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I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
The midterm elections are just about two weeks away. And things are looking a bit different than I would have expected. So Biden’s approval rating is hovering around 42 percent. Inflation is very high. And add in that midterms tend to swing against the president’s party and we should be on track for a massacre.
But if the polls are to be believed, we’re not. Democrats are favored to hold the Senate. Republicans are favored to win the House, and not by some giant landslide. No chamber looks set for the kind of wipeout we saw in 2018, or 2010, or 1994. And maybe the polls aren’t to be believed. That’s something we cover in this episode, too. But maybe there’s more than that at play.
My guest today is Matt Yglesias. Matt and I, we go way back. We were early political bloggers together back when the blogosphere and the internet and we were young. We co-founded Vox together. Now Matt writes the newsletter “Slow Boring” and he co-hosts the podcast “Bad Takes.”
And in recent years, Matt has become more focused on party strategies. How do Democrats and Republicans present themselves to the public? Who governs and shapes that presentation? What do they actually do when they govern, and how does that affect how they’re seen?
And Matt has particularly become a critic of a Democratic party that he often argues is in hock to a highly educated staffer class and has lost sight of the voters it most needs to win over. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about where Democrats are on the eve of this year 2022 election. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
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Matt Yglesias, welcome to the show.
Hi. It’s good to be here.
So let’s start with where we are. Joe Biden’s approval rating is about 42 percent in the averages I’m seeing. At the same time, the polls and forecasts give Democrats, I’d say it’s fair to say, a fighting chance in the midterms, a two in three chance of keeping the Senate, a one in four chance of keeping the House.
Those two things seem at odds to me, particularly given where inflation is and the general mood of the country. So how do you see what’s happening here?
I think, obviously, part of what’s happening in the Senate, like everybody would tell you, is Republicans have gone with a lot of bad candidates in a lot of races. And that is helping Democrats out.
I mean, I think you see this really significantly in New Hampshire, in particular, where Maggie Hassan I think was thought to be very vulnerable early in the cycle. John Sununu, who would have been her strongest opponent, didn’t run for the seat. Then Democrats ran some ads kind of encouraging Republicans to vote for this guy Bolduc, who’s like super duper right wing. And so now she looks really safe there.
I do think another thing is that my guess is that the polling is biased in favor of overstating Democrats’ chances. It’s hard to be super duper certain about something like that. But if Nate Silver wanted to bet with me, I think those 538 odds have Democrats too high in the Senate.
Nate, I should say, has written a bit about this and said that if he was going to imagine why his forecast is wrong, it would be polling bias towards the Democrats. At the same time, his argument here is that we’ve only seen that in two cycles. There have been a bunch of other cycles that go in other directions in terms of polling bias. We don’t really know if pollsters are able to account for this, but they’re certainly trying to. They know they missed the same thing in 2016. They know they missed it in 2020. The big misses were in presidential years, not in, say, the 2018 midterm election. And so he thinks Democrats have begun to think of anti-democratic polling bias as a kind of fact of nature when you shouldn’t think of it that way.
I mean, that’s — I think there’s two ways of looking at this, right? I mean, one is what you just laid out there. That polling error happens. By definition, these are statistical samples. They’re not 100 percent correct all the time. But you expect the errors to even out over the long-term.
I think the case that there’s a systematic problem is you look at the pattern of these 2022 races. So in Nevada, the polling looks pretty bad for the Democrats. Cortez Masto, I think, is set to lose narrowly, according to polls, in a blue-leaning state. Then you look at Ohio. Tim Ryan is also slightly behind in the polls, but Ohio is a much more conservative state. So Tim Ryan’s polling looks really good. Cortez Masto’s polling looks pretty bad.
Now, if you look back at 2020, Nevada is a state where the polling was extremely accurate and Ohio is a state where the polling was very biased toward Democrats. And I think if you go across the landscape, that’s what you see. Exactly the states where Democrats are maybe doing better than you would expect in the polls are the states that had the large polling errors. And in the states where the polling was most accurate, like Nevada, things are looking rougher for Democrats.
So that gives me reason to believe that the issues with the 2020 polling have not really been fixed. That you cannot do simple demographic-based adjustments to rewrite your polls. That there is just a strong correlation between inclination to answer surveys and partisan voting behavior and the methodologies are off.
I mean, now, I should say I’m not like 90 percent sure on this. I’m more like 60 percent. You know what I mean? If you asked me to bet with Nate Silver’s forecast, I would go low, but I wouldn’t put huge amount of confidence on it. The problem with elections is they don’t run that many elections. So you can’t — it’s really challenging to test these theories out.
We do what we can and we’ll see, right? If the 2022 polling turns out to be biased, I think everyone’s going to say, OK, we now have enough in a row that we need to say there’s a fundamental methodological problem here. On the other hand, if it just swings back the other way, people will say, you know, sh*t happens, surveying is hard, statistical sampling is imperfect.
And we’re going to have to see what happens. But that is my best explanation of the seeming mismatch between a bleak national political climate for Democrats and this kind of surprisingly strong Senate polling is that the state-level Senate polling is just off.
So the assumption is Democrats are going to lose the House if the polling is worse for Democrats than it appears to be or the reality is worse for Democrats than the polls are. They’ll lose it by more than people expect. In the Senate, what seats does this mental model you have expect to go to Republicans that the polling might not say will?
Because Ohio, I think, people are, like, good job, Tim Ryan. This is a strong race. And Democrats are hoping to see it break their way. But I don’t think that is bought into most of the views about what Senate — most of the predictions about which seats Democrats will control in 2023.
Well, I agree, except that, I mean, if you look at how these sort of models work, the long tail opportunity for Democrats to win Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, actually does have an impact on the kind of —
Oh, it definitely has an impact.
— statistical aggregate. Because if you look at the core battleground — we’re looking at Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania — the issue there is just that these are all close races. But to hold the Senate, Democrats need to win all of them, which is just a tough bar. And so if Republicans win, it’ll probably be because they take the seat in Nevada and they hold the seat in Pennsylvania. Those seem like the decisive battlegrounds.
Democrats definitely have a shot in Pennsylvania. Dr. Oz seems like a very poor candidate who is potentially blowing a super duper winnable race over there for them. There’s also this weird situation in Arizona, where I think, on paper, Mark Kelly seemed like he should be very vulnerable, but Blake Masters appears to be doing quite poorly and is also in these constant fights with Mitch McConnell about who’s going to put money into that race. So I mean, the —
And Arizona and Georgia weren’t bad polling states for Democrats before.
Exactly.
The polls have been pretty good in those states.
Yeah. And Georgia as well. I mean, Republicans in a bunch of these key races — I mean, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona — these are states that they’re not gimmes for Republicans, but they’re places where Republicans would have a very good shot to win. And in all three of these races, they didn’t nominate just a regular politician.
There’s just lots of Republican Party elected officials in Georgia. And instead they went with Herschel Walker, who even aside from these terrible scandals, it’s just like — he’s not conversant in public policy issues. He has all the — and Blake Masters, the same thing, who I guess doesn’t have any particular scandals, but he’s a real weirdo and he doesn’t talk like a normal politician.
And people always say that they want political outsiders and people who won’t be poll-tested automatons, but we always see that professional politicians do much better on average than random walk-on businessmen or football stars, things like that. And this is just kind of the weirdness of where Republicans are.
I saw earlier today, before we recorded, Paul Ryan reemerged from hiding and was talking about 2024. And he was like, I don’t think Trump’s going to be the nominee. Everybody knows Republicans would be better off with a different candidate. And I mean, Paul Ryan knows that. And I guess I know that. But I just — I don’t have his confidence.
If Republicans were good at selecting strong candidates, we wouldn’t be having this conversation about Herschel Walker and a television doctor from New Jersey running in Pennsylvania. I don’t exactly know what they’re doing. But they have developed a taste for eccentric characters.
One of the things we don’t seem to be seeing, and doesn’t really look to be in the cards even if you imagine a two to three point polling error against the Democrats, is a 2018, 2010, ‘06, 1994-style wipeout. And I don’t know, if you had told me a year or two years ago that Joe Biden’s going to be the president, inflation is going to be generationally high, unbelievably high, 80 percent people are going to not like where the economy is, two-thirds of people are going to say the economy is getting worse even as we speak, Biden will be in the low 40s, his disapproval will be in the mid-50s.
What does that Democratic midterm look like? I’d be like, oh, that’s going to be a massacre. Do you think Biden and the Democrats have played the political hand they have well here? Are they actually doing more with what they have than one should expect?
It’s interesting, right, because definitely the framing you gave, it’s like, oh my god, how are they doing this? Well, then, on the other hand, if you say, well, OK, suppose Democrats advance this fairly modest, super popular policy agenda, successfully stay out of huge, weird, crazy controversies, I’d be like, yeah, like this is a blueprint for success.
What’s interesting is that Biden’s approval has been so low really. Because there’s this kind of push and pull of the economic situation is difficult, the agenda Democrats have been advancing in Congress has been, I think, a very — it’s not just that it’s been a popular one, but there’s been no counter-mobilization to it. There’s no national protests against the Inflation Reduction Act kind of thing, the way you saw when Trump was passing his legislation or when Obama was passing legislation.
So on that level, I mean, I think Democrats have done a great job of minimizing thermostatic backlash and governing in a way that is at least acceptable to the vast majority of people. But then you have this inflation background, right? And so I think people are going to argue for a really long time how much of the inflationary situation in 2022 is due to policy errors that Congress and the administration made. Were the alternatives actually any better?
I mean, I would say, in defense of the substantive choices that were made, that, of course, everybody would like to think that it would be better to have inflation at 2 percent right now rather than 8 percent, but I think if you’d actually taken the steps that would have capped inflation at the 2 percent target level, that things would be much worse today. You would have much higher unemployment. And people would be saying, oh my god, we’re never going to recover from the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, I understand politically this is a really challenging thing for the White House and congressional leaders to talk about. But when all these people get sick from a new virus, there’s going to be an economic impact of that. And having the impact take the form of this high-rising prices and high-pressured labor market is probably — you don’t want to say optimal, but it was one of the better ways to handle it, realistically, given the alternatives on the table.
I don’t know that I would frame the policy choices exactly as you did there, because, I mean, go back to 1994. Bill Clinton doesn’t pass much. What he does try to do at some point in the polls looks totally fine. 2010, obviously, there was a lot of policy that happens. And some of it by the end is quite unpopular, like the Affordable Care Act. But it’s also made unpopular.
And one thing that has been weird watching Republicans after a political career covering this kind of thing is it never seemed to me that they cared to try to make the Inflation Reduction Act into a giant issue. I mean, there are big tax increases there. There’s all kinds of stuff that you can make look a little strange in the climate side of the bill. The prescription drug stuff is popular, but there’s a lot going on in the American Rescue Plan, a lot of random stuff in the background happening.
I mean, I think we should talk about Dobbs here, which, on the one hand, is clearly mobilizing in the Democratic Party’s favor. Democrats also push a very expansive abortion bill in the aftermath of that in the Senate. You might have imagined Republicans trying to make hay of that.
Compared to previous periods in American politics, it doesn’t actually seem to me that Republicans are united enough on, or care enough about, policy to do to Biden what they did to an Obama, or, in another way, a Clinton. They have not attempted against the Inflation Reduction Act what they did against the Affordable Care Act. They didn’t attempt against the American Rescue Plan what they did against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. There does seem to be a structural difference, too, in just what the Republican Party is fired up about nowadays.
Yeah, and I mean, some of that is obviously so much of the Republican mobilization has focused on crime. And I guess they characterize it as the border, immigration stuff. And it’s not that these are non-policy questions, because obviously the federal government has a substantial role in law enforcement and criminal justice policy, but Republicans are not saying, well, there’s some bill that Nancy Pelosi passed that has caused crime to be high.
And I’ve been trying to draw some conservatives out over the past couple of days as to what exactly are they saying. And what conservatives believe is that the racial justice and anti-police protests of 2020 and some of the statements and claims made by local and, to some extent, state politicians have created a big increase in crime.
What they really, really think, though, is not even that mayors caused this crime increase. They say that the cultural climate became so hostile to, and skeptical of, police officers making judgment calls in dangerous situations, that police responded to this social demand for much more caution, for many fewer stops, et cetera, et cetera, and that’s caused this increase in crime.
But it’s what has given, I think, a lot of the politics this strange feeling. Because Republicans are running against the kind of attitudes and social mores of American progressives broadly construed, much more than they are running against specific legislation that Democrats have passed or things that Joe Biden is saying or doing.
And the fact that this happened actually while Trump was president, I mean it raises the question of — there’s this idea — you scratch a Republican conversation and like, aha, we’ve decided that we can’t just be neutral and that the government has to come in and do battle for us in the culture wars.
And it’s never really clear to me what that amounts to exactly. But it seems like it’s going to win them the House of Representatives at a minimum, because as Mitch McConnell said, people don’t pay any attention to who the House candidates are. So candidate quality doesn’t — I mean, it’s a really funny thing where he’s like trying —
It’s a very funny quote.
He’s trying to explain why his guys are doing worse than Kevin McCarthy’s. And he’s like, because people know who my candidates are and they’re terrible. So it’s a weird situation.
The exact quote I believe is, “Candidate quality matters.” “In the Senate, candidate quality matters.” Something like that.
But it’s like — I mean, anyway. It’s a weird situation.
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One of the things I’m hearing from you here is actually a fairly positive take on how the Democratic Party is officially construed, is operating. I think it had become known in the past couple of years as having a more critical sense. The Democrats are losing touch. They’re becoming too in hock to a college-educated staffer class. They’re talking about too many unpopular things.
Do you feel that’s changed or do you feel that’s still happening in a different part of the sector? You’re sounding a little bit more bright about Democrats than I’ve heard you sound in a while.
Yeah, I mean — but look, I mean, I think so much, though, of the relatively bright picture for Democrats right now is parasitic on this very poor candidate choice by Senate Republicans. And Democrats have not done, I think, a great job of bringing coherence to the set of things that they say about American politics.
Democrats have developed the idea that the Republican Party has radicalized against democracy itself and cannot be trusted with power or else, as Joe Biden said, a semi-fascist regime is going to come to power. I both find that to be a little bit overstated, but not totally crazy. I mean, I think that’s a reasonable concern to have.
And yet, as your colleague Ross Douthat and other moderate conservatives are always whining, Biden is not really reaching out to be, like, I want a grand coalition of all Democratic forces to come together. I mean, who’s very insistent on we’ve got this whole agenda. We need to take people’s guns away. We need to have this expansive pro-choice agenda, et cetera, et cetera.
In terms of their actual legislation, they got really edited by Joe Manchin down to a much more modest and I think much more politically viable agenda than the big picture agenda that 46 or 47 Democrats have signed on to. People will sometimes do these memes, like if only Cal Cunningham had kept it in his pants, look at all this stuff we could have done. If Cal Cunningham had kept it in his pants — and, I mean, you’ve got to nuance a couple other things. But if Democrats had —
The Democrats had 54 seats —
Right.
— in the Senate.
And they had ended the filibuster, and passed this assault weapons ban, and passed the women’s reproductive health — I forget the exact name of that bill — passed the full $3 trillion Build Back Better. If they had done all that stuff, I think then we’d be looking at a much more typical midterm with a huge counter-mobilization of people going like, holy sh*t, I wanted to get Donald Trump out of the White House because he seemed unstable and I didn’t sign on for this sweeping transformation of all of American society.
You think about the water Biden is taking on over asylum seekers. And you imagine if he had passed the path to citizenship with no stepped-up enforcement bill that he proposed on his first day in office, people would be really upset. Republicans have made some gains on that issue. But it’s limited because I think the White House can legitimately say, what do you want from us on all these topics?
But that’s because they haven’t done this gigantic progressive agenda that Chuck Schumer, in some theoretical sense at least, signed on for. So I’m pretty positive on what Democrats actually did and pretty negative on what at least they tell themselves they wanted to have done.
One thing that strikes me about your thought here is you seem to me to be positing a pretty clear connection between what actually happens in politics and how the voters feel about what actually happens in politics. A clear one that I would probably say, when I go back to, say, Obamacare discourse in 2010, I don’t think it was all that related to what was in the Affordable Care Act. There are some things there, but there was a lot of death panels, a lot of just random lying about things.
I don’t know, when we talk about political vibes and political aesthetics, you know, I look at somebody sometimes like Bernie Sanders, or, in a different way, a John Fetterman, and it makes me wonder a little bit about the policy literalist tendencies I have or maybe that you have, because I think both get pretty far with a much more expansive agenda of some things that are popular and some things that are maybe unpopular — some things that are unpopular, actually — by just their political directionality, seeming to voters, to be a kind of on your side, don’t like the bad rich guys, tired of corruption in Washington.
And so I’m just wondering both how much policy communication, but also policy reality, matters. It’s just it’s hard for me to believe that the connection is really that close between more modest pieces of legislation or whether something passed the Senate but died in the House as opposed to didn’t pass the Senate in the case of the post-Dobbs abortion bill. How do you think about the connection between what actually happens and what voters feel about what’s happening?
Yeah, I mean, I’m a little bit torn, because to some extent, I’m trying to get people to think harder on the margin. And I think that 20 years ago, there was a conventional wisdom that was comically literal about the relationship between politics and public opinion. And so if George W. Bush won an election, that must show that people really liked the details of his leadership in the war on terror, rather than just there was a rally around the flag effect that just kind of happens.
I tend to think, though, that progressive-minded journalists and advocates and just people who talk on social media have gone overboard in terms of what do you get with the vibes and the atmospherics. I think that there is a desire to believe that if you just put a guy who looks like Jon Tester out there, that he can vote like Kristin Gillibrand and win everywhere.
But if you look at Jon Tester, until quite recently, he really broke from the Democratic Party on important substantive issues related to guns. He was against the DREAM Act when that came up in the Obama years. And I don’t think that that’s a coincidence.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Joe Manchin and Susan Collins do much better than their overall party brands. Or that a guy who lost, like Collin Peterson, still massively overperformed the fundamentals in his district because people knew him, knew what he was.
And I think that there’s a real backlash dynamic that when you do things — whatever it is you do — you alienate some people, because, I mean, there’s nothing you can do that makes everybody happy. But that people respond to getting mad at incumbents more than to being delighted about them. And that if somebody does 11 big things and you like two of them, you hate two of them, and you’re OK with the other seven, that tends to hurt the incumbent in the midterms.
And the fact that Biden hasn’t actually delivered sweeping change on immigration is sort of — I think it’s substantively bad and maybe contributes to inflation and other things that hurt him politically, but I do think that it’s limited the kind of blowback that Republicans have been able to mobilize. Because one thing we know is Republicans love to talk about the border.
And what I’ve seen in experiments is that getting people to think about immigration helps Republicans. But if you’re not watching a lot of Fox News, you actually don’t hear that much about the situation at the border, because mainstream journalists think it’s kind of demagogic and think it’s kind of unfair. And Biden isn’t doing big dramatic policy announcements.
When Ron DeSantis came up with this kind of clever, kind of sh*tty scheme to get a lot of attention, that seemed like that worked well for him. But I think it’s mostly worked well for Biden to keep focus off that stuff and keep people —
Do you think that scheme worked well for Ron DeSantis? It seemed to me that it ended up in very much too clever by half.
Eh, I mean, I feel like Republicans mostly liked it and appreciated it all things considered. I mean, I guess there’s some chance that he’s going to turn out to have broken the law and might get in some kind of trouble for that. But I feel like it was pretty good.
And I don’t know how things are where you are out in California, but in D.C., they’ve successfully gotten the mayor to be like, oh, man, this is a lot of asylum seekers. It’s a real problem for our city. We need some help. And so I think that that basically works as a tactic. And conversely, that Biden not delivering on his promise of sweeping change has kind of worked for him.
But if I was to offer a strong criticism of the Biden administration, which I sometimes do, and the Democrats more broadly, it’s that I don’t think that they’ve set priorities very clearly across this whole set of issues. That they have operated as this kind of checklists, log roll. If you’re in a safe seat, it doesn’t matter. You can just be for everything that everybody asks for, and not think that hard about it, and use the word “crisis” for everything, and it’s all good.
But when it has come time to actually govern, they’re quite tangled up and betwixt in between both on this, like, are we in a popular front against fascism or are we not? But even when OPEC announced that they were cutting oil production the other day, the members of Congress — I spoke to a couple of members of Congress and I saw statements from dozens of them. And they were like, this is bad. None of them were like, this is amazing. It’s going to help us meet our climate goals.
So if Democrats agree that high oil prices are bad, that it’s bad for the economy, it’s bad for them politically, it’s bad for the American people, it raises the question of why did they come into office and cancel all these oil and gas leases. And now — I mean, I talk to everybody and don’t give me a hard time, White House Communications Office, I know that if you get attacked now and saying that Joe Biden is the cause of the expensive oil, they’ll be like, they eventually did do the leases and production is close to record highs.
But that’s because they were blocked in court. They came into office with the intention of reducing American oil and gas production. They were blocked in court. They then reversed their own policy when oil got expensive. And now when Saudi Arabia increases the price of oil, they’re like, maybe we need to rethink our whole alliance structure.
But that reflects a failure to think this whole issue through from first principles and be like, what do we actually believe about this? And we eventually got to the point where I heard from people who work for Deb Haaland, who’s a very progressive person at Interior, that they want the advocacy groups to get off their backs. They’re like, you’re asking us to do stuff that’s not within our legal authority and it’s embarrassing to lose in court.
But that’s a contrast to — there was this good story in the Semafor about anti-abortion groups wanted Senate Republicans to sign on to a bill that anti-abortion groups love, that would have been toxically unpopular. And they told them, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to try to win the election. And we’ve done great things for you guys and you got to give us a break.
And that’s a problem that progressives keep confronting, I think, across the issue space is that there’s not a forum through which people are setting priorities, telling people no, et cetera, et cetera. Instead it’s all been left to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to do the edit.
There’s something weird here that I’d be curious for your take on. So I covered policy design in the White House and Congress pretty closely in the Obama era — covered it now. I would say there’s just much less of a policy design process in this Democratic Congress. I think the stimulus — the initial stimulus in the Obama era had also that flavor of the Christmas tree —
Yep.
— where it’s like they were coming in, they needed something really, really quickly, and they just threw the doors open in Congress. Everybody bring us your ideas and we’re going to put them into a gigantic bill. But the other bills didn’t work like that.
The Affordable Care Act was this year-long policy design fight. And a lot of things people wanted ended up out of it. And the things that ended up in it, for the most part, people would explain to you why they were there. I think you can say the same with Dodd-Frank, which had a really serious policy design process behind it.
The point here isn’t that I agree with every decision made, either political or substantive, in these bills, but you could really watch the way the prioritization process was working. And sometimes there was a backroom deal that came to a settlement. Sometimes it was arguments. But there was a structure through which things got said yes to and things got said no to. And it took quite a lot of time to play out.
And nothing has really looked like that to me in this Democratic Congress. I mean, the American Rescue Plan kind of had a similar flavor to the stimulus. So I think I’d put that a little bit to the side, though, obviously, there are Democratic economists, like Furman and Summers, who think it was much too big.
But after that Build Back Better, which you did have quite a bit more time to figure out, had this same flavor of, all right, everybody throw everything you can into the pot. And there wasn’t even much debate over how the individual things were designed. I mean, you did some coverage on things like the paid family leave and the child care sides of it, which I agreed with, that were just very strangely, to some degree, poorly designed. CHIPS, which is a big deal, was a very weird design process that I don’t think anybody actually understood.
And so part of the prioritization question is like a top-down thing, right? Does Joe Biden come out and say, here’s what I really care about. Could a voter give you an account of the three things Joe Biden thinks are the most important things? But there’s also a genuine procedural question about why policymaking right now seems to be a little bit more — I would also put this, by the way, on the democracy bills, which work this way, too.
Just throw everything related to the topic or the topics in the Build Back Better system into this bucket. But nobody’s really saying no to what goes into the bucket, which is different than it has been at other times when I’ve covered these things.
Yeah, I mean, there’s two aspects to that. One is health care emerged clearly as Democrats’ top priority for 2009 — before 2009. I was talking to a Democratic Senator who 2009 was his first year in the Senate. And I was trying to ask him, as a reporter, I was like, how did health care become your top priority? How was that communicated to you? How did they make you prioritize this?
But I guess I’m not good at asking questions. And he, I think, thought I was asking a rhetorical question and threw it back at me. He was like, I don’t know. I wasn’t here. How did they do that? And I was like, I don’t know. But it definitely happened, right?
And I think you and I were both in conversations with Nancy Pelosi, with Barack Obama in 2008, 2009, in which both of them expressed some diffidence, actually, about that prioritization, just some ambivalence about it. But it was the decision that was made and they were going with it, even if they maybe thought that climate and energy was more important than health care.
And Max Baucus was laying groundwork for the approach that became the Affordable Care Act before the election. And it was already mapped out then that —
I remember this event he threw that I covered —
Yeah.
— that it was called “The Prepare to Launch Event.” And when it started — and Max Baucus is a very weird speaker. He’s a former Senate Finance Chair. And it just — he made everybody watch a video of the space shuttle launching. Like as a metaphor, like we’re getting ready to launch. And when this happens, we’re going to be ready to go. But it was a lot of work that went into that.
Right. And then somebody, a staffer for a progressive Senator, who was also new in 2009, I remember was talking to me relatively early in the process. And she was very frustrated with Baucus and the moderates and where things were going. And she was like, do you think — are we even going to be able to get a public option? And I was telling her, I was like, no, you’re not, because this has all been orchestrated long in advance what’s going on here.
And I knew that. Whereas, I’m more knowledgeable and better-sourced, I think, in 2021 than I was in 2009. But I had much less of a sense of what was going on. And I think that’s because there wasn’t like an answer to that question. It was genuinely very improvisational.
And part of that is a lot of people decided that Obama didn’t throw enough long balls. That ultimately the moderates in Congress are going to cut down whatever you propose. So it was foolish of him to have come out of the gates so reasonably and that he should have been, like, we’re doing single payer health care, and then let Baucus come back with the public option or something like that.
And that’s something that I think, like, I had said in 2010, 2011, so I don’t want to completely divorce myself from it. But that turned into the idea that you should just do whatever and just make it someone else’s problem to decide what actually happens. And that is what happened. The White House signed off on all kinds of stuff. And then ultimately Joe Manchin decides what happens.
But that’s actually abdicating your power in a weird way to not engage constructively and be like, here’s what we’re doing. The democracy bills I think was the — in some ways, the most egregious example of that, where they had all these campaign finance reform provisions in there that no one could explain exactly why they were in there. It was something that progressives had been really fired up about 10 years ago, so it just made it onto the list and people put it there.
I mean, the reason for that is that the primary author in the House was Sarbanes. And Sarbanes is a long-time campaign finance guy.
Right. I mean, that’s an explanation. But that’s not a reason. I mean, a lot of people were left very worried about the state of American democracy by what happened in the 2020 election, in the lame duck on January 6. And public financing of House elections is just not what that is about at all. It’s an idea that was completely out of left field.
And then meanwhile, they went actually very soft on gerrymandering reform, because a couple of Southern CBC members and the Massachusetts —
Congressional Black caucus.
Yeah, Congressional Black Caucus and the Massachusetts delegation did not want strong anti-gerrymandering rules. Because, in particular, in Massachusetts, strong anti-gerrymandering rules would make it go from nine seats that are safe for Democrats to probably nine seats that are all strongly blue-leaning but not 100 percent safe.
So gerrymandering is actually a really big deal in terms of democracy in a way that I think campaign finance isn’t. And it was just a kind of — I mean, it’s tough, right? I mean, if key members don’t want strong anti-gerrymandering provisions, maybe you can’t get it done.
But then you could just focus on something else. I guess we’re going to have this Electoral Count Reform legislation may really happen in the lame duck, which could have been non-controversial. But it was just odd to have votes on this total overhaul of the campaign finance system when that had nothing to do with what anyone was upset about.
I think, fortunately, for everyone involved, barely anybody even remembers that that happened. But it’s a little bit embarrassing. Public financing also polls terribly. And in the current alignment, it would disadvantage Democrats. So it was a particularly odd thing to focus on. I mean, maybe just high-minded of John Sarbanes that he has this principled view that we need to have public financing. But it’s weird, right?
And there’s been this kind of lull nothing matters attitude, I think, that took over in a way that it wound up not being — maybe not being damaging because none of these poorly written bills passed anyway. But it just makes you wonder what was everybody doing for the four years that Donald Trump was president.
[MUSIC]
A couple of minutes ago, you said something interesting that I want you to unspool, which is that you’re trying to push people to do more thinking along the margin.
Yeah.
And that in, let’s call it 2005, there was an almost absurd policy literalism — or 1998. And that now you think it’s flipped to the other side. And this is something, I think, that’s come to define your work in the past couple of years. Tell me about it, as you see it, the almost regime change in how Democrats think about elections, the dominant political theory of how you win elections and brand yourself as a party.
Well, yeah, so I mean, after 2012, Obama got re-elected and Republicans still controlled the House. And what Obama’s team really wanted to do was pass an immigration reform bill. A lot of Republican elites seemed open to that idea, which is part of what made it a reasonable thing for Obama to push for. You know what I mean? There would be no point in pushing for a climate bill because it wasn’t going to happen. An immigration bill really might have happened.
And Marco Rubio went on Sean Hannity’s show. And the two of them agreed this was a good idea.
Right. So a big part of selling that immigration push was selling the idea that Republicans had really lost touch with the growing Latino electorate and that this was really, really important. And I think a lot of things were said in the wake of that election that were not analytically true but were well-intentioned.
There was an overstatement of the centrality of the Latino vote to that outcome and of the centrality of the immigration issue to the Latino vote. And you look at a map — people know that a surge of Hispanic turnout is not why Obama won Wisconsin.
I wrote an article in the wake of that election, being, like, I don’t know, guys, Nevada, Colorado maybe, but Obama — just he won all these Midwestern states, right? But Obama did get a very strong performance from Hispanic voters. That is true. So there was just more focus on that fact than that fact bore in analytical weight.
And then if you talk to people who worked on the Obama campaign, they say, look, our Latino messaging just did not involve that much immigration stuff. It involved some, but it was a lot of health care and education. But in the wake of the election, there was a lot of discussion on the Latino vote and a lot of discussion of immigration’s role in the Latino vote because that was to back up a legislative agenda, right? I mean, they don’t just run these campaigns for their own amusem*nt. They’re trying to pass bills. The bill wound up not passing.
But this idea that Democrats were going to win by mobilizing the forces of demographic change and that they were going to mobilize those forces primarily by emphasizing progressive ideas on identity and cultural issues kept going forward. And, if anything, snowballing in the wake of the failure of what was really a legislative strategy, not an election-winning strategy.
Because, again, if you look at the campaign, it’s not like they forgot that they had to win these Midwestern states or that they couldn’t count how many Mexican-Americans live in Iowa. Some but not that many. And they knew that, right? But it kind of rolled forward to the point where everybody starts making the case for their own ideas in these electoral terms.
And so, I mean, we know why environmentalists care about climate change. It’s because greenhouse gases lead to warmer temperatures on the planet and sea levels rise, et cetera, et cetera. But Sierra Club and other groups start putting out all this stuff about how young voters are demanding action on climate change and that to garner turnout, we need this strong environmental agenda.
And the evidentiary basis for that kind of claim was just always really, really weak. But people got very dug in on mobilization, mobilization, mobilization as a kind of ethos, in part, because they believed it, because certain demographic facts got read wrong. But I think, in part, because it just became the coin of the realm.
This is how everyone was supposed to talk about their ideas was how it’s going to contribute to base turnout. And if you came to a meeting being, like, I just think it’s a really good idea to do this, but keep it quiet and do it under the table, people were like, no, you’re so weird. You’re supposed to talk about how you’re going to mobilize the base.
And we saw in 2016, and then we saw again in 2020, these extremely high turnout elections, which is nice from a civic standpoint. I mean, I guess it’s good to see people participate. But it doesn’t alter the partisan composition of the electorate in the kind of way that I think a progressive in 2010 would have told you it would. People would have said, oh, if we get this surge in turnout, it’s going to push things way to the left.
And that just turns out not to be true, which is fine in some ways. But it just means that a lot of stuff about demographics and turnout and mobilization I think has really not aged well as a take or as an analysis. And a lot of old conventional wisdom about swing voters and boring stuff like that, I think is at least approximately true.
So let me try to frame this slightly differently, or the version of it I’ve watched happen, which is I think it’s useful to keep in mind who it is politicians think they are trying to persuade and of what. I would say when I got into politics — I started covering professionally in the early 2000s. I was paying attention in the ‘90s.
Democrats, in particular, had a sense that what they truly believed was reviled by the electorate. They had lost three times — Reagan, Reagan, Bush. Bill Clinton won, but he was this great compromiser who sort of won by repudiating parts of the Democratic or at least a liberal agenda.
And so the implicit question that dominated — it wasn’t the only one people asked, but the people who asked this one seemed to be the ones who were in charge — was what would somebody who doesn’t ideologically or culturally agree with us, but is open to us, think about this? The somewhat mythical moderate.
And I think that the implicit version of this that became stronger over time, which did reflect changes in the electorate — the Obama coalition doesn’t exist in 1988. So the idea that you can run Barack Obama and that he will win and win really big —
What’s the famous number is that Obama and Dukakis got very similar shares of the white vote —
In 2012, yes, in the white vote. I think that Obama slightly underperforms Dukakis in the white vote in 2012, if I’m not wrong. But he wins. And so the marginal voter, I think, becomes a younger, not that interested, but pretty liberal person.
So it’s, like, are you trying to convince somebody who is interested but doesn’t really agree with you versus somebody who is kind of uninterested and is mainly suspicious and cynical of you, who thinks you’re just another bought and paid-for politician who won’t actually do what they want? And to me, in a bunch of different ways — and I want to talk about other things that happened at the same time — but that’s the main shift in the cognitive structure of the way the Democratic Party sees politics. And I think it’s also worth noting that it is accompanied by a shift in the Republican cognitive structure that I’d honestly have somewhat more trouble articulating in a clear way because Donald Trump emerges in the Republican Party in such a burst of his own intuition, to put it lightly.
So I don’t think it’s as clearly stated anywhere. But the Republican Party also shifts from, I think, having a little bit more of a sense of the wind at their backs, but also being somewhat more cautious, to being completely YOLO in their approach to politics.
And because Donald Trump wins, even if he doesn’t win with the popular vote, which Democrats typically can’t do, there’s a sense that he’s proven something. I mean, I think this actually ends up affecting the way Democrats think. That if the Republicans can do this and not just get away with it, but be rewarded for it, and more people agree with Democrats, in theory, than agree with Trumpist Republicans, then the question of, can you win elections through mass mobilization, begins to seem very relevant.
And then I think the third thing is there is a not just a kernel, a reality, an analytical reality under this, which is ticket splitting goes way down. The number of floating voters goes down. It’s not down to nothing, but the number of voters who shift parties election to election has gone down quite a bit over the years.
And so there actually are fewer persuadable voters. I mean, that middle is shrinking. And so the sense is there more voters you can pull off the sidelines rather than more voters you can pull out of the middle. I think that’s a lot of the shift.
I want to put a pin in the ticket-splitting thing, because to me there’s a big question as to have the ticket-splitters gone away or have the politicians stop trying so hard to get them? But I think a lot of what you said is right. And I would also throw in there — I mean, not to make too much a deal out of one thing, but David Broockman wrote this paper that I think we’ve both written about, that wasn’t single-handedly influential —
It was the “Political Scientist.”
“Political Scientist.” Part of what changed people’s thinking was the discovery that self-identified political moderates have a lot of immoderate opinions. I think a lot of people read that as saying that it doesn’t matter what you say or do in politics, or issues don’t matter to anybody. I think the right way of reading that is just much more literally. That some widely-held views are also just coded as extreme in conventional wisdom circles.
So at the time the paper comes out, no big time people in American politics were for marijuana legalization. But marijuana legalization polled perfectly well. So something that’s happened since it came out is there’s been all this legalization of marijuana. And it’s been perfectly popular, right?
And so the fact that a congressional reporter would have told you — that’s a really marginal opinion. But a survey researcher would have told you — no, that’s actually a very mainstream opinion. So that’s an important fact that is different from an old-fashioned elite-centric way of doing politics.
So Trump comes along. And the other thing that happens with Trump is that people have very strong reactions to him. And it’s like I know how strong the reactions are, so I just — I want to be careful in what I’m saying. But Donald Trump’s stated policy views are just not that extreme.
The positions he took on immigration are pretty similar to the positions Mitt Romney took on immigration. The positions he took on economic policy are much more moderate than the ones Romney took in 2012. His wildest ideas — like we should completely ban Muslims from entering the country — poll better than lots of more, quote unquote, “mainstream” opinions.
So in some sense, if you were to tell someone, OK, Republicans would nominate someone with more moderate opinions on Social Security and Medicare, but also he has a lot of scandals and so he would do OK but not great, you’d be like, yeah, that’s really boring. But we were all there. We all watched Donald Trump. There was nothing boring about it. It was the craziest, most captivating thing that’s ever happened in politics.
So it was just really hard to shrug that off as, like, eh, this is how we thought the world worked. Instead, you wanted to react like, oh my god, this upends everything we know. But what did it really upend on some level? Because he didn’t come out there and say, hey, we should privatize Social Security and get crowds cheering for him.
What he did was he was like, let’s not do the most toxically unpopular stuff that the Republican Party used to stand for. Let’s just pound the table on status quo cultural politics. And it worked not that well even.
Let me give you a contrary view of this, because I agree that people underestimate that Trump shifted the Republican Party’s economic policy substance a little bit more centrist from where it was under, say, Paul Ryan. So I want to grant that point.
Well, what he said. I’m not sure about the substance.
What he said, yes. I mean, but he was out there, he said he was going to raise taxes on people like himself. And he said he was going to cover everybody with really great health care. I mean, there was something to that.
But two things, I think, happened in 2016, which are really, really blow up anybody’s sense that they understand what is going on in American politics. One is Trump, who I think the thing that you’re not giving enough credence to just in the way you frame that is that what Trump did was excite people by breaking every basic rule of political behavior.
I think people thought you couldn’t be that cruel and have folks stand by you. That you couldn’t be that insulting. That you couldn’t say some of the things he said. That you couldn’t tell Ted Cruz that his wife was ugly and his dad probably helped kill J.F.K.
Right.
The question Donald Trump raised wasn’t how could you be a major anti-immigrant politician in this country, but it was if you can act like that and survive it, because you are exciting to the people who like you, and then ultimately win, then what does that imply? And then on the other side is Bernie Sanders.
And in some ways, I think Bernie Sanders and his run in 2016 is as or more important in seeing how liberal thinking changes than Trump, because, one, running as a socialist was supposed to be absolute poison in politics. That you just couldn’t do it. It would have been ridiculous 15 years before. Two, you have Hillary Clinton lose. So her brand — to Donald Trump — so her brand of politics and the politics around the mainstream lane of the Democratic Party becomes somewhat discredited.
Bernie Sanders was exciting. He had huge rallies. People loved him. Now all the journalists are on Twitter and all the political professionals are on Twitter. And you can see on Twitter that the energy is all people with little red roses after their profile. It’s all these Brooklyn socialists.
And so something is happening where, on the right, Donald Trump breaks a bunch of rules of political behavior and prospers for it. On the left, Bernie Sanders breaks a bunch of known rules of political behavior and prospers for it. I mean, when he announced his run, I think the conventional wisdom was, well, too bad for the left Elizabeth Warren didn’t get in the race.
Absolutely.
Right? Instead, you’ve got this marginal figure who’s going to get seven percent. But no, he does really, really well. The center of the Democratic Party becomes somewhat discredited. And I mean, I remember this feeling very well. It’s like, oh, maybe the boundaries aren’t what anybody thought they were.
Exactly.
And Clinton, I think, in particular, I think Bears too much of the brunt of this, but I think there was a real sense that you couldn’t win without enthusiasm.
But that’s what I mean, though. I’m being deliberately obtuse about Trump, because I was there, and I saw it, and it was shocking, and it changed how everybody thought. I’m just saying if you weren’t there, if you didn’t know anything about the Trump campaign other than — if you were reading about it in an obscure foreign country, you’d be like, yeah, OK, that’s just — it kind of makes sense, right?
And as you say, it changed our view of what the limits were. But one inference that people drew from it is, oh my god, there are no limits.
Right.
Right? And I think that that is the wrong inference. It just it turns out that certain norms of conduct are not as constraining as people might have thought before. That you can be really mean about your political adversaries and people will shrug it off.
And there’s things that are a little bit nuanced. That you can be — if you’re a Republican, you can be negative on America’s global role and people won’t read that as unpatriotic. They’ll just read it as, well, he’s tough. Things like that. And there’s a lot, I think, we can learn from it.
But there was an implication drawn that if Trump can get away with making fun of John McCain’s wartime service, then we can say we’re going to abolish ICE. But those things don’t follow from each other. And life is a learning process. I’ve been on this journey as much as anybody else. Trump was, in fact, quite surprising to people’s expectations.
And the Bernie thing, though, captured something that is very real, which is before 2016, self-identified liberals are not just a minority of America, they’re a minority of Democrats. So you could consolidate all the liberals and just lose. Lose the primary.
And that has changed. The demographic bulk of the Democratic Party is more left wing than it used to be. And you now can win a Democratic Party primary, at least, by saying F all this moderation. We should be like a European social democracy, right?
Not this — Bill Clinton did a lot of really overt triangulation. But Obama did a lot of light triangulation where he would be like, I’m not an ideologue. I’m just a guy who looks at the facts. I’m interested in pragmatic solutions. And, OK, 90 percent of my solutions are progressive stuff, but that’s just the facts have a liberal bias. That’s who I am.
You can now win a Democratic primary by saying what Bernie Sanders said, which is I’ve looked at it and I think Denmark is a fundamentally more just society than the United States of America. We should have a wholesale transformation of our social and economic model to be like the economic model of a foreign country.
And you never before, in American history — you wouldn’t have been able to get any lift-off with that, right? And the fact that you could now was really striking. And I think we both saw at Vox, in the early days of Bernie’s campaign, how articles would just pop on the internet if somebody would be like it would be better to be Scandinavia. Like 20 billion clicks. You’re like, whoa, OK.
Because the fact that there was a different social model in the Nordic countries and that it was admirable in many ways was like — that was a known piece of information in the universe, but it didn’t seem like there was much public interest in it. And then suddenly there was a lot. And you could get people to come to your rallies. It was a whole thing. That’s just very different. That’s a different landscape from the one when we started our careers.
Well, something else happens in this period that I think you touched on there, which is interesting, which is the signals of, and then capacity for those signals to amplify into real world outcomes, of enthusiasm become much more mirrored and much more clear.
So how would you really know enthusiasm very early in a primary year 25 years ago? There actually aren’t that many ways. I mean, OK, if the rallies are big. But they’re just in Iowa and New Hampshire for a couple of months. Who really cares?
But by the time you get past the Dean campaign, which I was an intern on, and I remember the unbelievable rise of national small donor online fundraising. So you have that capacity. So enthusiasm that is diffuse but is able to find a website can turn into money. And money really does matter in politics, particularly in primary campaigns.
Then, two, you have attention. The Bernie Sanders articles keep popping to the top of Reddit. Or you can feel on Twitter because all the journalists are on Twitter all the time and you can feel that there’s a lot more energy around Bernie Sanders, around Donald Trump, than there is around some of these other candidates.
That leads to, particularly, now for media outlets that are competing with each other, that have analytics inside of them — you don’t really know who read what in your newspaper 25 years ago, but you know exactly who reads what on your website, you know which quarter hour of your cable news show rates the best, you know as a journalist or just a user of Twitter, which tweets of yours or around you are getting the most retweets.
So all of a sudden this capacity for ideas that are maybe not — I don’t want to say broadly popular, because the ideas before weren’t always broadly popular either, but mainstream within the political institutions — but ideas that rather than having that kind of support, have intense minority or majority, but in this case, I think minority support online.
Well, there’s no gatekeeper.
They can really quickly — yeah, there’s no gatekeeping. But there’s also amplification. This is, I think, a really big difference. It isn’t just that there is some kind of random poll happening here. The better something does, the better it does.
The more Bernie Sanders gets to the top of Reddit, the more articles get written about Bernie Sanders from outlets that are trying to get to the top of Reddit. The more journalists notice that a really, really sharply-worded tweet in this direction or that direction will get 25,000 retweets, the more of them you get, this can also become money over time. I mean, it becomes Donald Trump just owns attention in 2016.
I do think that has a pretty big effect on changing political incentives on what people are actually hearing about. And then it also has a compositional effect. I mean, you mention here that liberals are slowly becoming a larger part of the Democratic Party.
But there’s also a conversion. I mean, when you’re hearing constantly about how great Bernie Sanders is, that’s going to create more people who might have been curious and open to Bernie Sanders’ style ideas are going to learn about them and become Socialists than would have back when Sanders would have had a harder time getting covered by the political system or by the media.
And so I do think you end up in this structural shift towards ideas that have super die-hard fan bases, instead of ideas that are maybe good enough for as broad a swath of the electorate as you can possibly get to.
Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s right. I mean, especially of the internet of some years ago. I mean, the internet has changed again since 2015.
Yeah.
And it’s in a way — I mean, I say this — you probably know this better than me in the Bay Area, but these tech guys are incredibly upset all the time about left wing figures in the media. And I always feel like, you did this. The old guys of journalism were not sitting around in 2014 and saying it’s amazing that this weird left wing content is going viral all the time.
The technology platforms altered the objective incentive structure of the media landscape. There have been many iterations of further alteration. I have no idea what would perform well on a TikTok. Podcasts have a completely different ideology and demand structure from Facebook, social sharing, Google is weird.
But it was this moment when politics stories could go very viral on Facebook, in particular. And that really opened the door to not more extreme in spacial view of ideology, but much more — I mean, when we used to help people with headlines, I don’t know exactly how you would put it, but there’s a certain kind of emotional stridency that was really, really selling there.
A complete alignment of fact, value, and emotion, all behind this is obviously right. And that lent itself to a certain style of politics that was really different from — traditionally you needed all these elite validators. And that’s a different world. And old-time politicians, media people, political actors struggle to learn how to operate in a new media environment.
And I don’t think that that actually means that all of those old ideas are obsolete. But the ideas about what to do in a mechanical, tactical, logistical sense maybe were obsolete. And it’s been a real kind of struggle I think for party establishments in both sides.
Let me end on this question before we go to books. Let’s say that there is polling bias this year, but it’s a two-point bias towards Republicans. So Democrats wake up after the election and they have kept the House and they’ve kept the Senate.
Yep.
Let’s say it’s basically what they have now — 50/50 and then a slim majority in the House. I’m doing some reporting on this, but my basic view is Democrats have no idea what they would do if they woke up in that situation. What do you think they should do if they wake up in that situation?
So one thing is that I think that would show that the voters are actually more concerned about the sketchy authoritarianism of the Republican Party than they seem to be, which would be nice. I mean, that would be validating, I think, for our society.
And I think that that would suggest that Democrats should try to sure up those institutional bases of the country. I mean, I’ve been talking about gerrymandering a number of times. Electoral Count Act Reform is on the table, but we don’t know if it’s going to happen. Really digging in, I think, on telling people we are pulling out of this emergency situation.
We are going to try to ensure that there are free and fair elections on an ongoing basis going forward. We are going to act very boldly and decisively on those topics. And then we’re going to try to make inflation be lower. I think the risk would be, OK, we just want to replay 2021 and wish away Joe Manchin. And we’re going to pass all these bills that people have forgotten about entirely. Sorry, I should also — I should mention the abortion issue. We haven’t talked a lot about Dobbs. But that was a big momentum-shifter, because it’s unusual when Democrats control Congress and the White House to have such a big conservative policy win.
If Democrats do really well, they obviously have to do something on abortion rights. But I think they should try to do something like set a national floor, guaranteed legality through 12 weeks, something like that. And then allow for some state to state variation.
But not poke the bear of federal funding and some of the other things that are in the Women’s Health Protection Act just because you want to try to minimize backlash. You want to try to get things done that will be sustainable and that people will like. And so I think — I always urge caution.
And then always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
So I recently read Cormac Ó Gráda book, “Famine: A Short History,” that’s old and I bought when it first came out, but it’s super fascinating. And I mean, it does what it says on the tin. It’s a history of famines, which used to be a huge problem and have now become a not that huge problem, which is really good.
Brad de Long’s book called “Slouching Towards Utopia,” which is a broad-based history of economic growth over the course of the long 20th century is really, really good. I do want to recommend Rachel Aviv’s book. It is called “Strangers to Ourselves.” A friend of mine recommended it to me. And it has just really blown my mind.
It is a fresh perspective on mental health that loyal Ezra Klein listeners probably know all about. But I found it really, really enlightening. I think the hardest thing about books is I always read books about topics I’m interested in. But then I know so much about them already that I just get annoyed by the books. Whereas this one was it was like, yeah, I’m expanding my mind. I’m becoming a stranger to myself, as I learn about new things, and it’s great.
Matt Yglesias. Thank you very much.
Thank you. [MUSIC]
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Our researcher is Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones, and audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.
