For the first time since 1999, the New York Knicks will appear in the NBA Finals. It’s a momentous occasion for a city and fan base starved for basketball success. President Trump, never missing an opportunity to insert himself into the discourse, has suggested that he’ll attend a game in Madison Square Garden. When asked about the president’s ambitions to attend a game, New York Governor Kathy Hochul challenged him to name the starting lineup of the “1993 championship team.”
But the Knicks didn’t win the championship in 1993. They did make the finals in 1994, but lost to the Houston Rockets. The most recent Knicks championship was, in fact, in 1973. Hochul’s press office has since said on X that Hochul slipped up on purpose: She “was baiting Trump into pretending that team won the finals. A classic 4D chess move.” The likelier explanation is that the Democratic governor, presented with the opportunity to score a couple of easy political points, had missed the layup.
That would certainly fit the pattern. Democratic politicians are decades into an authenticity problem. Fairly or not, voters—especially men—tend to perceive Democrats as unrelatable, scripted, and disconnected from the population they seek to govern. The solution seemingly favored by Democratic consultants is for anyone with presidential aspirations to appear on as many manosphere podcasts as possible or play footsie with edgy streamers. But appearing on this or that platform is not really what matters. Rather, the game is to get as much attention as possible, as frequently as possible, while seeming as relatable as possible. A cheat code exists to hit all three objectives: sports talk.
The contemporary sports-media landscape is designed to take ruthless advantage of the fact that nothing generates attention more reliably than controversy. Personalities such as Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless have made fortunes because they understand that sparking disagreement equals clicks and attention. Their debates may be contrived, inconsequential, and moronic. Their arguments may be made in bad faith. Yet they and other talking heads play on an endless loop on screens across the country. An entire genre of sports podcasts, meanwhile, seems to exist only to generate clips of the most outrageous opinions and post them to TikTok and YouTube.
As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk. A popular meme mocks men for being content to sit and name obscure athletes to one another for hours. It’s popular because it isn’t far from the truth. The politically disengaged male voters whom Democrats are so desperate to reach aren’t at bars arguing about Medicare funding. They are arguing about a roughing-the-passer penalty. Bettors on Polymarket give Stephen A. Smith higher odds of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential primary than Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, and Ruben Gallego. Nothing gets attention like sports takes.
[Chris Murphy: My son’s hockey team and the crisis of American resentment]
Trump seems to understand this. He takes controversial positions on sports and talks about them in words that sound sincere. The NFL’s kickoff rules, recently changed to reduce injuries during returns, are a particular passion of his. After attending the 2025 Super Bowl, the president posted on Truth Social: “The worst part of the Super Bowl, by far, was watching the Kickoff where, as the ball is sailing through the air, the entire field is frozen, stiff. College Football does not do it, and won’t! Whose idea was it to ruin the Game?”
How much Trump personally cares about sports other than golf is unclear, but he knows which buttons to press. He goes to UFC fights; he goes to the Super Bowl; he has pro athletes—most recently the Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart—speak at his rallies. Sports fans can relate, because this is how many of us would abuse our power if we were president.
Some other politicians are getting it. Ron DeSantis, who was widely mocked during the 2024 primaries for his robot-like demeanor, is happy to go on podcasts to discuss how the transfer portal and name, image, and likeness payments are ruining college football. DeSantis even remarked at a recent press conference that, although the University of Florida’s basketball team was the defending NCAA champion at the time, the fans weren’t happy, because the football team was bad. He understands his audience.
Zohran Mamdani, the rare Democrat who seems fluent in sports, has made a point of showing off his extensive knowledge of the English Premier League and has made his fandom of the Knicks and Mets apparent. After the Knicks swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA playoffs, Mamdani went on X to troll the Ohio Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy.
Compare these examples with the way in which the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign tried to channel some of sports talk’s power after selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high-school-football coach, as Harris’s running mate. “Coach Walz,” as Harris called him at the event announcing his candidacy, seemed more content to let people write about his sports identity than to demonstrate it. On October 27, the nation found out why. After Walz joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a Twitch livestream to play Madden, the über-popular football video game, his campaign’s X account posted that “@AOC can run a mean pick 6.” A pick-six (when an interception is returned for a touchdown) is an outcome, not a play. The gaffe was probably the fault of a social-media staffer, not Walz himself. Even so, it went viral in sports group chats across the country.
But the more telling moment had actually come a week earlier, when Walz appeared on The Rich Eisen Show. During his 15-minute segment, Walz went out of his way to compliment the University of Michigan’s football fans, Lambeau Field in Wisconsin, and the coach of the Detroit Lions (also in Michigan). The appearance didn’t generate the kind of viral contempt that greeted the pick-six post. Indeed, the YouTube excerpt of Walz’s appearance on Eisen’s show has just 50,000 views. (By contrast, Trump’s appearance on the sports-and-entertainment podcast Bussin’ With the Boys, which was released just a few days earlier, has nearly 10 times as many.) And that’s exactly the problem: Walz avoided controversy by saying nice things about everyone, thus defeating the purpose of talking sports. In the realm of sports talk, kindness is unrelatable; it’s alien, even. What’s relatable is irrationally caring for your team and irrationally hating its rivals—not pandering by saying that you happen to like all of the teams in key Rust Belt swing states.
If Democrats want to defeat authoritarianism, they need to win the trust of people who are not necessarily politically engaged. To do that, they could do worse than to start expressing their own hot takes on sports. These shouldn’t repeat already-popular opinions as a way to seem relatable. The perfect take should be actually unpopular, counter to the consensus, and specific.
The Senate candidate James Talarico doesn’t need to run away from his meatless-taco order. Instead, he could prove that he’s a regular guy by calling into ESPN Austin to accuse the University of Texas quarterback Arch Manning of being a nepo baby who got millions of dollars just for his name. Or perhaps he could compare Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys’ imperious owner, to Trump: an egotistical old man destroying a once-proud institution.
Indeed, the sports world offers fertile terrain for class politics. Progressive Democrats have been trying, with limited success, to convince Americans that billionaires are their true enemy. Well, guess who loves to hate billionaires: aggrieved sports fans. Why not take a break from complaining that billionaires don’t pay their fair share of income taxes to focus instead on team owners’ obsession with avoiding the luxury tax by trading away their best players? Perhaps AOC could earn some support in Staten Island if she hammered Hal Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, for letting Juan Soto go to the crosstown Mets to save on his tax bill.
[Dan Moore: Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums]
Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania, is one of the most popular Democratic governors in the country. Is it any coincidence that he drew headlines last year by complaining about the NFL’s attempts to ban the Philadelphia Eagles’ famed “tush push”? If he runs for president, he could go further still: Insinuate that the Eagles lost the 2023 Super Bowl due to sabotage by a groundskeeper with suspiciously close ties to the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s going to lose in Missouri regardless, so he might as well shore up those Pennsylvania votes while proving that he’s just as deranged as the rest of us sports fans.
The point isn’t the substance of the opinion—it’s the willingness to defend it. Sports takes are a simple way to show that you have the backbone to stand for something unpopular because you believe in it.
The counterargument to all of this is that politicians, especially dorky Democratic politicians, simply don’t have hot sports takes to offer, because they aren’t actually fans. But if you can’t relate to something that resonates so strongly with American people, then you need to reevaluate your role as a politician in an electoral democracy. Aspiring leaders who aren’t up on sports would do well to set aside some time to at least watch the highlights. They will find that sports opinions have a key advantage over policy arguments: If elected, politicians can never be held accountable for them.
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