set of rhetorical tools that have been developed over thousands of years to grab and hold people’s attention. So I think that’s a huge part of what’s going on.
And again, that connects to this back-to-the-future theme that we keep returning to, which is: You can’t just raise money and run ads. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to have something going on about how you grab people.
And he clearly has that. You’re totally right that he’s a unicorn, in that it’s not connected to that populist message in the same way.
He is, I think, a populist, and I think he’s very much framing himself as a sort of insurgent outside the status quo. But he’s really not relying on any kind of us-versus-them framework.
There’s a little bit about the billionaires, but it’s rhetorical flourishing.
It’s not the core in the way Platner — and that is Platner’s thing. It’s what comes out of his chest.
Talarico is a former president of his college Democrats.
Yeah, exactly. [Laughs.]
He’s a different type.
Yes. Totally agree.
He is a person who has wanted to run — he’s a Teach for America kid. He’s not a person who has been failed by American institutions. He is not a person who you feel harbors a great anger toward the Democratic establishment. He’s a state representative.
And that’s an interesting dimension of him, but he also has a quality that Platner does in a different way. I’m not saying he was cast in the sense that somebody came out and found him the way they came out and found Platner.
Talarico does look like what he is. In the same way that Platner looks like what he is. I mean, a lot of people are oyster farmers or lobstermen, but you wouldn’t see them on the street and think: Well, you definitely spend all your time on the water. And Platner looks like a seaman.
Yes.
And Talarico, you would cast him ——
As a pastor.
To play the idealistic young pastor. Rooting out corruption in a complicated church.
Yes, exactly.
He just has the whole ——
You could put him in a scene in “There Will Be Blood.” [Laughs.]
Right, exactly. And he rises by running his social media strategy, which eventually gets him on “Rogan.” I think that he also reflects this yearning people have, which is really powerful and that was underplayed, which is not just for populism or radicalism or even inspiration, but in the Trump era, for decency.
Totally. And there’s a yearning for public virtue, which is a funny inversion of some of the politics of our youth.
I’m starting to talk a lot about virtue on this show.
Yeah, and I’m thinking a lot about virtue.
That’s partly the experience of Trump. It’s partly that I’m a middle-aged dad with three kids, and I think a lot about moral instruction. Particularly about moral instruction in a world in which the most powerful and famous figure in the country is a moral degenerate.
The other thing I would say is there are these different vibratory levels that different coalitions play on. And I do think that the appeal for connection, brother and sisterhood, solidarity, unity — that was the thing that Barack Obama was able to marshal. And that’s still deep in the progressive soul. I think it’s deep in the American soul.
Donald Trump is totally incapable of playing in that register. The Republican Party increasingly in his era is incapable of playing in that register. And the last thing I’ll say, and this applies to Jon Ossoff, as well ——
Where we’re going next.
Oh, good. When you think about: What’s the opposite of Trump? One typology of the opposite of Trump is a nice young man. [Laughs.] And James Talarico is a nice young man.
Let me hold before we go to Jon Ossoff, and the different Obama registers.
The nice young man — what it means to be nice, the weakness of being nice — has been the main form of attack the Ken Paxton campaign has decided to unleash.
I think it’s so crazy.
“Low-T Talarico,” “Tofu Talarico,” “Talafreako” — which, now the Talarico campaign has Talafreako shirts. I think that one was a Paxton mistake.
But the weakness they think they have sensed is that people want strength. And a nice young man who wants you to like him and speaks often of his own humility and has a vegan girlfriend is not strong enough for Texas.
That’s a charitable version. They’re calling him the F-slur, is what they’re doing. You’re giving a charitable version of what the actual campaign is.
And actually, quite literally — you have Stephen Miller saying he’s the first transgender candidate, he’s a queer. It’s very schoolyard, all of it.
It’s a true version of cruelty versus kindness. They’re really playing into the campaign Talarico wanted to set up. I once heard somebody around the Mamdani-Cuomo campaign say: They both got the exact antagonist they wanted.
Yes, that’s a great point.
And it just turned out Mamdani was right about which antagonist he wanted, and Cuomo wasn’t.
In terms of that race and who’s making the right tactical calls, we should just take a step back and say: Texas is Texas for a reason. And if you run a moderately competent campaign with a moderately competent candidate, you will win by five points.
As a Republican.
As a Republican. It’s just structurally there. So you’ve really got to screw things up.
If not more than five points.
Yes. I mean, 10 to five. You run a bad campaign, it’s five. You run a miserable campaign like Ted Cruz did in 2018, in a really good year for Democrats, you win by two.
What I would say about Paxton is that he’s kind of the worst of all worlds in this way — which is that Ken Paxton is someone with a lot of baggage.
He was impeached by a supermajority Republican state legislature for corruption. He was indicted on securities crimes, although not convicted. He was also not convicted on his impeachment. His wife recently divorced him for what she called biblical reasons. There were a number of his ex-staffers who came out with a statement where they talked about just how awful he was as a boss and in his public positions.
I’ve covered Ken Paxton a ton in my journalism career. You don’t hear him talk that much. This is not a super-charismatic guy. He’s got all the baggage and none of the charisma. It’s a weird combination of things.
But it’s not like there’s some amazing magnetism on the other side of it.
If you were setting up the worst kind of candidate in this era, who’s got all of the negatives of high-risk attentional strategies and none of the positives, it is Ken Paxton.
Yes. But this is where I think there’s something genuinely interesting about Talarico because he, to me, shows there are actually a lot of pathways into breaking out attentionally.
It’s genuinely interesting that Talarico was able to beat Jasmine Crockett. Big MS NOW figure, Jasmine Crockett, is the way to put it.
Yes and big on viral video, and is not superguarded and talky-pointsy. And I think that’s a good attribute, and he beat her in that primary.
But it goes to show that there are probably a lot of different angles that you can play here.
One thing that these platforms sniff out, and I don’t know why, but podcasting, video, etc., they sniff out inauthenticity in a way that was not true when you were giving quotes in newspapers or going on “Meet the Press” or being on the nightly news. I think, actually, inauthentic figures could do perfectly well there. Somehow, institutions — to go back to what we were talking about — institutions don’t care about authenticity.
No.
They actually want you to change who you are to conform to what they need.
Yes.
But these anti-institutional spaces, there is something about them where people — I always feel this when people are on the show: The first thing the audience can sense is inauthenticity. The first thing they can sense is you’re not telling them what you really think.
Yes. That’s such a good point, that you have to be some version of your actual self to figure it out and to do it right.
Rahm Emanuel is not, in my view, likely to be the Democrats’ 2028 nominee, but his somewhat unlikely presidential campaign is going to do better than I think people realize it’s going to do in being a force in the primary. Because he is fundamentally himself in all places.
Totally, yes.
And so that allows him to attack and run plays and be compelling.
And also he’s got — to go back to the risk calculation — he’s got nothing to lose. He can say yes to everything.
And he’s a high-risk personality. He’s an unusual, highly institutional figure who has very high-risk appetites.
Yes, very high-risk.
Speaking of 2028: We talked about A.O.C. a little bit ago, and she’s one of the big figures here, but what have you made of Jon Ossoff’s emergence as a cross-ideological 2028 dark horse? A person whom I’ve been talking about for a while, but who Hasan Piker is also talking about, who Matthew Yglesias is talking about. Michelle Goldberg just did a great piece on him. There’s something interesting in what people are projecting onto Jon Ossoff.
I have been jokingly calling him, in our team Slack channel, the Lisan al-Gaib, which is a “Dune” reference to the Timothée Chalamet figure — essentially, the chosen one. The foretold prophet.
This is a joke, just to be clear. And the reason that I use that is ——
Jewish Kennedy, man.
[Laughs.] There is something about the way that he is performing his candidacy, the social media videos they’re putting out, the fact that he is very conventionally handsome, and young, and could be in a movie. Like A.O.C., he’s very controlled in his media.
Yeah, he’s not playing a volume game. You don’t see him on podcast interviews right now.
No. I think he has figured out a way, in a broadly palatable ideological fashion, to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different Democratic factions. Which is important.
But also he’s running for re-election in a swing state and is right now polling very well. We’ll see what happens.
But if you back up a couple of years. If I said to you in 2024 or 2022 or whatever: Which of Georgia’s Democratic senators is everybody going to be talking about in 2026 as a 2028 savior? I think the answer would have been Raphael Warnock.
One hundred percent.
And instead, Ossoff is the one people are talking about. And I was looking at Raphael Warnock’s YouTube page, because he’s doing content, but it doesn’t have any of the visual grammar.
One thing that you see in a Mamdani, you see in a Jon Ossoff, you see in a James Talarico, is: This is not just an age of algorithms. It’s visual.
Very visual.
And you’ll see Warnock, and he’s talking at the Senate press conference setups, and he’s just in front of American flags. And Ossoff — they have figured out — you know the clip, immediately when you see it.
And Ossoff used to be a documentarian who did documentaries on international corruption. So there’s a background here. This guy actually knows how to create TV about corruption.
But there’s something really interesting to me about — first, the scarcity. The creating want. This: Who is Jon Ossoff? This building anticipation, plus this figuring out of a visual grammar ——
That’s distinct and wholly your own.
And looks like Obama.
Yes, it does look like Obama. [Laughs.] It’s also the hero shot ——
It’s always a hero shot. Which was a constant — you remember there was an Onion article ——
You’ve got to be skinny for that to work. For anyone else who’s taking notes out there in production, you’ve got to be pretty thin for that hero shot to look good.
The hero shot being this three-quarters upward angle. And otherwise you get a lot of chin.
Yes, you get a lot of chin.
And there was this great article by The Onion on Obama — something like: Obama accidentally stares too far into the future.
[Laughs.] Yeah. That’s so true.
Because he was very good at this.
And the Ossoff shot is always ——
It’s always like — he doesn’t seem like he’s looking at a crowd. [Laughs.]
Yeah. He’s gazing out past the crowd. You’re right. And I do think it’s true — that kind of visual branding is so interesting.
There’s one other dimension of Ossoff that is really worth mentioning in terms of 2028, which is that he’s Jewish.
Yes. And a genuine Israel critic.
To go back to what we were saying about that Michigan race: There’s no way of getting around the fractures in the party on Gaza, Israel, perceptions of antisemitism, perceptions of undue influence by the Israel lobby.
The coalition contains both elements, and someone is going to have to figure out how to thread that needle. If you were asking me what that person might look like, I would say the first Democratic Jewish nominee in history who is also a critic of Israel would be one recipe to thread a very difficult needle for the coalition.
Yes, and the point here is that Ossoff has substance on this. So he, early on, signed onto a Bernie Sanders letter that I think only had 19 ——
Yes, with a small group ——
That was against sending more arms to Israel given the level of humanitarian devastation that was currently being inflicted by Israel upon Gaza.
My colleague Michelle Goldberg had a great profile of him, and she mentions a Haaretz piece, which is the liberal Israeli newspaper, saying: Well, this position is going to make it much harder for Ossoff to win in Georgia.
And no — it put Ossoff in position to actually navigate this in a way the others are going to have a lot of trouble with. Josh Shapiro is going to have a lot of trouble here. He’s already having a lot of trouble here. But if you go too far to the other side — you’re going to need somebody who can represent both sides of the divide at once.
Balance. It’s tricky.
And Ossoff, who is, one, centering on a corruption story. Who is, two, centering on — he moves a corruption critique into an argument for liberal pluralism. It’s sort of a populist critique with a liberal pluralist answer. He talks a lot about values, talks a lot about being rooted in the civil rights movement and then is able to navigate this dimension of the party’s schism.
He’s also done something on corruption that I have struggled to do, and I don’t know if you’ve felt the same way: The corruption is so overwhelming, and you can hear it in my voice right now — it leaves me speechless.
It’s so brazen. It’s so insane. Every single day, I discover some new story that would have been the end of any other politician I’ve covered. Ossoff has figured out how to tell that story very, very well.
But one reason is that he moves it to be about Donald Trump and also about the Democratic Party — also about the existing institutions.
Yes.
Archival clip of Jon Ossoff: See, I get why people voted for him. Because even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world. It’s been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money. Both sides.
And it’s worse than ever now. Citizens United was the worst court decision in modern American history. [Applause.]
And when members of Congress aren’t begging for money from lobbyists, they’re trying to dodge getting carpet-bombed by these super PACs. And see, this is why nothing works for ordinary people.
It’s not because of woke college kids or trans students or because there are interracial couples in cereal commercials. [Laughs.] It’s because the people’s elected representatives don’t represent the people. They represent the donors. [Applause.]
Credibility. Ossoff is very careful always to do this, which again is another Obama move. Obama would always include an argument from the other side in the argument he was making.
Yes. Always. “People say” ——
And Ossoff does that — both sides — and he’s very, very careful to make this a critique of the system itself: Donald Trump is taking advantage of it, but he is not its originating cause.
Yes, and that’s also part of, again — it helps to be getting your reps in before the Georgia electorate. It’s like comedians.
Politicians are like comedians. You work the room. You see where your laugh lines are. You work different rooms. You work larger and larger rooms, and the room matters a lot, and the feedback you get from the room, it matters a lot.
It helps to be in a context where the room that you’re working has a Georgia electorate. This was true of Bernie Sanders in Vermont, where he only got to where he was after many failures — many electoral failures, many years in the electoral wilderness — by figuring out how to talk to the median Vermont voter, who was not a committed ideological socialist.
It’s why Barack Obama was as good as he was, because he was a Black politician who had to work white rooms. And he’s talked about that: How much he had to do to win statewide in Illinois, to win in these rural areas where people were very skeptical of a person named Barack Hussein Obama in 2004.
The other thing that is worth touching on here: One thing I see among the Democrats right now is they’re all competing to prove they’re the fighter. And relatively few are working in the more inspirational side of the tradition. You look at Newsom, you look at A.O.C., you look at JB Pritzker. They’re all like: I am your brawler. I will rip their throats out for you.
And Ossoff, even though he’s attacking corruption, he is ——
Not in that mode at all.
It’s a different register. There’s a type of Democrat who, even if they have learned to suppress it, their fundamental feeling at all levels is a disbelief.
They’re thinking: I can’t believe this is happening. I literally can’t believe this is happening. [Laughs.]
That anybody could like this guy, that these things aren’t sinking him.
Yes.
He is formed in races where that is not a register that works, and you cannot — a lot of Democrats have to kind of abstractly come to the view that there are people in this world who like Donald Trump, but they don’t know any of them. And if they do, they maybe cut them out of their lives. And that is not Jon Ossoff’s world.
That’s what I mean. He’s formed fully in an environment in which the appeal of Trump, and Trump’s power over the electorate, and Trump’s power over specific people that he has to win over — or whose family members he has to win over — is present from the beginning. And there’s something really useful and powerful about that for, again, how you train.
But if you look at polling — and if you particularly now look at the prediction markets — in polling, Kamala Harris has a lead. I think people are skeptical that lead will lead to primary dominance, but I guess we’ll see if she runs. But if you look at prediction markets, the lead is Gavin Newsom. And we all knew Gavin Newsom wanted to run for president.
I would say six years ago, I was pretty dismissive of how that was likely to go. Handsome white guy with a bunch of scandals from California was not what the Democratic Party seemed to be looking for. Who he is in some ways has changed, or actually, in some ways maybe come closer to a core of him.
What do you think about the way Newsom has maneuvered himself into, one, attentionally capable in a way he wasn’t always. But, two, into what I think is the fairly wide consensus right now that he is a Democratic front-runner for 2028?
I have complicated feelings. There’s some part of me that just thinks being the governor of California is a tough thing to do — to win nationally, to be the president. Of course, New York real estate developer is also pretty tough, too, so what do I know? [Laughs.]
The choice Newsom has made attentionally is one of the most interesting, which is: He was always a charismatic guy, but he has chosen omnipresence. He’s chosen to say yes to everything. He’s chosen to go everywhere. He’s chosen to host his own podcast.
He just had Ashley St. Clair on it. He had Ben Shapiro on not long ago. He’s doing things you would not expect.
Exactly. And it has produced a comfort that is really useful in the world that we live in. There’s a question of both what the Democratic primary electorate wants and what the general electorate wants in relation to Donald Trump.
And here’s what I mean by this: You were talking about being a fighter, and I think there’s a little bit of what Fred Hampton said: You don’t fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water.
There’s a question between: Do you want to fight fire with fire, or do you want to fight fire with water? And the “our fighter” version — our brawler, our Trump, essentially, which I think is appealing to some people in the Democratic electorate — is the mode that some Democratic politicians have gone into. And in some almost parodic ways, it’s the way that Newsom has gone by doing the whole Trump shtick online.
OK, but let me complicate this in one way, because it’s why I find Newsom really interesting.
Because he is doing more than that, I agree, yes.
There are two things. One is the number of reps he’s getting, places he’s going. You and I just saw him at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference — he has just gotten better. He’s gotten better faster than the others have.
But the other thing — a really big problem Democrats have faced since Obama is about describing a kind of unity that we can find as a country, a way of living here together despite our disagreements, despite our history, despite our differences.
And Bill Clinton did a lot in this register: Rhodes scholar but poor Arkansas boy. New South.
Obama — I mean, the master of this register.
The ultimate.
But because he was a master of this register, he somewhat destroyed the ability of anybody else to use it. Because if he couldn’t achieve it ——
Right. That’s a good point.
If what the Obama era cashed out into was Donald Trump and the division and dissolution of the shared moral and democratic framework we had, then to speak like Obama did in 2004, to speak like he did in 2008, becomes naïve. Nobody is going to believe you.
But the weird thing Newsom is doing is containing these two opposite ideas in himself, which is, one: I’ll be your brawler. But two: We will just disagree honestly and in public and continue the relationship with each other under those terms.
He’ll talk to Charlie Kirk, before Charlie Kirk was killed. He’ll talk to Michael Savage. He’ll talk to Ben Shapiro. He’ll go to the left.
And Newsom almost seems to be making this argument that is not: We can live here together in some way where our differences dissolve. It’s: Our fights with each other can be productive.
I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. It’s a very Ezra Klein-ist approach. [Laughs.]
I do wonder whether there’s also a kind of incoherence in that narratively that makes it a little difficult to pull off.
I don’t think he’s been able to synthesize them yet.
Yeah, that’s right.
I’m not sure you can. But it’s why I find his campaign very interesting.
The place right now in his rhetoric that falls the most flat for me is he’ll start talking about the need to be a “repairer of the breach” — it’s a biblical line.
You don’t feel it. You don’t feel how he’s going to repair the breach.
Right.
I want to end here on the big attentional campaign that ended in failure, which was Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles.
So interesting.
Because if you were online, it was like this former reality star is coming out of nowhere. He’s got the greatest ads. You can’t be on X for five minutes without seeing something from him. He’s going to maybe win 50 percent in the runoff — maybe at least make the runoff.
But then it didn’t pan out to anything. He underperformed Donald Trump.
And it’s a great counterpoint to many of the theories I’ve been espousing, so I’m glad we’re talking about it, because it was a very successful campaign attentionally. I do think there’s something going on.
We should say — there’s something going on with X right now under Elon Musk that is a little distinct to that platform. Which is that it’s become a hermetically sealed hothouse of insanity that, when you’re not in it all the time, you enter it, and you’re like: You guys are nuts.
And that’s exactly the way many people felt about what we might call peak woke Twitter. So part of it, I think, is a product of how much that was an X candidacy.
Yeah, there’s also a question of what’s real there.
Yes. Totally.
What’s being clip-farmed? What has a lot of bots pushing it?
But the other lesson here: It is never going to be the case that attention is the entire story. There has to be something else happening. And I think with Pratt, there was nothing else happening, really. There was no reason for that man to be mayor, first of all. Why that guy?
I do think the Pratt campaign, to me, really is an object lesson in what X is at this point that would be very useful for everyone to internalize.
You and I both remember back in the day when people would say: Twitter is not real life. [Laughs.] And weirdly, I think that’s even more the case now under the algorithmic empire of one Elon Musk.
I think one of the greatest advantages Democrats have going into 2028 ——
Is not being there ——
Is that Elon Musk has control of Twitter. I think people think of this as a problem for Democrats: It’s the opposite.
There’s really something to that.
Musk is warping Twitter toward a hard right, conspiratorial, hermetic nature. And in the way that when Democrats had dominance over Twitter — when liberals and progressives and leftists had dominance over Twitter — they convinced themselves of a bunch of ideas that were politically lethal.
But they didn’t understand that, because where they were, to have normie opinions was politically lethal. That’s how it is for the right now on Twitter.
I think that’s exactly what’s happening.
And JD Vance is there, and all of their staffers are there. Whereas the liberals and Democrats and leftists are split and broken across different platforms, and that is genuinely an advantage.
I have come to this exact same conclusion.
Yeah. Twitter — it’s kind of a curse. It makes you feel very powerful. And you pay for it.
Let’s end there. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
I’m going to spare you all my reading on Italian history, which is probably not particularly relevant.
I read and loved Ben Lerner’s newest, “Transcription.”
I will say, as someone who went to Brown, he was in my class there. I just went to my 25th reunion with Kate, whom I met there, and it had a particular potency for me that it may not have to the general audience.
I recently read — and I can’t believe I had never read this book — “The Godfather” — the original novel by Mario Puzo. It’s a combination of some really weird and truly awful misogynistic stuff, but it is incredible how good that book is in some ways. And also, it kind of makes you understand why the movie is a masterpiece. I didn’t quite realize how faithful the movie was to the original source material.
And the last one is a new novel that I am about halfway through — by someone else whom I know, Courtney Maum — called “Alan Opts Out.” It’s a great, really insightful, searing, comedic look at a Greenwich advertising executive who goes to live in the playhouse in his backyard.
Chris Hayes, thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes 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 Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Julie Beer and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy, Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.
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