This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
The Democratic Party is in a tense moment right now, and the implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine has become a focal point for those tensions.
Archival news clip: Democrat Graham Platner said he is dropping out of his state’s Senate race. It follows allegations of rape and physical abuse, which he denies.
Archival clip of Graham Platner: I just want to make it clear: This is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen. It’s not real.
After months of debating what the lessons of Platner’s sudden rise were, now it’s all about the lessons of his even more sudden fall. And every faction has a lesson it wants the other to learn. To the Democratic establishment, it demonstrates the failures of the populace to vet their candidates: You can’t trust them. Look at how Platner fell apart under scrutiny. What if that had happened after the date when Maine’s Democratic Party couldn’t choose a new candidate?
And then the populists want to protect what Platner seemed to be proving before his implosion: that the Democratic establishment is intensely vulnerable, that it’s out of touch with the electorate. Platner did, after all, beat Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, Chuck Schumer’s handpicked candidate, in the Democratic primary before his campaign collapsed.
A lot of the anger has focused on Morris Katz, a strategist at the political consulting firm Fight Agency. You may not have heard of Katz, but he is a consultant in his late 20s who burst onto the scene as a key political adviser to Zohran Mamdani and then as Platner’s lead strategist.
But before that, Katz was the ad maker for John Fetterman’s 2022 campaign. He was one of the key strategists on Dan Osborn’s independent run for Senate in Nebraska in 2024. There’s been a certain kind of working-class-coded populist campaign that Katz has really become central in defining.
So here was this guy whom people really hadn’t heard of before, who was the right-hand man of the two Democratic politicians probably getting the most press this year. And now, among both the left and the center, the knives are out for him.
You have all these stories about the slipshod way he was running the campaign. You had a Democratic Socialists of America letter being circulated trying to argue that the D.S.A. shouldn’t work with him any longer.
I think you can really see this one both ways. Katz made genuinely huge mistakes. It is very possible that the failure to effectively vet Platner could have cost Democrats the Senate this year. Katz has also clearly figured out something about this political moment that strategists many years his senior have not.
So I wanted to have him on the show to ask him both about what he clearly has gotten right and what he just as clearly got wrong.
Ezra Klein: Morris Katz, welcome to the show.
Morris Katz: Thanks for having me, Ezra. It’s good to be here.
We’re talking in the aftermath of Graham Platner’s campaign imploding after a credible accusation of rape. There are a lot of people angry at you, some of them people you worked with, for poorly vetting Platner — but also for attacking people who were trying to raise the alarm on him.
Now that you’ve had some time to digest what has happened, what do you think went wrong?
I think a lot of the critiques and anger are fully valid. I think I’ve been very critical of the Democratic establishment, frequently, and where those critiques come from is not that they make mistakes. It’s that they make the same mistakes over and over again because learning from those lessons would pose a threat to their power. And I don’t want to do that. And I think there are things here, many of the critiques that have been made, that are incredibly valid and things to learn from.
The conversation around the vetting — there is no standard vetting process that would have found the credible allegation that ended the campaign. Eric Swalwell served on the House Intelligence Committee for about a decade and then saw similar allegations end his campaign.
That being said, in hindsight, knowing what we know now, the Reddit posts alone probably should have been enough — or should have been enough. The tattoo should have been enough. The initial New York Times story on troubling behavior should have been enough.
I think both things can be true: that we need different kinds of candidates running outside of the political arena — and that it’s the United States Senate, and candidacies should be held to an incredibly high standard.
There are a lot of incredible people who are not part of the political arena, a lot of incredible working-class Americans across the country, who don’t have those problematic Reddit posts or who don’t have a problematic tattoo or don’t have quite the level of controversy in their past.
You had described the Reddit posts, at one point, as an asset.
I think that there was a belief that I am still kind of wrestling with. Over the course of the campaign, one of the things that was really, frankly, inspiring to see is that we have so little grace in our politics and so little room for nuance, and it felt like this opened up a lot of those conversations. You saw people just extend such grace and open up their hearts and be willing to hope and believe not just that we could change our politics but that people could change.
I think that was something we needed, and I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want people’s lesson from this to be that there should never be room for grace. I think that there are a lot of people who have made mistakes or said controversial things who we want to win the support of, who we need to earn the trust of. But I also think I was wrong.
Now that’s not to say that everyone who has said controversial things on Reddit would then have things like this come out. I don’t think that’s the case. But it’s to say that there’s a higher risk there of it happening when there are things like that, and there’s too much at stake, and there are so many people who don’t have that potential liability. It’s the United States Senate.
I want to go back to the beginning of it. The story has been somewhat told by Dan Moraff, another consultant who worked on the Platner campaign. But I haven’t really heard you tell it in public.
How did you meet Graham Platner? How did you find him? What was the process that led you to him?
The initial factor that led to the broader efforts of recruitment in Maine was a lot of angst around Janet Mills being the presumptive nominee. This was someone who was polling as one of the least popular governors in the country, who would have been the oldest freshman member of the United States Senate in Senate history, and who had made a lot of enemies out of key components of Maine — labor unions, tribes.
A network of us connected with different local folks — labor leaders, organization leaders — with a vision of recruitment. One of the important factors in that is — there’s been a lot of criticism, obviously, around it, but many of the people, and I still believe this, who are best equipped to serve are not people who are going to raise their hand and sign up for it.
So there was a lot of conversation and thought around how the kind of candidate who could win Maine would be a veteran, they would be someone from outside of the Portland area — ideally, a community in which Trump won — and someone tied to an industry that has a specific resonance in Maine.
The waterfront industry was a leading factor there, and it was then a broader process and a series of meetings that led folks to Graham.
So you’re looking, in a way, for someone who’s doing lobstering, who’s an oyster farmer, who’s a fisherman. You’re almost casting a candidate.
I think it’s listening to the specificities of an area and the specificities of the problems facing that area and seeing: Who’s the voice that should be representing these people in Washington? Who should be fighting for them in Washington? Who’s most in touch?
We have a problem in that the lived realities of so many of the people who run for office are so disconnected from the lived realities of the people they’re running to represent. There is a friction there that is impossible to reconcile.
And so how do you overcome that? You need people who don’t have that same gap.
So why not somebody like Troy Jackson, who’s now going to be, looks to be, the nominee?
I find this interesting because Jackson is somebody who is a fifth-generation logger, if I’m not wrong. Very, very populist politics. He doesn’t have Platner’s charisma — I think it is fair to say that. He has been a State Senate president there. He has this mix of the right politics, but he’s also an insider, a person who has been in politics for a while.
Was that why he was not the exciting figure for you guys?
Troy was really committed to running for governor at the time. I think if Troy Jackson was running for Senate, there would not have been a process.
What did you see in Platner when you first met him? What was that conversation like?
I saw someone who lived on the same road he grew up on, who clearly loved Maine a lot — and who I thought really articulated, in a powerful way, both a story that could capture the anger and angst so many people feel over the status quo, but also had an affirmative vision of what government could do about it.
How many people did you, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, another strategist and Moraff’s partner, collectively meet with before settling on Platner?
There were a number of meetings of which I was not a part. But the entire process was not limited. It was an extended process that landed on Graham.
And it was an effort to convince him, right? I’ve read there were like 30-some efforts to ——
Yes.
He told you guys to get off his lawn.
[Laughs.] Yes. The State Senate tried to recruit him in 2020. I think a number of people had reached out over the years, saying: You should run for office. You should run for office.
He liked what his life was and articulated a skepticism of it being possible to defeat Janet Mills. So it was a running process.
I know when you did settle on him, there was a vetting document created. What did that document find?
The document found a Reddit account. Essentially, there was the inclination that there were problematic posts on Reddit, not the full degree of what later came out, but that was the extent of what that document found.
An even more robust process would have found more of the specific Reddit comments and, potentially, the tattoo.
But again, a standard vetting process probably doesn’t uncover most of the things that came after.
One of Platner’s old Reddit posts regarding victims of sexual assault stated:
Holy [expletive], how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so [expletive] up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?
That’s from 2013. What do you think when you hear it now?
I think it should have been a red line.
He talked about it being one of the things he regretted saying the most, that it was indicative of a time of his life when he was lost and angry, and that it was in no way reflective of who he was.
When I talk about the need for a different kind of standard for public office, I think we can both have a standard in which a normal person can say something deeply hurtful and harmful online and not be exiled from society and day-to-day life if they’ve changed or are putting in the work to change. But also, that doesn’t mean that they’re entitled to a role in elected office.
I’m a big believer in grace in politics, and I think that we need to create a lot of space for people to change — everybody from politicians to voters.
One of the things that really shifted my thinking on Platner, though, was something that you did know early on, which is about his sexting as many as a dozen women in the early days of his marriage.
There was this narrative that I was very open to, which is: This is a guy with a dark past, with a tough past, who had put in a lot of work and changed, and he asked to be judged on his present.
So when that came out, it made me wonder about his present, and, particularly, what it made me wonder about, fundamentally, was his honesty.
We publicly didn’t know that for quite some time. It was brought to the campaign early on through his wife, Amy Gertner.
What did you think when you learned about that? Combined with some of these other things — the Totenkopf tattoo, the Reddit posts — why did that not begin to worry you more about whether or not he could actually be trusted in what he was saying?
I think it both did worry me more, and some of those concerns at the time were eased by the communication from Amy herself and from Graham that this was something that they worked through extensively in their marriage.
It seemed like a good-faith engagement of two married people working through a difficult thing and working through it together and handling it in all the ways that one would handle something like that once it came up.
I wanted to respect both the privacy of their marriage in that, and also, I think there’s a difference between consensual sexting and the allegations that ended the campaign. I was trying to hold room for all of those different things at once.
The challenge of all of this was — as someone who does deeply believe in grace and nuance and the fact that people are complicated and life is complicated and maybe politics should reflect a little bit more of that — there was a constant weighing of: How much is too much? What is the red line? And I think, obviously, I did not see it soon enough.
Other people who were involved did see a red line sooner. Genevieve McDonald was the campaign’s political director. She resigned back in October 2025, around a lot of this. She knew about the sexting, she knew about the Reddit posts, the Totenkopf tattoo.
It has been reported that when you heard she was speaking to The Wall Street Journal about Platner’s cheating, you demanded she retract her comments, send you a recording of her talking to the reporters retracting her comments, and if not, that you would attack her for sabotaging the campaign.
Do you owe her an apology? Have you apologized to her?
So there are parts of that description that I would take some issue with. The thing on that specific issue that I was articulating was that it was a violation of Amy’s privacy.
For all the conversation about vetting, part of what the vetting process requires is a lot of honesty and transparency from candidates. When, as a team, you go to them and say: Hey, we need you to tell us everything — part of what didn’t work in this instance is when there was not full transparency.
In that specific instance, Amy came to her and was fully honest. To see Amy’s trust violated like that, and to see that practice that allows campaigns to operate and us to get to a place of honesty violated like that, was frustrating.
I think I can understand that. On the other hand, I think one of the questions is: What is the responsibility of a campaign to the public? To the people around a candidate who maybe know more than the public knows or, frankly, to the party or to the larger project of the politics?
A number of people resigned from the campaign over time. I had this impression from the outside that no one thing, until the final revelation, was disqualifying for Platner. But it seemed like a lot of smoke, like a lot of decisions that didn’t look great, and you just wonder: What else is there that you don’t know? And also: Is this a person who should be in the Senate?
I can really understand the frustration you must have had at people revealing things that were in the campaign or confirming things that had come out in internal vetting. On the other hand, there is this complicated question of: What happens when campaign consultants know things that maybe the public should know?
Just to be clear on one of the points: We did not know — there has been speculation of what we knew around some of the more serious later allegations and when, and we did not know until the day or two prior to that story coming out that there was a credible and serious allegation of rape.
The area we were in, in terms of the things we knew, were sexting, Reddit and tattoo land. To your point, none of those things alone in a vacuum was necessarily disqualifying.
And also, there was so much momentum and energy from the voters in Maine. Graham was traveling across the state, the campaign was building a movement of thousands and thousands of volunteers, bringing people off the sidelines.
I think that friction of really wanting to believe — I say to my candidates a lot: A lot of candidates’ greatest strengths are their greatest weaknesses. You’re an outsider, but you’re inexperienced. Or you’re experienced, but you’re part of the establishment. You’re a policy wonk, but then you’re overly in the weeds.
I take the work that I do very personally and may be naïve at times in the sense of wanting a different kind of politics to be possible. And feeling that friction of sensing: Yes, this is a lot of smoke — and being almost disoriented by that. But then also experiencing the euphoria of seeing a politics of what could be possible: Of town halls of hundreds and hundreds of people in areas Trump won talking about the New Deal and a different kind of populist politics and taking on corruption and Republicans saying that they’d had enough. And independents saying they hadn’t voted for cycles, but this campaign was bringing them out.
The friction of all of those things was a lot. If I was doing it over again, I would do a lot of it differently. But that was what was happening.
One of the things that McDonald has said is that she did come to you and started trying to vet Platner more herself — we reached out to her, and we weren’t able to talk to her — but that the Fight consultancy was not interested in going further down the vetting pathway.
She has expressed a lot of anger about that. The finance director resigned. There were people who felt something was going wrong.
In the sense of what you are trying to learn from this, if you look back on those conversations, if you look back on people sensing that something was up here, what were these other members of the campaign beginning to see that eventually proved true, even if they didn’t know exactly what would prove true, that you and Fight didn’t?
Fight is not a vetting agency. That’s not a service we offer. We work with campaigns, and campaigns work with vetting professionals. I think there’s a fair critique of Fight putting more pressure and me putting more pressure on people to ensure that the vetting process taking place is responsible and robust.
I don’t recall that conversation that Genevieve is outlining. I think there was a mix of different personal dynamics in some of those decisions. But I also think they were right to feel that something was amiss earlier.
One of Platner’s accusers was Lyndsey Fifield, who had been in a partnership with him and accused him, it came out in the Times story, of being physically abusive when they were together.
She has worked in conservative politics, and so there was a real rush to say that this was just politically motivated, that she was just a Republican trying to destroy his campaign.
Her story really bothered me for two reasons. One, obviously, the abuse. But the other was her contemporaneously telling other people: This guy told me his tattoo was a Totenkopf.
I had always been pretty skeptical of the tattoo story. I didn’t think Platner was in any way an antisemite or a Nazi, but I wasn’t really sure he didn’t know what his tattoo was.
Do you see her story differently now and wish you’d reacted to that story differently?
Yes. Knowing what we know now, there should have been more credibility given immediately to that story when it came forward.
This begins to get to the broader topic because a lot went wrong here, but also some things went really right.
Until the last moment, Platner had wrecked the sitting governor of Maine in the primary.
Throughout the campaign, you and many of your allies were arguing the Democratic Party only wants to run — your word was “losers” — who have wanted to be president since they were in fifth grade, and that what the party needs is normal, real people.
Real people have checkered pasts, and that needs to be accepted to have more authentic politics.
Platner is such an unusual case because the strategy both worked and failed at the same time. How do you see that same theory now?
I think real people have checkered pasts, and also there are many, many, many real people who do not have that kind of checkered past.
It often seemed to be a little insulting to what gets called real people.
Exactly. Yes. I think the online stuff is fair — a lot of people have posted online. The content of those goes probably a step beyond what most people have said.
There can both be room for some level of nuanced conversation about people who’ve lived lives not tailor-made for politics, and also more strict standards on it.
Even two days after the Politico story came out, there was a poll that had Graham down to Susan Collins, but had Janet Mills running five points behind Graham Platner, even after the story on the day he suspended his campaign.
We have a Republican majority in the House, we have a Republican majority in the Senate, we have a Republican in the White House, and we have no functional path to a clear governing Democratic majority.
There were mistakes made here, and they need to not be made again. But to go entirely in the other direction and decide: OK, we’re totally going to write off trying a different approach, we’re going to totally write off bringing outsiders in to run for office — at a moment in which the party establishment and any kind of establishment institutions of power are deeply unpopular — does not feel like a good-faith effort to get to the place we need to get to.
If we’re all serious about a powerful governing majority, then that is going to require a different approach. It’s going to have to tap into the level of anger and angst that people are feeling, and also this deep, deep desire for hope that I think this campaign tapped into.
What is an outsider to you?
My understanding of the list of campaigns you’ve been centrally involved in over the past couple of years is: John Fetterman, where you were pretty centrally responsible for the ad strategy, and after his stroke he was really reliant on that strategy; Dan Osborn, the independent who ran before and is running again in Nebraska and wildly overperformed for Democrats in that state, sort of a union guy; Zohran Mamdani, who people have now heard of and needs no introduction; Graham Platner; and Nathan Sage, who is running in Iowa for Senate.
Some of these candidates are what you might call an outsider, right? Platner did not have political experience. Nathan Sage did not have a lot of political experience.
Fetterman was a lieutenant governor of his state. Osborn was a little bit better known as a major union leader.
When you talk about this strategy, what is an outsider?
I think inherent in part of the problem is that the people who are insiders right now in positions of power are an incredibly narrow definition. It’s an incredibly small group of people who have power and influence and resources in our politics in our country right now. Anyone who’s outside of that orbit, I think, is an outsider.
It’s similar to the discourse around class right now. The majority of people are working and do not feel like they have enough to live the lives that they should be able to. There is such a profound exclusion of the American people from access to resources, from access to power, from access to the lives they want to be able to live.
The people who are in that category need to be running for office. That should look different in a lot of places. That has a lot of different faces, a lot of different backgrounds, but that, I think, is the goal that we should be coming to.
The thing that I really notice about that list of candidates is that it’s not far from a list of candidates who have gotten the most attention in their cycles. The thing that even your critics say about you is that, as an ad maker, as a storyteller, as somebody who is helping to recruit candidates or choosing candidates to work with, you have figured out a way to break through attentionally at a time when it’s very hard to do so.
There are a lot of people who are outsiders, but not everybody who is an outsider is going to be a good candidate. Not everybody who is an outsider is going to be somebody who goes viral on social or algorithmic media.
When I was asking you about where you found Platner, I feel, from the stories I know, that you underplayed the casting dimension of him — actually looking for a charismatic candidate with a specific kind of bio.
You didn’t invent looking for bios. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been doing that forever, and the Republicans have been doing that forever.
It does feel like you look for people who feel like their bios, which is a little bit different. I’ve watched a lot of veterans run in politics, and they just feel like normal candidates. John Fetterman was sort of an insider — a known political quantity as lieutenant governor — but in that campaign, with his shorts and his tattoos, there was an aesthetic to him that felt different from other candidates.
When you’re finding these people, when you’re looking for them, when you’re framing their stories with them, what is it beyond that simple outsider-insider thing that you are looking for? What do you feel breaks through and what doesn’t?
There’s a misconception sometimes in politics that to win an election, you’re sitting down at a job interview. Right now, where voters are, they believe that every single thing you’re saying at a job interview is a lie. They’re just not going to believe it.
Oh, you got some bill through the state legislature? Well, you’re never going to get it done in Washington.
Oh, you say you’re going to lower prescription drug costs? How come nothing has happened? Maybe you’ll get it done in 15 years.
We’re actually not engaging in a job interview. We’re engaging in something of a dating process with people who’ve been on 100 bad dates in a row and are holding out a little bit of hope that maybe tonight is going to be different. How can you make people who’ve been given every reason to give up on love fall in love again?
Much like love, there’s something not random but magnetic to it. To shake that loose, you need a candidate and a campaign that is telling a story that can bring people who have every reason to be out back in.
John Fetterman was a story about Braddock as much as it was a story about him: a forgotten steel town that believed its best days were generations ago, that still deserves to be fought for, that doesn’t deserve to be left behind.
A bio isn’t just bullet points but a story to tell. People talk about hope as a political tool or an abstract thing, not a tangible thing in and of itself. I believe that there’s a power in hope, even just as a thing that people are feeling. Everyone’s having such a hard time.
I also think there is an X factor in our politics. Someone could run for president any year and have the exact same policy positions as Barack Obama. But Barack Obama had an X factor that made him unique. So did Bill Clinton, so does Donald Trump, so did George W. Bush.
The people who rise to the highest ranks of political power in this country do have an X factor, and we can’t ignore that. You uniquely can’t ignore that in the modern media environment where you can’t just run a campaign on 30-second television ads.
This is what I want to zone in on, because I think Fight, as a consultancy, and you, as a consultant, are good at finding people with the X factor.
One place where I think the strategy of the broad coalition of the Democratic Party has fallen apart is that I think they were looking for the ability to raise money — not the X factor.
I think there’s a deep lack of updating in the strategy. To break down the way that this traditionally works: There’s a district or a state where there’s a competitive election, and the institutional approach to recruitment there is who can raise the most money in the first 48 hours. That is literally the driving, determining factor in who the Democratic establishment wants to recruit.
Inherent in that, when the question you’re asking is: Who knows the most wealthy people? — that is probably someone ill-equipped to make a credible case as an outsider running against a rigged economy. I think that’s the job of the consultant class.
One of the reasons I do what I do now: One of my first jobs was in North Carolina working for a candidate there, Erica Smith, who had an incredible story to tell. She also had some issues of her own, but she had a really powerful story.
She was a pastor from a rural part of the state that was rapidly falling behind and had been left behind by the political establishment where Democrats were collapsing. She had a decent electoral record, even as a state senator. She grew up on the same family farm that her family was enslaved on — a really profound story about North Carolina, overcoming hardship and having a vision.
We did a 100-county tour in 100 days across all of North Carolina. In that campaign and that tour, I saw two things. One was that the political establishment did not exist in a way to see that there’s a candidate here with a really compelling story and some really good talent. How do we wrap around her, protect her, lift her up, fill in the blind spots here and support it?
Instead, it was: She can’t raise the money. Or: It’s unserious. Or: Someone from there can never rise into political power.
Is the issue that it did work differently before? I always understand money as having been able to buy two things: Money could buy a certain amount of attention by buying mailers and TV spots. And money could buy a certain amount of organizing by paying for yard signs and sending people into the field.
Both of those things have gotten harder to buy — people don’t watch TV spots in the same way they used to — and easier or more straightforward to earn. If you have enthusiasm and you’re compelling, all of a sudden your videos can go viral, and people scrolling through TikTok in your area will see you.
Was it actually optimized for something that made sense at one time, and now that’s no longer true? Or is it just that you get the money a different way? The money still matters just as much, but you acquire it differently?
Money still matters profoundly, and you get it differently. But I think the main thing is you can’t hide behind 30-second ads anymore. You can’t just run a campaign predicated on paid media.
You are constantly expected to be communicating. People’s standards for transparency have risen in the social media age. We now know everything about our celebrities.
The standard for the ways in which LeBron James has to interact with the public is fundamentally different than the standards for the way Michael Jordan had to interact with the public. If LeBron James was at casinos until 5 a.m. every day, we’d be telling a very different story about LeBron.
There’s a similar thing in politics, where everything’s under a microscope. You’re being recorded at any given moment. You can’t put on a 30-second facade and hope that’s enough. You need every part of a campaign working together to tell a complete story that can’t be artificially constructed, and you can’t cover up for a lack of candidate talent.
The most compelling indicator of candidate overperformance remains candidate quality. We can have all of these different debates, but that remains fundamentally true.
The candidates on that list have an ideological range to them. Fetterman changed a lot after the campaign, so he’s a little bit of an unusual case, after his stroke.
Dan Osborn, running as an independent, was a very populist candidate, but very moderate on other issues. He did an ad, maybe you made the ad, about wanting to help build the wall on the border with his own hands.
You have Platner, who’s much more progressive. Zohran Mamdani, who’s a Democratic Socialist. Nathan Sage, who was sort of in between that.
You’ve said before that, for you, the candidates don’t need to be progressive, they need to be populist. What’s the difference?
Frankly, a lot of the difference is in the labels the general public assigns to it.
What frustrates me about the current state of the Democratic Party is we have a big-tent party that is constantly shifting and rearranging to exclude people who challenge the powers at the heart of it.
Be specific. What do you mean by that?
Watching someone like Josh Gottheimer, for example — a member of Congress — who says: We need a big-tent party — but also says that no one in D.S.A. should be allowed in that party.
Well, that’s not a big-tent party then.
Or anytime anyone is critical of Israel: Well, that’s not who the Democratic Party should be.
I’m interested in a big-tent party that flips that a little bit — where we’re allowed to disagree. People have different politics on the border or slightly different approaches on a variety of issues across the country, and candidates and campaigns can reflect those. But we are united in a belief that we are not even having a good-faith conversation until we’ve done serious things about corruption at the heart of our politics and until we’re working to address an economy that’s broken. To me, that’s the base line of where people are.
The longer it takes us to get to that place of being a party that embodies a challenge to the status quo rather than protecting it, the longer we’re going to be in the wilderness.
You sort of dodged my progressivism versus populism question, so let me sharpen it. What is populism?
I think it is a belief that the people should have more power. That’s my specific interpretation, but I think a lot about the nature of power in terms of how much people feel like they have it in their lives. A lot of the issues we have stem from the fact that we’re at a moment in history where people feel more powerless than ever before.
Was Obama a populist?
I believe so, yes. I think his entire theory of the case was deeply populist. He told a story of the country belonging to everyone and that being at the heart of things.
Particularly, his re-election campaign doesn’t get talked about enough for just quite how populist the approach was. Mitt Romney was a Wall Street villain who had shipped our jobs away, who wanted more money for himself and his Wall Street friends, while Obama was a president who took them on, brought the economy back and stared down those same villains.
I think that’s an example where populism allows for a big tent. The people who critique it are just absurd because it’s against their own interests.
Fight — not as much specifically you — worked on Tom Steyer’s campaign for governor of California. Tom Steyer is a billionaire. Can a billionaire be a populist?
If you’re a class traitor. [Laughs.] JB Pritzker is another example of someone whose policies are in conflict with the interests of the billionaire class.
What I’m trying to get at is: In your theory of where the Democratic Party has gone wrong and where politics is going, what separates the candidates able to make the kind of appeal that you think works from the candidates who can’t?
I don’t know Janet Mills myself, but I am certain if we had Janet Mills in this studio, she would say she also believes more power should go to the people. She also believes that politics is corrupt and has certainly had to make compromises, as any governor has, as Zohran Mamdani has to make compromises, as people in power do.
But she would probably see herself as fitting within that definition. So would most people in the establishment Democratic Party who come in for regular tongue-lashings from you and some of the people around you.
What is the line here?
The ability to name villains. It drives me insane that you have these politicians who take on affordability, and you hear them say: We have an affordability crisis, which is why I’m here talking about affordability, because what Democrats need to do is talk about affordability.
You’re not saying anything. Everyone is dealing with some version of an affordability crisis across the country, but the villains of it are specific in specific places. In some places, it’s broken right-to-repair laws. In some places, it’s bad landlords. In some places, it’s electric monopolies. In other places, it’s specific billionaires or corporations.
I don’t think Janet Mills would name the people who are taking power and using it to hurt working people.
So that’s the point of populism: It’s not just believing that people should have more power, but believing that there is a small group of people or corporations that has collected that power, and that’s what needs to be broken — and articulating that clearly.
There’s a case to be made that, basically, populism is a politics that points. What we have in the rising Republican Party is a populism that points the finger down or to the side — targeting trans communities, targeting immigrant communities. What we are advocating for is a populism that points the finger up.
The friction and the fight right now with a lot of the Democratic establishment is that there is a belief that we are not in this populist moment, or that we can just get through this moment and things will collapse.
The reason that frustrates me so intensely is I don’t think there is any electoral indication that is true. There is going to be a populist future in this country — it is a question of who’s going to control it. If it is not the Democratic Party, then it is only going to get worse on the other side. We need to start pointing up before there’s no one left around.
You mentioned Obama’s 2012 campaign earlier. Obama has these two campaigns that are different. You have the 2008 campaign, which is very much about hope, change and coming together. Then the 2012 campaign, which is harder-edged, more about plutocrats, billionaires and Bain Capital.
I still see the Democratic Party vibrating between those two approaches. You can see reasons for both in polls. People are very upset about political division and want politics to feel different — it is a big-tent party that needs many kinds of people inside it. On the other hand, you ask people if the political system basically needs to be burned down, and they tell you: Yes.
How do you think about that balance — that there’s simultaneously a desire in the public for a politics that points, and a politics that unites and has a kind of fellowship to it?
It’s an interesting question. This is a slightly different answer to the question you posed. There’s a sustainability question with it. There’s this friction with how quickly incumbents, not just in America but all over the world, are turning over because you can ride this populist wave — but then what?
We need a populism — to play to the crowd — that’s married to a bit of abundance. You simultaneously need a restoration of faith in government, because that contributes to a dividing factor and a baked-in cynicism that’s divisive. Populism can be hopeful if you marry it with an abundance-esque approach of the deep belief that government needs to work.
The Zohran Mamdani approach.
Yes. I don’t think it’s a credible claim that we’re going to take back all this power and fortune from the billionaire class or the oligarchy if we can’t even build 100 homes. Marrying those things together begins to tell a story of a populism that’s hopeful because you can believe in it, it’s tangible in your life, and it’s a reorientation of power. It’s all of those things combined.
It frustrates me when we get into these debates over: You can believe in antitrust policy, or you can believe in abundance.
I have also found those debates frustrating. [Laughs.]
We can massively cut red tape that makes people’s lives more difficult, and we can impose new regulations that protect people from predatory actions.
There are a lot of people doing a compelling job of this: In raising the finger, from pointing to your neighbor to pointing toward the powerful, there can be a story of unity, hope and love.
I did not come up with this, I cannot remember who came up with this, so I apologize to whoever it is. Someone described it as: It’s Obama’s “we” and Bernie’s “them.” It’s an Obama-esque coalition that’s inclusive and that we’re all a part of, and we’re stronger when we’re all in it together and taking on the Bernie Sanders version of the villains who are opposing us.
I want to stay on populism for a minute. One thing that connects the candidates we’ve been talking about is they’re all men. Is there a connection for you between populism and gender, and between what you think the public reads as populist and working class and gender?
I think the public tends to more loosely assign that term to men, and I don’t think it’s particularly accurate. There are a lot of candidates — like Rebecca Cooke running in Wisconsin — who meet all of those same criteria. Or Governor Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, who is probably a technocratic-populist hybrid but has campaigned in that way and governed in that way.
I think about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an example of this. The way people use the term “populist,” oftentimes, is code-switching. If something is progressive, it’s unelectable, and “populist” becomes the electable version of “progressive.”
That’s not my interpretation of it, but it contributes to, like, where people are afraid that if they start saying A.O.C. is a populist, then it undercuts their arguments to keep her from running for president or to keep her from being president.
But is there an outdated idea of what the working class looks like here?
Yes.
Because if you look at Nathan Sage, Fetterman, Platner or Dan Osborn, there’s an image of a guy who could work on an oyster farm, a lobster boat or in a factory.
The working class today, in a modal sense, is often an immigrant woman working as a home health care aide. Our politics treats the working class as if it goes to work in a hard hat.
It has been a critique of you — but more broadly, of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and a lot of people in modern politics — that they have not tried or managed to come up with a more modern way of presenting what it means to be working class.
I certainly can’t speak for Donald Trump, and I can’t speak for Senator Sanders, either, but I think there is an element of how these things are written about, grouped, covered and perceived.
Someone like Jamaal Bowman is a working-class candidate, but stories written about him tended to leave out the fact that he was a working-class outsider because it was more convenient to lean into other critical narratives than to embrace that. Or Cori Bush — two members primaried by AIPAC last cycle. Because they don’t meet the traditional definition, that tag is not applied to them, which then perpetuates the cycle.
Even in polls before Platner dropped out, Susan Collins was winning by quite a lot among white men in Maine without a college degree. There’s been a well-documented shift where the Democratic Party has become the party of the college educated. The more left you go in the party, the more true that often is. The D.S.A. does incredibly well among people with postgraduate degrees who have struggled in the economy, for instance.
The critique has been that the Democratic Party’s theory of how to win back the working class has been to cosplay the working class, and that one of the reasons it’s not working is that it’s not what those actual voters want. Again, Platner did very well with people who had postgraduate degrees.
How do you see that conflict between the Democratic Party’s image of itself and who is actually in it?
It is not a problem that we’re going to solve in one election or with one campaign. It is indicative of a massive brand problem that comes when you have a D next to your name — or even, frankly, when you don’t have an R next to your name.
It sounds like a bad political speech riff, but it is fundamentally true that a worker in Michigan whose factory closed has more in common with a waitress in Texas working at starvation minimum wage — regardless of their race, gender and age — than at any point in American history in terms of broad class erosion.
To change it, we need so many of these people stepping up and running. There are people who would say that we need more than just an economic argument to win back these people. I don’t think that’s untrue. I would argue that there are alternatives to mass moderation. Localized moderations are appropriate — but we need to be telling a story as part of this populism that extends beyond just economics.
How much is the kind of candidate you look for somebody who actually has to feel themselves failed by the institutions?
I think the credibility thing is absolutely a component of what needs to be factored in. Like: What gives you the credibility to make this argument and to have voters believe you?
But I also think there are a lot of people who are not trying that hard to make this critique.
I think that there’s a whole segment of the Democratic Party that still believes that the end-all, be-all problem is Donald Trump. The entire critique is one of Donald Trump. Every problem we’re facing is the result of Donald Trump.
Our heads are in the sand if we can’t acknowledge that for 12 of the last 17 years, Democrats have had the White House. Over those periods of time, we had control of both chambers multiple times, and people’s lives have gotten worse.
So we can’t just go and tell people Donald Trump is the reason everything is bad, when they’ve been alive this whole time and experienced it. Clearly, there’s a systemic issue here that extends beyond any one president or any one office. Yet a lot of our party, or at least the people in positions of power in the party, aren’t levying that critique.
To what degree is there demand in the Democratic Party for candidates who can code switch?
There’s an interesting argument in the party going way back — Norman Mailer wrote about this, and there’s a famous Ron Brownstein piece on Barack Obama about the “wine track” and the “beer track” in the Democratic Party.
An attack people launched at Platner, which I thought was sort of wrong, was that he came from a family that had been well-off. His dad helped buy his home, and he went to an elite private school.
You see something like this with Mamdani, whose mother is a celebrated director and whose father is an academic.
Donald Trump himself is a billionaire.
Often, what you end up seeing in candidates who succeed is this ability to operate across different worlds. Is that something you look for or think is important? How do you rate that?
I don’t think it’s something that should be important. There needs to be a way for people to get elected without having coastal communities getting all on board with them.
There are ways to challenge the status quo, there are ways to overcome it, there’s grass-roots money. But to some degree, you still need buy-in from coastal communities to really launch to the degree you traditionally have to.
That’s because you need to raise money from them?
The mix of money and media attention. And it’s just a lot harder. There’s something to be said for the political utility of being able to talk to a variety of your constituents, and that should be important.
But once you extend into: Oh, how comfortable do they make a donor feel? — we’re not in a place anymore that’s serving the electability goal.
The campaign that you worked on that didn’t take off was Nathan Sage in Iowa. What went wrong?
He was one of the people I had in mind when I was saying this.
I think Nathan was an incredible candidate who, I think, would have won the Iowa U.S. Senate seat, who had an incredible story. He served three tours, I believe. He grew up in a trailer park in Mason City, Iowa, worked his way through high school, went to serve, came back, then served his small-town Chamber of Commerce and brought small businesses back.
His anger and disdain for the people who had sold out families like his was profound and real, and he also connected deeply with voters when he was in a room with them at town halls and at campaign events.
But to the donor class, it felt abstract, or they didn’t quite see it, because they weren’t living the lives of other families struggling in Iowa. So it didn’t quite break through in the same way.
It’s a different skill to pitch donors and to pitch press than it is to pitch voters. The collapse of local media has made this problem a lot worse.
Twenty years ago, there were profound local media circuits that existed, that were actually in the weeds. If you had really strong feelings about a factory that was giving workers cancer in Iowa, you could go and do five interviews about that and show your knowledge of local issues and show your passion in a way that was going to make people’s lives better.
It’s not a particularly sexy pitch to national reporters to say: Hey, do you want to write four different articles about a factory giving workers cancer in Iowa and a candidate who’s incredibly angry about it?
One of the pathologies of a lot of Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party right now is it is a party of people who love institutions at a time when institutions are failing.
One of the places where I’m sympathetic to that is that institutions were actually one of the ways you got attention. I mean, there’s a huge amount of the Democratic Party just optimized for a period when you went to the newspaper editorial boards, and you had to win them over.
So it wasn’t just whether you could get attention, it was: Could you impress the editors? Could you get the endorsement of the local civic groups?
And now all these layers are weaker across much more of the country. There’s less union density. There are fewer civic groups that have real memberships. There are fewer local newspapers, and their editorial boards carry less weight.
So it means skills that were once really important are less important, and skills that once couldn’t get you anywhere — the newspaper would not cover someone who both did not have any support and was just making people mad by saying outlandish things. But now, you could be Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles and rocket forward, in attention at the very least, from being a candidate like that.
I think the gap between editorial rooms and corporate boardrooms and what is driving voters has never been more profound. And I think that’s been exacerbated in the Democratic Party by what, I think, was a problematic shift after you had in 2012 the moderate to Republican elites essentially handpicking Mitt Romney. He receives the nomination, and Obama wins a daunting re-election on the populist campaign against him. And then you see Donald Trump rise up against that Republican establishment.
And then I think you see this misleading exodus from the Republican Party of donors, of institutional figures, to the Democratic Party, saying: I can’t be a part of this. And, of course, they’re welcomed into the tent because they come with resources, and they come with platforms that have historically been of electoral significance.
We, suddenly, at a moment in which there is a massive uprising against institutions, think that we’re building a new coalition that is pro-institution. We took all the people who made the Republican Party unelectable, folded them into our tent, and let them influence our approach. And I think it’s fundamentally wrong and broken.
There is an interesting friction that’s going to have to play out here, of: What is the traditional media’s role in politics? Which I think is fundamentally different from what it has been before.
It would have been unimaginable 20 years ago if I told you The New York Times editorial board is going to write a piece essentially telling voters: Do not vote for Zohran Mamdani. And then that person is going to win the Democratic primary by 12 points. But that’s what we saw happen, and I think there’s just this disconnect. There’s a curiosity problem. Oftentimes, we’re not asking the right questions about what is driving this.
To now compliment The New York Times, Emma Goldberg did a good piece on this, talking about the affordability angle of the New York City slate that won. But that was the only piece really written in traditional media with that as the center point, and those were the main things those campaigns focused on. But all of the dialogue was around unrelated components of it, and there’s just this disconnect — there’s a real friction there.
When you met Mamdani the first time, what made you think there was some magic there?
I think his profound and earnest belief that it is government’s job to be making things better, and the marriage of that with a vision is just, frankly, incredibly rare. And it shouldn’t be, but it is.
The number of people who sit down and say they’re thinking about running for an office, and whose initial answer is: We have this crisis, and I think this office can address this crisis if we just decided we wanted to.
I’m a big believer in the idea that campaigns aren’t won in the content of the battle, they’re won in the context in which they’re taking place.
And if we’re taking campaigns in a context in which we are ashamed of government, in which we don’t believe government can do anything, in which we’re apologetic about government, then it’s going to be really hard to convince people to vote for the party that is the bigger government party.
If we can’t prove that government is one of the greatest tools for good known to human history, then how are we going to do anything?
The first time Mamdani started coming on my radar, I think, was the “halalflation” video, where he was going around with the halal carts and — I think you’re involved in this — just noting how much more expensive it had gotten. And it wasn’t this grand socialist vision for what government could be. It was very specific. It was the whole thing in miniature, repeatedly.
Every Democrat now wants to copy the Mamdani visual language and the Mamdani dominance of vertical video. Very few are able to do it.
You guys sort of built that together. When people come to you asking for lessons from it, what do you tell them to take from it? And what do you tell them not to take from it?
There were a lot of incredibly talented people on that team from Melted Solids and Andrew Epstein. And as good as I might be, and as good as they might be, everyone looks really good riding a Cadillac, and Zohran Mamdani is a generational leader, and it’s hard to take any credit for that.
I think one of the roles there is to play is, frankly, getting out of the way. We have an entire consultant industry and a party establishment that has built its role on being like: Oh, you have a big idea? Well, don’t do that. You have something that’s going to expose you to some risk? Don’t do that. You have a broad vision? Scale it down. You have a new tactic you want to try? Well, not on our watch.
A lot of that was very specific to the mayor, and he had a vision — he had a specific way he was good at communicating, and we all worked to build a system in which he was able to do that, that could meet people where they were, and then also could reimagine what an electorate would look like.
That’s one of the issues we get into. We have these imaginary visions of a baked-in electorate — with no imagination of reshaping it. I think this speaks to the white working-class issue, too.
How many of the issues we face there are the result of the fact that we have pulled resources from the places that are predominantly rural, white working-class areas? And then you combine that with the rise of conservative media in those areas. They are hearing a 365-day-a-year narrative that is going uncombatted. It is not enough in eight weeks or eight months to just fight back against that. It takes a year-round effort to reach those people.
I think what you saw with the mayor was a belief that, no, maybe if we actually talk to young people and give them a vision for a city they can afford, they will come out and show up for it. Maybe if you did not run away from Muslim identity but embraced it, Muslim voters are going to come out en masse to support that vision.
I think meeting people where they are, and believing that people actually will want to take part in our politics if we extend a hand, is something that can be taken to any campaign.
One thing that was striking to me about you and Mamdani — and I always want, when I’m talking about attention, to not make it feel like I’m separating out political positions. The product you’re selling is the most important part of selling it.
But I think there’s also something about having a touch for how stories and storytelling in this moment work. Mamdani’s mother is a famed film director. Your godfather, I learned, was Philip Seymour Hoffman. Your father, I think, was a producer.
Is there something right now, for you, about the centrality of being able to tell stories in this moment? Is there something in that campaign between the two of you around that? It seems to me not accidental.
I think there’s something to our politics relating to some of the other things we’ve talked about, like the requirement of a leap of faith. And that takes more than just an argument — it takes a story.
A leap of faith from the voter.
From the voter. I think a lot about when my godfather — when Phil was doing “Death of a Salesman.”
Early on, when he was first talking about doing it, he was describing it as the best play ever written. And he talked about how it starts — it’s an incredible play, but barely anything happens — it starts with a sigh. The first stage direction, or first audible stage direction, is a sigh from Willy Loman, and in that sigh, you’ve met a man who has been defeated by feeling like no matter what he does, it is not enough. He has no path to hope, to prosperity. Over the course of the play, what we see is someone who has already given up on life finally give up on life.
And I think we need to fundamentally, materially, change people’s lives in massive, massive ways. There are so many people right now who — I think Willy’s story is a version of the story they’re living. Not necessarily literally but just this deep hopelessness.
And if we can tell a story that things can be different, if we can tell a story that they have a role to play, if we can tell a story that they matter, then that is an act of radical change, too.
I was genuinely skeptical that the way the campaign was constantly present, and the way Mamdani was constantly present during the campaign, could translate into governing.
Trump has done that, but he does it by constantly pissing people off, unlocking constant energy through outrage and conflict and anger.
Mamdani has managed to maintain a constant presence if you’re in New York. Probably if you’re not in New York, too — but, certainly, if you are. Almost separate from what he is doing — though there are real things he’s doing — you see him doing things for New York all the time. You turn on your phone, and there he is. It has genuinely felt new to me.
Is that something only he can do? New York is an unusual media market. It’s giant. All the media — not all, but a lot of the media — is centered here, so he can project outward from being here in a way that is harder if you’re in Boston, or — to say nothing of a town smaller than that. Or is there a genuine lesson there?
I think there’s a genuine lesson. The first lesson is to elect leaders who are serious about governing and who believe in a very proactive approach for governing. But I think in some ways, to me, it’s the second side.
If you wrote a sequel to “Abundance” — there’s the communication side of it. If we believe that there is a crisis of faith in government’s ability to do things, I think there is an obligation to not just do things, to not just make it easier to do things, but to tell the story of doing things.
In 2023, 2024, I was driving through Michigan, and there was a sign somewhere that said: This road is being paved because of the bipartisan highway bill.
Barely any Republicans voted for that piece of legislation, and that is how we are marketing it — why wouldn’t we be leaning in? Democrats [expletive] did this. Sorry, I don’t know if I can curse on the podcast.
You can. I did, so you’re welcome to.
Oh, good.
We’re trying to get attention here, man.
[Laughs.] Yeah. Attention economy.
Leaning in. We need to campaign at the speed of the modern attention span, and you need to govern at the speed of the modern attention span. And there is such a laid-back approach — you know: In eight years, this is going to be phased in; in a decade, this is going to be built.
And it’s like: That does not meet the urgency people are feeling. And to restore the bond between the public and government, there needs to be that urgency.
What about at the level of affect? One way Mamdani feels different to me than some of the other people who have been on your roster — and populism, in general — populism, I think, has a reputation, rightly or wrongly, as being pretty pissed off.
I’m not saying Mamdani isn’t. There is genuine anger in him, correctly so, about the ways people are harmed and ripped off and how unaffordable it is to live in this city.
But, one, he always looks like he’s enjoying governing. He looks like he likes his job, which a lot of people — they get elected, and then they seem kind of miserable from then on. Which, fair enough, it can be a pretty miserable job, but he looks like he enjoys it.
But there’s also a positive affect from him — a sunniness that I don’t associate with the Democrats and that I don’t associate with populists, specifically. Bernie Sanders isn’t known for his sunniness.
I just don’t see it from that many politicians. Most politicians — and Trump is not like this, but most politicians — they treat the work pretty grimly.
You can’t fake it, and I think that is one of the challenges. There are a lot of different things in politics you can fake. You can’t fake a true love of the place and the people you’re representing — and the mayor doesn’t.
I think the mayor truly loves every single New York City resident. Regardless of what they may say about him, he just loves this city, and it comes through.
I think there can be a better job done, at least on the left populist side of the spectrum, of articulating that this is a labor of love. I think Trump supporters are having a very good time. It’s abstract to us, but there was a joy to that when he was campaigning. It’s almost a cultural phenomenon of what it means, and you’re wearing your Trump hat or your Trump sticker like a badge of honor.
And I think there’s something to that — something people can take pride in, something people can see themselves in, where they belong.
And to me, it does relate to the power component. People feel — due to a mix of factors, from globalization and economic factors to the influence of social media — people feel just so small. And if you can bring them into something that makes them feel big, which is what populism should be at its best, there’s joy in that process, and it needs to be reflected.
One of the more radical things Mamdani has done has been to use his popularity as mayor, and the influence of his mayoralty, to launch a series of primary challenges of either incumbents, like Dan Goldman, or incumbent-backed, establishment-backed politicians in order to send allies like Brad Lander or Claire Valdez to Congress.
There has also been a Democratic Socialists of America component of this. You worked on these campaigns, working through Mamdani, and it led to a lot of debate and discussion about whether or not the Democratic Party is in the beginning of a schisming moment.
So is that how you see it? How do you understand the power-building efforts that Mamdani, that the D.S.A., that, frankly, the Platner campaign represented? What is the relationship between the populist push and the established Democratic Party?
My perspective on it is: Either politicians can change, or the voters for whom they represent are going to change who’s representing them. The idea that anyone gets to be a gatekeeper to the party I find kind of absurd.
It is not our tent to define. Voters can define it — and everyone can play their role in making the case to voters of what they believe it should be.
Why are we not asking the question: What did Darializa Avila Chevalier, a community organizer who recently won a congressional primary in New York City, do right to energize all these new people and bring in all these young voters?
And you can hold room for: I disagree with whatever respective comments, but I’m also curious if maybe there’s something here to offer.
Putting aside the moral component of it and all that, it is bad electoral math to believe in subtraction. The job is to bring more people in. We have primaries, we have elections. That’s how this works. And the sore loser component of it I don’t think is particularly productive.
We should be excited by the fact that there are so many new young people showing up to vote. We should be excited by the fact that people who haven’t voted in decades are showing up to vote, that people are early voting faster because they’re more eager.
There is something good here that’s happening, and I think the people who feel threatened by it could do themselves a favor by embracing it.
The critique I hear from the sort of Democrats you’re, I think, talking about there is that what’s going on now is that in safe Democratic areas, the party is going left.
And they might have whatever view they have on that, but their worry about it, and their worry about the energy around it — their worry about the amount of media attention it gets from people like me — is that they feel that it makes the Democratic Party’s job in a place like North Carolina or Ohio harder. That the perception of the national party is that it’s becoming more socialist. You have people who’ve made all kinds of comments about defunding the police or abolishing prisons.
So I think as somebody who does care about winning, not just in places like Maine, which is more blue, but in places like Ohio and Alaska, etc. — how do you think about that challenge? How does this mass of Democratic parties become one thing that can compete, not just in a New York City, but in places Democrats used to win, like Indiana and North Dakota?
To me, two things are true. One, there is a national brand problem that is undeniable. To me, that national brand problem does not come from more liberal social perspectives from representatives in deep blue places. It comes from a tangible feeling that the Democratic Party is out of touch with the things that voters care about.
And if you look at polling, Bernie Sanders is more popular than Chuck Schumer. And it is a disdain of the elites and the powerful that, I think, fuels the Democratic brand issue. And that is what we need to address to overcome that.
Democrats also have an eat-their-own component that fuels these flames. You see some of these candidates win, and instead of us wrapping our arms around them as a party and instead of it being like: Look, we disagree with their positions on A, B and C, but what we’re all aligned on is that we should be spending our taxpayer dollars on babies, not bombs. What we all agree on is that we need stronger unions to be able to lift up working people.
Instead, it’s: Yeah, they’re a [expletive] radical, that’s not my party.
Are you so friendly to the establishment Democrats in the way that you’re asking them to be friendly to you?
[Laughs.] I think the people whom I’m critical of oftentimes are not engaging in good faith the way that they’re critical of our — I think that when their positions are compromised because of the money they take and the people they’re answering to, and that is what is hurting the brand, and then they have the audacity to throw other people under the bus for it, it’s bad faith. And it’s the problem.
I’m just saying, and I don’t actually have — I’m a big-tent party guy. I’ve done a lot of work on this, and I think I’ve proven this out. But I am just saying that sometimes, I find that both sides feel that they’re willing to play nice, and the other one isn’t.
The way I would describe what you are saying to me here is the Democratic Party, to the extent such a thing exists, but the sort of elites of it, should be more embracing of Claire Valdez, and should recognize that even if they have disagreements with her, everybody is kind of on the same side.
And you’re, like: Look, the problem with them is that they’re corrupt.
[Klein and Katz laugh.]
And I think they might not see that as such a friendly way to frame the work they’ve been doing to, say, try to win a majority. I’m not even saying they’re not corrupt, but ——
Yeah, I think they’re two different lanes.
And I’ll just say that this is actually one of the critiques I’ve heard of you, of Fight Agency. You’ll say they’re corrupt, and then it’s like — I actually like Tom Steyer quite a bit — but it’s like, as long as you’re working with the right billionaires, it’s fine.
As long as you are working with the right, more establishment candidates, like Micah Lasher in New York’s 12th Congressional District — which, I think you were a little bit involved in that race — it’s fine. That anybody is fine as long as they’re on our side, and if they’re on the other side, then they’re possibly a corrupt traitor of the people.
I mean, what I’d say about that spectrum of candidates — none of them take money from lobbyists.
Well, Tom is a billionaire. He doesn’t need to.
None of them take money from corporate PACs. All of them have a deep belief in government’s role and what it should do. And I think we should give a ton of leeway for people running in Trump-plus-20 places.
What doesn’t feel like it quite corresponds is a lot of the people who are the harshest critics are actually not running in those Trump-plus-20 places. You hear Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown punching left a whole lot less than you hear the frequenters of certain cable news circuits, who are just members of Congress in D-plus-10 seats or something.
If you look at the people who really have proven records of overperformance, it’s not the tactic they’re taking. That’s not to say they’re in lockstep with the party at large and everything, but they’re not reaching those overperformances by just piling onto the left. They’re just carving out unique things to their places.
So I want to loop back to Platner here at the end. One of the things I thought was most interesting about the Platner story was that he was recruited — that you all went out and found a candidate you thought would fit Maine.
And to a large extent you were right. Now, it fell apart at the end, but that sense that there are different kinds of candidates out there who could work in this moment — I don’t think that’s something that people should throw overboard.
So my question for you — and, honestly, for others who might want to learn from what you all at least were trying to do there — is: What have you learned both for good and bad about how to find candidates?
If you want to say: The Democratic Party needs to recruit a different kind of person to run, but also you want to take seriously that people who have not been in politics and have not been aggressively vetted in politics might come with more downside risk — what would be your process next time?
I think that there is a deep, deep hunger for a different kind of politics. There is a deep, deep frustration with the status quo. And what we’re seeing right now is not a democracy the way the founders intended it. It was supposed to be something that looked more like a farmer going to serve their two terms and then going home, and a small business owner going to serve their two terms and coming home.
And it was the idea of it being almost a cathedral representative of the fabric of America. And we are so far from that. I think that is why we have so many of the problems we have. Only 2 percent of Congress is from the working class.
There are many things that are devastating about all of this, but one of the many is the degree to which people have put so much hope and faith into this. People who had kind of written politics off felt inspired again.
And I think when we do that, we’re asking for so much: for people to believe that maybe their lives can actually get better, maybe politics can actually be a tool for good.
We can’t let them down. And that’s going to mean different standards. That’s going to mean a far more robust vetting process. That’s going to mean, I think, bringing in more partners and larger conversations.
But I think there’s too much at stake to walk away, and things are so clearly not working the way they are right now. We need to find a way to bring more people in.
And then I’ll ask our final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Three books. I’ll do “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman — a really stunning human portrayal of the ramifications of the Holocaust and that entire era.
“The Shame” by Makenna Goodman is a really beautiful book about the friction of isolation and dreams and anxiety. And I think in some way, it’s not at all a political book, but it feels political in the way of the conversation we’re having about the results of modern society on people.
And then, I have not finished it yet, but I’m currently reading “The Fourth Branch” by Daniel Squadron and very much enjoying that. It’s a really astute observation of where political power is and how we can shape a government that’s on a day-to-day basis improving people’s lives.
Morris Katz, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me, Ezra.
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, Annie Galvin and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon and Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Dani Dillon, Julian Hackney and Jan Kobal. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Marina King. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Rebecca Shaid. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy, Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.
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