‘The Strongest Democratic Party That Any of Us Have Ever Seen’

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2024

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you’re a Democrat, how worried should you be right now? It’s strangely hard to answer that question. On the one hand, polls suggest Democrats should be very worried. President Biden looks weaker than he did as a candidate in 2020, and in matchups with Donald Trump, the election looks like a coin flip. On the other hand, Democrats staved off an expected red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. Biden has a strong record to run on, and Trump has a lot more baggage than he did in 2020. So, in an effort to put all those pieces together, I had two conversations with two people who have polar opposite perspectives — starting with a more optimistic take for Democrats. Simon Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic political strategist, the author of the newsletter Hopium Chronicles and one of the few people who correctly predicted the Democrats’ strong performance in 2022. He argues that the Democratic Party is in a better position now than it has been for generations. In this conversation, we talk about why he isn’t worried about Biden’s polling numbers, how anti-MAGA sentiments have become a motivating force for many voters, what he thinks about the shifts in working-class support of the Democratic Party, why there’s such a huge gap between Biden’s economic track record and how voters perceive the economy right now, how Biden’s age is affecting the campaign, whether his foreign policy might alienate young voters and more. Mentioned: Columnist Assistant application Book Recommendations: A New Deal for the World by Elizabeth Borgwardt On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder The Collector by Daniel Silva Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. So a bit of housekeeping ahead of today's episode. We are hiring a calm assistant for me and Tricey
0:28.3	McMillan Kottam to do fact-checking research clerical work. It's great entry-level role and you can find it by clicking the
0:35.0	link in the show notes here or going to follow that up with a couple different views on the Democratic Party.
0:54.8	And I think for Democrats, the core question that I get asked that you hear asked is, why are Democrats letting this unpopular 81 year old president run again?
1:07.3	I think it's worth stepping back and asking if you were a politician in the Democratic Party
1:12.3	who'd wanted to run against Joe Biden, what
1:15.0	would you have run on? One theory of how you would challenge an incumbent president
1:20.0	would be you would say he's a bad president. But actually Biden has passed a ton of critical
1:26.3	legislation, Democrats, the inflation reduction act, the infrastructure bill, chips and science.
1:31.9	The economy is doing pretty well. The labor market is really strong,
1:35.6	inflation is coming down. So it's kind of hard to run, saying Joe Biden has done a bad job
1:40.5	being president. I mean, there are important differences now increasingly
1:44.1	on foreign policy but if you think back eight months ago that wasn't as true. The other way you could
1:49.8	have run against Joe Biden is to say the guy's a loser he's not going to be able to win and
1:54.8	the crucial moment for that I think the way to think about why Biden in the end
2:00.0	did not did not get wiped out. They won. They did much better than you would have
2:16.2	expected. They gained in the Senate, they gained in state legislatures, they gained in
2:20.4	governorships. They did lose a House, but they held down losses.
2:24.4	And I always thought that if Democrats got wiped out in 2022,
2:28.1	there really would be primary challenges.
2:30.2	And because if they did so much better than expected,
2:33.0	there wasn't really room for them to get off the ground.
	...

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