How the Democrats Did It

this election was full of so many extraordinary Democratic campaigns lifted, yes, by a wave that kind of Trump set into motion. But to get over the finish line in so many places, Democrats had to run the right candidates and they had to run in very, very different ways in very different places. And I want to spend an episode looking at some of the ways they ran and what that can reveal about the Democratic Party that will emerge out of this election, the lessons the Democratic Party will take going into the next election. There's already, like, you can feel these efforts at factional and finding beginning among Democrats. But I think what is uniting the campaigns that won on Tuesday is a lot more interesting and a lot more revealing than the differences between them. My colleague, Michelle Goldberg, also an opinion columnist here at the New York Times, has done amazing work over the past year covering these different campaigns, going to Texas and Michigan and Maine and so many other places to actually see what the elections felt like on the ground. So she brings all this texture from when it wasn't clear if these strategies would work out. It wasn't clear if a Democratic wave, to say nothing of a blue tsunami, would actually build. So I want to have her on the show now to talk about what actually worked, what she saw then, and what that allows her to understand now about the Democratic Party that is emerging out of this election. She joins me now. Michelle Goldberg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So big week. I want to begin with Texas, which you covered extensively, and I think is the heart of both why this election feels like and more than feels like really is like an earthquake that will reshape the political landscape for a long time. How did Democrats win Texas? Well, I mean, I think, you know, look, they couldn't have done it, obviously, without Donald Trump. Donald Trump got a bunch of new voters, among mostly Mexican-American people in Texas, and then he absolutely terrorized them. So that's part of the story. But also, I think, you know, James Tallarico was a phenomenal candidate, and he identified something really early. I mean, when I profiled him, he was like the underdog in the Senate primary. But even then, I think he had this very clear vision of what he thought people in Texas were going to do. And I think he had this very clear vision of what he thought people in Texas were going to do. And the way he talks about billionaires is not that different from the way Bernie Sanders talks about billionaires, with the difference that he is often talking very specifically about tech billionaires. You know, he talks about Texas as a major center of the data center build-out. People in the rural part of the state hate them because they see them and their eyesores. And, you know, and sometimes people feel like they're ruining their lives. They're loud. They're loud. Like, you talk to people who can no longer sleep at night, who say that the noise is like killing their livestock, you know, and they want to move, but they can't sell their property because their property value has fallen through the floor. So that's like one group of people. Then there's just people for whom the construction is like a huge inconvenience. It's ruining their views. It's, you know, they kind of moved out. They didn't think they were moving into industrial areas. Maybe they were in favor of Donald Trump saying he was going to re-industrialize the heartland. They didn't think he meant like their backyard. Then there's also just this sort of ambient resentment of all of these tech bros who are saying, we're remaking the future. Get on board or be left behind. And by the way, there's a chance we're going to destroy the world and you're going to pay for it. And so, you know, it's one thing to make sacrifices for an industry that you think you're going to benefit from. It's another to make sacrifices for like a crypto mine. And so all these things come together. Ask not what the crypto mine can do for you, but what you can do for the crypto mine. Yeah, exactly. So I think. Actually, it feels that way with AI sometimes. Ask not what AI can do for you, but ask what you can do for AI. Right. I mean, that is kind of Sam Altman's attitude half the time. You know, and then on the other side, you have Ken Paxton, who is uniquely loathsome, although I suspect that maybe John Cornyn would have lost also. Well, this is, I think, one of the really interesting things about Texas, because there was a story that I think people were fairly clued into before the election. Tallarico is an excellent candidate in a way to give Joe Rogan some credit here. It was Rogan inviting Tallarico on and then lavishing him in praise that made, I think, a lot of Democrats think maybe Tallarico's thing actually works on the kind of people Democrats need to actually win over. And then Trump intervenes, makes sure Paxton is going to be the nominee. So you've got this very, very talented, nice Democratic candidate running against a scandal-plagued Republican. And so if we had ended up with an election night where James Tallarico won for Senate, I might say, okay, Trump is unpopular. Paxton is like a monster. And, you know, Tallarico is an excellent candidate. That's not what happened. Democrats won four of the five redistricted House seats. They won for governor. They had huge gains in the Texas House. And so that wasn't all scandal-plagued Republicans on the other side. I mean, Greg Abbott wasn't considered a highly vulnerable Republican before this week. So there's two different parts of that, right? So on the one hand, Greg Abbott, there was huge resentment. And when you hear about this resentment, you never really can understand how, like, anecdotal it is. You know, like, I was meeting a bunch of MAGA voters at Gina Hinojosa's events. You know, she put one of them in her ad, right? She had a commercial with somebody who had been at the Capitol on January 6th. I was at the January 6th rally. I'm a staunch conservative, but I cannot support Governor Greg Abbott. Greg Abbott is bought and paid for by the billionaires and the corporations. And they were furious about data centers, and they were also furious about vouchers. And I think, you know, this is maybe a kind of a sleeper issue in a lot of places, but not for parents who live in places where there aren't a lot of private schools, but where they feel like their schools are being defunded. People are just livid about this, you know? And they would talk about, like, cutbacks in, say, after-school busing so that people couldn't do extracurriculars or sports or anything unless they had someone to pick them up. So I met this guy at a rally in Longview, Texas. He's like a MAGA voter, super conservative, told me that the last time he had voted for a Democrat was back in the 90s. And that was only because back then lots of Texas local officials were still Democrats. And he's, you know, not only is he voting against Greg Abbott, he's at the Gina Hinojosa rally. And it's because he was a school superintendent, but was so angry about vouchers, you know, what vouchers were doing to, like, his particular school system. So that's part of it. The other part is just the fact that you did have Democrats running in all these races, like, serious Democrats running in all these races, which you can't understate. So you had Democrats running up and down the ticket. When I met Gina, like, before I went out there, I met her when she was in New York to kind of hear more about her race. And I said to her, you know, why should Democrats believe in this race when, like, Texas is always Lucy in the football for Democrats? And she said, because this time we have a ticket. This time we have a team. When Beto ran in 2018 and came pretty close to Ted Cruz, there wasn't a competitive campaign for governor. There weren't competitive races around him. It was just him. And there's, like, a magnifying effect of having all of these different candidates doing their own events, running their own commercials, doing their own get-out-the-vote efforts. That's kind of compounding. And so I think that part of, like, party building, not just, I mean, James Taylor Rico is a fantastic candidate, but not just relying on one marquee candidate to drag everybody across the finish line was, I think, really important. I was thinking about politics as having content and texture. And a lot of what you're describing here is content. The, you know, voucher issue, the AI data centers issue, high prices, you know, what is Donald Trump doing in Iran, right? That's all content. And then there's texture, which is, like, how does politics feel to people? And one interesting thing to me about the Texas Democratic Party is that, you know, the Democrats actually had two very, very high-profile candidates running in the Senate primary, you know, with Taylor Rico and Jasmine Crockett. And Crockett is much more the traditional fighter candidate, takes on the raid, had all these viral videos where she was, you know, lacing into Republican members of Congress. The Democrats go for Taylor Rico, and he sort of infuses, I think, the campaign with this particular texture. And I want to play a clip here of his victory speech. strongest force in the universe. Love is not passive. Love is not neutral. Love is not weak. Love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied. Love requires that we look evil in the eye and not blink. That kind of love has always been a threat to the powers that be. That kind of love is revolutionary. That kind of love is creative. Hate is predictable. Hate is boring. Hate can't lower our energy bills. Hate can't teach a child to read. Hate can't build a future. But what hate can't do, love can. I love that. I think it's really beautiful. Something was happening in the texture of the campaign. In Texas, not only there. I mean, I think you see it with Adam Hamilton. In Kansas, people talk about, you know, you see it somewhat with El Sayed. There's like this rise of a religious left, a more moralistic left. John Ossoff talking in the language of values. But I think Tallarico in particular exemplified this. Can you step into the Trump era? Can you win over Trump voters? Not by mirroring Trump, but by acting as this. Well, he's the anti-Trump. He's the anti-Trump. Tell me a little bit about this side of it. So at the time that I first met Tallarico, there was still this idea in the Democratic Party that they needed their own Trump. That was, I think, around the time that Gavin Newsom was like selling knee pads. And Tallarico, I mean, you know, his faith is real. He was a seminarian. He still eventually hopes to be a pastor when he's done with politics. He's not a Christian nationalist by any stretch of the imagination. And in fact, developed his politics like very much in opposition to Christian nationalism, believes it's kind of sinful. And, you know, he's in a state where it's so preeminent. But he does. He does believe that Democrats lost something as they became more secular and kind of lost a language to talk about values and conviction and the things that make life meaningful. And people slipped into kind of atomization and despair. And at least for him, you know, kind of faith is what sustains him. And I think he thinks that, you know, other people, he would never try to push his faith on other people. But he does think people. People need something transcendent. Well, the other thing, though, that I thought was very effective in what he did, Tallarico is a progressive candidate. I mean, he had these points where he moderated on oil and gas, on certain trans issues, on immigration and sort of like pushing himself forward on border enforcement. But I think people some just think too much about politics as a single dimension of like where do you stand on Medicare for all people's impression of what a Democrat or Republican is, is also. Do they have faith? Oh, is also where do they live is also how do they talk and how do they dress? And one thing Tallarico seemed to me to be doing throughout the campaign quite effectively, and many of the candidates did it in different ways, was sort of saying, I'm not like those other Democrats. First of all, I don't hate you. I mean, there's been a clip going around of him on a podcast asked about Donald Trump begins by listing what he likes about Donald Trump. I think the president does have clear strengths. I think he's able to communicate in a way that's clear and concise and powerful to people. He is willing to take action when there's so much gridlock. He's willing to just kind of bust through walls to deliver for people. And he has a sense of humor, which I feel like is really missing in in politics. It's a very Obama like politics, right? There's no red and blue, or at least those divisions do not fully define us. And this has been a layer of politics that I think has sort of been lost in the Trump era because Trump made so many people feel it didn't matter. And it has been really interesting to me to see it roar back. Well, and it's interesting because there's two dimensions. On the one hand, James Tallarico is not a pushover, right? And he's not really a kind of squishy centrist, you know? I mean, James Tallarico will tell you that, like, the Democratic Party has forgotten how to fight. You know, he talks about flipping tables. So it's not that he's saying that the Democratic Party needs to be more conciliatory. It's more just that it needs to be more willing to fight for the right things. And the right things are kind of, you know, unchecked billionaire corporate power, economic inequality, the like. So it's this kind of, like, everyone against the billionaires kind of politics, which just is numerically much better than a sort of, like, red-blue divide. He also is able to speak to the fact that people are, like, so burned out on rage and so hungry for an alternative. And for the idea of a politics that can feel different. And there's a lot of kind of very conservative Christians who were kind of apoplectic about the way he used faith. They would say he was a heretic. In some ways, they were more threatened by him than they were by a secular candidate. But when I would go to his rallies, I would talk to people who would say how good it felt that there was kind of a Democrat who wore his Christianity on his sleeve and who would say that they had felt in the past, like, the Democratic Party was not open to religious people, even though Tallarico represented their faith much more than the Republicans did. And so there was a population, there was a group of Texas voters who felt drawn into the party by him. So I do think it's really interesting the way this open-hearted, love-thy-neighbor politics doesn't have to feel like this appeal coexisted with populism. And you could really see it also in Hinojosa's campaign, we talked a little bit about the data center populism. But I want to play this clip from an appearance that she did on the campaign trail in August where she was talking about the data centers. It is the fight for Texas. It is the fight in America. It is the fight about is this going to be a Texas that is by and for the people. And we need a governor who will defend the rights of the people, who will cancel contracts that jeopardize our water that we need to drink and live in our homes. It is common sense. To get back to a time, back to a time when our elected leaders did the bidding of the people and not the moneyed interests and not the billionaires. There's something I can't remember if you said it or she said it in an interview with you, but she talked about AI contributing to a feeling people had that their lives were coming out of control. That it was disordering. So how did she build that populism? She would often say the culture wars are over. And I think I was a little bit skeptical of that going in. Like, I don't know. I don't know if you can just kind of unilaterally say that this central source of division in American politics is no longer relevant. But there is a sense that it becomes kind of tired when people feel so directly threatened, both in their immediate environment, in what their kids' schools are going to look like, in these billionaires telling them that their jobs are disappearing, that the world might disappear. It helped in some ways that Elon Musk moved to Texas and made himself, the face in a lot of ways of the Republican Party there. You know, in some ways, she often seemed, and I think Della Rico even more so, often seemed like he was running as much against Elon Musk as against Ken Paxton. But and then she convinced people that that was going to be her priorities, right? Not that she was necessarily moderating, you know, so she would say, I still believe what I believe, but like, we're not going to get consensus on this. So we're going to do the, you know, the things around the edges that we can all agree on, like making sure that women who are having miscarriages are treated in hospitals. But what really matters is the kind of unchecked power of these billionaires. I also think that, you know, there's a kind of an upper middle class person, take myself, not that I'm a swing voter, but if I think about who do I find threatening now, it's Elon Musk, right? It's like the tech bros. They seem to be like the forces, not just inequality, but incipient totalitarianism. And they're culture warriors. Right. And they are the forces behind this presidency and the Republican Party. And I've written this in other instances before, you know, Democrats have been sort of bemoaning their loss of the white working class and not just the white working class for many, many years, right? And they sort of wanted to bring back a sort of FDR coalition. They wanted to bring back the political power of unions, but also being the party in many cases of the educated upper middle class that for a long time was very, very comfortable with Silicon Valley, right? So for a long time, Silicon Valley was seen as a kind of democratic stronghold and people who felt like comfortable and optimistic about the role of technology in their jobs in the future were a big part of the Democratic coalition. People now in polls see the Republican Party as the elitist party. That was not true a few years ago. And it's kind of obvious why that is, because you see Donald Trump and these billionaires and his like, you know, kind of Caligula like Halloween parties and stuff. But, you know, Donald Trump was always this extraordinarily gaudy and decadent figure. But the fact that he was kind of culturally in tune with parts of the working class overrode that, as did, and I think this gets lost, the fact that they saw him as a class traitor. They saw him as someone who had seen the inside of the system and was going to blow it up, as opposed to just someone who wanted to get inside there so he could like grab everything in sight. And, you know, so again, this has created a problem for Democrats in terms of fundraising, in terms of, you know, having kind of hostile forces own a lot of these platforms, but it has also created this like kind of generational opportunity for a possible realignment. If you go back to 2016, after Donald Trump wins, there is a certain category of Democratic interpretation, which is, this is the last gasp of like a dying old political coalition. But then in 2020, particularly in 2024, he begins making really significant inroads with Hispanic voters, with Asian American voters, to some degree with Black voters. Certainly in 2024 with young voters. The Hispanic strength was always the most important and unusual change he was making to the electorate and the most significant way in which Democrats turned out to be wrong about him and wrong about the right ways to combat him. And then Donald Trump won office in 2024, turned over the entire immigration portfolio basically to Stephen Miller and Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem. And in the border counties of Texas, the swing versus like the 2024 presidential election, to just name a couple of these, Cameron County, plus 44 swing to the Democrats, Hidalgo, plus 49, Webb, plus 50. I mean, these are heavily Hispanic border counties. And part of the story here is not just like Palo Rico's kindness or, you know, hosts, you know, AI populism, but as you were saying, a massive swing in the Hispanic electorate, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. People like Bobby Polito, who was running for the House, this amazing, like, candidate, you know, well-known singer in those communities, you know, he wins by 25 points in a Trump district. I mean, and in some ways that's the easiest to explain, right? I mean, in retrospect, the idea that as the country became more diverse, Democrats were going to have this, like, automatic demographic advantage. And people leaned into that, right? I mean, I think that maybe that was like the substrate of a lot of emphasis on identity, even going up to the 2024 for election. But it's one thing for people to be able to look beyond kind of rhetorical disrespect. And it's another thing to have masked men grabbing your relatives off their job sites, kids afraid to go to school. I mean, just the amount of terror that people were feeling. I mean, there was a story that I don't think got a lot of national attention, but it was something that people were talking about when I was in Texas, that there were two young guys on their way to enlist in the Marines. And they're citizens. They get picked up and roughed up by ICE. I mean, these are the kind of things you can't make up. And those kind of encounters are things that people were seeing firsthand or hearing about from people that they knew. So I want to then shift over to Georgia, where John Ossoff crushed Mike Collins by 18 points. This was supposed to be an endangered seat. Right. J.D. Vance goes and says he's going to be pretending that he's Trump's biggest ally in Congress, and he's going to be pretending that he helped carry out the Trump agenda. The Ossoff victory, which I think has been one of the most important things in my life, the big stories coming out of the election. This clip from one of the debates between Ossoff and Collins is, I think, maybe the single most brutal moment I have ever seen in a political debate. Mike Collins and Donald Trump, they're still obsessed with overturning the 2020 election. Mike Collins still believes the 2020 election was stolen. Mike Collins has supported Donald Trump's effort to overturn the election, and he wants to give your tax dollars to the violent thugs and sacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Mike Collins is attacking your voting rights. But that's not a surprise when you consider who Mike Collins is. This is a man who cheered on a group of young men who were mocking a black woman on a college campus with monkey sounds. If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club. Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club. Mike Collins is standing there during this. Just like looking down at his papers. You went out, you reported on the Ossoff campaign. What did you see there? So, I mean, John Ossoff, in some ways, I don't think any candidate does quite so much like resistance fan service. And partly it's just these are different electorates. There is this kind of like resistance electorate in Georgia in a way that there just isn't. Civil rights legacy. Right. Well, yeah. I mean, he grew up in a synagogue that was firebombed because of the civil rights and alliance with Martin Luther King. He's an intern for John Lewis. There is this, you know, kind of historic black Jewish alliance that dates back to the civil rights movement and that he is very much rooted in and very much cognizant of. And you've seen it in both of his campaigns. You saw it in him and Raphael Warnock basically running as a ticket. And this time he kind of ran as a ticket with Keisha Lance Bottoms. He is able to speak very successfully, both to black voters who grew up in the civil rights tradition, but also to some of these suburban women who were radicalized by the 2016 election. I mean, I just want to go back for a second. I was in such a bad place after 2016. And the first time I felt like a teeny bit of hope was when I went to the 6th District, which is where John Ossoff was running in a special election. And there were all these women who had not been political, but had all this kind of social capital from like the PTA and, you know, the stuff that you do as a suburban mom and who all of a sudden became like political fiends. They could look at the map of the block and say like, OK, you know, this guy, he's not going to vote Democrat, but the wife might and she gets home from work first. So that's when we've got to hit the door. And I remember him saying to me, you know, I'm standing on the shoulder of these women. And he didn't win that race. But obviously, that was like eventually a Democrat flipped that seat. And that was the seat of his political career. And so I think he's always understood these kind of very outraged middle-aged suburban women who are very, very important in the Georgia electorate. You know, I've compared him to Peter Magyar in Hungary. That was the other race I covered this year was the Hungarian election. And what you saw with Peter Magyar was this combination of reclaiming Hungarian national identity, wrapping himself in the Hungarian flag, you know, reciting Hungarian poetry, and just this relentless focus on Orban's corruption. John Ossoff is always talking about the Mar-a-Lago Mafia. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights. One of the things that he did so effectively is that in the past, it's been hard to get voters to care as much as maybe I think they should about all of Donald Trump's like authoritarian depredations. But what John Ossoff does is connect those, and this is also something that happened in Hungary, connect those to the suffering you're feeling in your own life. So it's not just that they're enriching themselves, they're doing it at your expense. Just think about this. When you are paying more for your health insurance, when a hospital in your community, is closing down. Mike Collins voted to take that money out of your pocket and out of your community and give it instead to data center developers. And that's the problem, Mike. It's not just that you've hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online. It's that you're robbing your constituents to subsidize your donors. I want to know if you will commit to voting to repeal that data center tax scam that you voted for. What's your answer? I mean, I think that that so exemplifies the way he's on the one hand able to make this like kind of sweeping moral case against the right, but then again, kind of connect it to the immiseration of the voters. He is really outraged by corruption. Like a big part of his story was that he was a documentarian before he was a politician and made documentaries about corruption and, you know, had someone he worked with killed for his work on one of those documentaries. I think this is an important point about him because two things that are kind of in that answer you just gave that I think are worth drawing out a little bit. One is he did not run a, well, I think Trump has done a lot of good things kind of purple state campaign, right? That is one move. It would not have been a crazy move for him to try. It's not what he did. He became, I think, such an important part of the democratic message in this election, because what he showed is something that Democrats had long believed, but they couldn't crack the code on, which is that Trump's corruption should be a tremendous political vulnerability. that is not like a new insight john ossoff what happened was ossoff was the one who was able to weaponize the insight into like consistent viral almost unanswerable clips i want to play one of them here that i think shows a couple of the things that he was able to do so well just listen to this last september the president of kazakhstan calls donald trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an american company and the very next month eric and don junior get a stake in the american company pursuing the mining deal six days later six days after prince eric and prince don get their stake kazakhstan announces this company will get quote the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world a few more weeks go by and then the u.s government run by their father sets aside 1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project in kazakhstan all this while you pay more for gas for groceries for health care and that's just the tip of the iceberg billions from foreign princes and oligarchs sweetheart real estate deals all over the world taxpayer funding to trump backed companies and listen here's the bottom line if you're involved in any of this next year you'll be raising your right hand and swearing to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you god in front of the united states congress this i think is why there's been something different about the reaction to osso's victory because this is not look how much money i brought back to georgia for highways i think this felt to many people like the case against trump they had always wanted to see work and resonate resonating not in san francisco not in new york city but in georgia where ossoff rode that case to an 18 point victory right and john ossoff is kind of amazing at constituent yes he is that's also part of it that's the underlying part of it but yeah i mean i think part of why this has been so cathartic is that in some ways this feels like the first election where people have responded to donald trump in what seems like a normal way right it's kind of how we expected them to respond to donald trump in 2016 and 2018 and all these elections when they didn't it's like now there is this kind of popular revulsion that he was able to channel and i think one of his skills and this again i think goes back to his background as a documentary filmmaker is that he knows how to take these like really wonky details right it's like hard to build a drama out of like tungsten mining rights in kazakhstan but he knows how to tell a story about that and to make that story symbolic because the other challenge in talking about donald trump's corruption is that it is you know it's sort of beyond the realm of human consciousness to keep it all in mind at one time and so he's able to find these like extremely salient examples and talk about them in this like condensed gripping way and bring people along with it he has this very old school oratorical style you know you hear the black church in it but you also just hear the way they used to teach elocution well and he and and obama like and obama yeah but i was watching him in obama and i was watching their obama actually does have a much less formal style of speech than also does also has a self-consciously formal construction every political era has almost like i think the same structure which is somebody wins doing something unusual and then everybody tries to ape them for a little while you know donald trump with this incredibly off the cuff weaving looping discursive rhetorical style you know the podcast election of 2024 can you go hang with the besties mm-hmm and then we'll try to do that for a bit you know gavin newsom and his podcast you know they're all doing podcasts and then here comes john ossoff talking as if he's in the 18th century and it's refreshing actually like oh you wrote a speech right you then went back over it and you edited this right and he does and he's you know he writes his own speeches yeah which is somewhat unusual um he's like a very kind of earnest and reserved person you know he doesn't want to do casual off the cuff kind of hanging out on a podcast everybody has heard about his workout routine right exactly i mean we've heard about other candidates workout routines because that was part of the mimicking the podcast style i think had an had someone from the times i believe interview him while he was working out he did that with us on piker too ossoff it's like he holds a lot backstage he dribbles out his clips it just it's interesting to me stylistically he was doing something disciplined in an era when almost one of the lessons people had taken was discipline is dangerous well and he has a theory of this and you know how much of this is just kind of a rationalization because i think he is a sort of reserved and introverted person but he also has a theory which is that there's power in not being in people's face all the time that like if you sort of hang back then when you do intervene people are more ready to listen or it will get you know his theory of attention is sort of like the opposite of the theory of attention that people are more ready to listen to and i think people have been learning for the last however many years yeah they should want more of you not want less of you right exactly that like yeah you should be maybe like a little bit coy so georgia i mean going plus 18 for the democrats going to the democrats in the governorship texas you also had and these were not races that you were on the ground for but i think you understood the night was going to be something different when the needle began swinging on south carolina for a i was not ready to believe that mississippi it looks like the democrats are going to win that seat when i think of what is now different in american politics it will be sustainably different i'm not saying the south has realigned people always talk about realignments i think this more as a de-alignment what has happened is the south has become unreliable now for the republican party they have to defend it democrats are going to have an opportunity to say this is what it is like when we govern texas when we govern georgia when you know you have a south carolina senator a mississippi senator you're going to have to defend it you're going to have to defend it you're going to have to defend it you're going to have to defend it and just the collapse of the republicans southern wall i mean we never even called that the red wall because you wouldn't even have really thought to attack it but now the entire political map is it's just a map again of states right it's like it's hard to even imagine it's hard to even imagine what the 2028 presidential looks like if people are fighting in texas in kansas to say nothing of how the candidate recruitment goes i mean i think one thing the democratic party was not doing in the way you might have thought was really thinking about who do you recruit in south carolina you know it ended up getting a great candidate but a lot of these were were people who stepped forward themselves who stepped forward themselves i mean the scott column story in mississippi is so interesting maybe it's worth saying for a minute how he ends up in this race because he could have had another job right he was appointed to the federal bench by joe biden and he is blocked by mississippi senator cindy hyde smith and then he decides to challenge her in the election and now he's beat her for her senate seat we think we think we think we think but yeah what does it mean that the south has fallen for the republicans so i mean look obviously in some ways i think we're still metabolizing this because it's just i can't think of another time when like so many of our political assumptions have just been exploded overnight there was kind of an attempt after mit romney was defeated to reckon with what it means to be like a conservative party in a multi-racial democracy and then donald trump kind of blew that up but they're going to have to start thinking about it again with donald trump being on the way out right because like how does a candidate like jd vance you know sort of even more i think aligned with white nationalist forces in the republican party then donald trump how does he win in a state like mississippi if mississippi's votes can't just be taken for granted from the outset and then at the same time you know maybe marco rubio is a better candidate for mississippi but maybe not a better candidate for an anti-war electorate and so their coalition has evaporated overnight but there's also all of these questions for the democratic party because you're going to start hearing demands from some of the more left-wing candidates and some of those demands are going to be really popular and i think that again is worth keeping in mind there's a lot of things that i think will both satisfy certain left-wing base voters and potentially help the democratic party solidify itself as a national party and it's kind of been a while since we've understood the democratic party as a national party and then there's another part of it that is less about like messaging and such and is also just about investment and building and taking seriously that you need a strong Democratic Party in those places. And I think it then gets into kind of what happens in the places Democrats are more prepared to contest, right? Which is like the kind of like the string of elections in the Midwest. So you had Senate seats open for contest in Ohio, where Sherrod Brown won, running, again, a very anti-data center campaign, among other things. In Minnesota, where Peggy Flanagan won for the Democrats. Democrats weren't that worried about that one. In Michigan, where that became a very marquee seat because it was one of the few seats in the country where Republicans thought maybe they had a pickup opportunity. Gary Peters, a Democratic senator from Michigan, had decided to retire this cycle. You did a bunch of reporting from Michigan. And now kind of everybody knows how it went. But before we get to El Sayed, I actually want to talk about Haley Stevens, who was the Democratic establishment choice in that election. I was never totally sure why. But Schumer recruited her. Governor Whitmer endorsed her kind of towards the end of that primary, hoping to push her over the edge. Who was she? And how did she end up endorsing the Republican in the final days of the race? Okay, so I've been critical of Chuck Schumer's intervention in some of these races. There was obviously races where he was really, really important, right? He was really important in convincing Sherrod Brown to run again. I mean, Haley Stevens, as far as I can tell, her main attribute, and this is ironic given how things went down, was that she was a team player. She was just like a normie, solid Democrat who had a lot of patrons in the party, who was a big fan of her. She was a big fan of her. She was like, not just kind of normally pro-Israel, but incredibly passionately pro-Israel for kind of odd reasons because she's not Jewish, or although she might become Jewish, she says. I always thought that was a huge mistake. I never understood why, if you don't want Abdul El-Sayed to be the candidate, either because you are like ideologically not in line with him or you think that he's a risk. I mean, Mallory McMurrow was right there. Yeah, I like Mallory McMurrow a lot. I never understood. I never understood why the establishment was moving towards Stevens. I like El-Sayed too, but I understood what the fears about him were for electability reasons. I always understood what happened here. Stevens, in addition to some of the AIPAC dimensions you just mentioned, she'd originally won in a Trumpy district. Her 2018 and 2020 elections were in a district that at least at that point was R plus four. And so there's a feeling that she could win over Trump voters and everybody's so used to Michigan being these like super tiny margins. But you would want, you would want to watch her on TV. And she just wasn't an impressive candidate. It's not just, I think, that she's like, you know, kind of not super inspiring or charismatic. She's also, I mean, you could not see her campaign, right? Like I go to Michigan and I wanted to go to some of her events. I understand I wrote critically about her, but I write critically about a lot of people and their press people will still tell me where they're campaigning. Like there was so, or you sign up as a member of the public. She did so few events where if you just as a member of the public, as opposed to somebody who was like recruited to be there where you could go see her. I mean, it was like, it was bizarre. I don't know that I've ever seen anything like it. She just kind of was not accessible, you know? And then meanwhile, Abdul El-Sayed is going everywhere. Mallory McMurrow is going everywhere. I mean, I think Mallory McMurrow suffered from being the sort of Goldilocks candidate. Yeah, she was sort of in between the two of them. The smart thing for the establishment would have been to coalesce behind, Mallory McMurrow. And then, you know, kind of once she dropped out of the race, I mean, I think it was always ugly, but it became especially ugly once it became a binary campaign. But this is, I want to say that I think Schumer ended up doing a good job on a lot of measures here, right? They just, you know, they put money to Mississippi late in the game when people thought that might be a completely crazy move. I mean, he took some risks. He got Roy Cooper. They really did have a bunch of recruiting wins. And even in Maine where like Janet Mill, who was suspended her campaign in the primary, what happened on the other side of it didn't make like the other side of that look great, right? Graham Plattner ended up being a bit of a disaster too. The thing that I thought was interesting here and reflected to me a way in which a democratic establishment needs to update its sense of what makes a candidate electable is it does not care about and does not select for star power. It does not care about and does not select for charisma. It does not care about and does not select for people creating an authentic, movement around them, right? People being genuinely excited. But El-Sayed was exciting the hell out of people. Yeah, absolutely. And the fear that he was both a kind of mobilizing and counter-mobilizing candidate. He mobilized his people and mobilized people against him, which is, I think, why the Republicans thought they might win. But there was, I thought, a sort of for a long time, like an unwillingness to grapple with what it meant that, you know, so many Democrats in Michigan were so excited about El-Sayed. I mean, there's been a lot of attention to the Democrats who wouldn't vote for him. Haley Stevens being one of them. I think we would have seen something similar and maybe even larger on the other side. You know, voters who wouldn't have voted for Haley Stevens because of her passionate commitment to Israel. But there are some lessons that are hard to draw just because the tide was so high that it kind of carried so many people along. Like El-Sayed, on the one hand, El-Sayed, when he was being really, when he was playing hockey, would say he was going to win by seven. And that seemed ridiculous. And I think he won by seven. And also, that doesn't look like that's kind of an underperformance relative to the rest of the field. And so it's a little bit hard to draw direct lessons from it. But I absolutely think you could see it in Michigan. You could definitely see it in Maine. You know, and again, beating Susan Collins is no small thing. But you could feel the difference in energy between when Graham Platt was the nominee and when, you know, I went to a Troy Jackson event, just I have family in Maine and was visiting them. Went to a Troy Jackson event while I was there. You know, he seems like a very nice man. It didn't have the energy of the Plattner. But yeah, you could just feel, yeah, there's just like, you could feel the sort of like deflation. And yeah, I mean, the Democratic Party maybe is not in the, it should be optimized for vibes. I mean, after the Obama experience, but. But it wasn't for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in some ways, maybe still isn't. I want to play a clip of El-Sayed's victory speech, because I think it speaks to the way he specifically ran in Michigan. We spoke of a brighter, a bigger, more hopeful Michigan. There's an astroturfed, corporate-funded advertising campaign built to deceive and distract. Rather than try to unite us to contend with the crisis, the crisis of gas or groceries, the opposition decided to try to divide us. At first, they pointed to my name and my faith as if to say, you know, he's a little different. And when it didn't work, they tried to guilt me by association. And when that didn't work, they went all in on one of the ugliest campaigns we've seen in our lifetimes. They might have been pointing to my name, my name, and my faith. But we all know that my name and my faith aren't the reason you can't afford your gas. Not the reason you can't afford your groceries. Not the reason you can't see a doctor. I think you see there, I mean, you heard a sort of similar move at the end of basically every clip I've been playing, is this continuous bringing back to, like, they're trying to distract you from what you know, which is that everything is too expensive. In a way, what struck me as significant about El-Sayed's campaign is not, did he. underperform by a little bit? He didn't underperform by a lot, right? And so he had a kind of normal performance for, you know, Michigan Senate candidate. I think you could sort of, you know, debate whether it could have been five points more. That's significant in a place like Michigan. On the other hand, you just saw, like, a hardcore populist with, like, a huge amount of money spent to other him for his skin color and faith and name win the Rust Belt. Right? It worked. Like, at the end of the day. Right. That was, I mean, and that was. That was the gamble, right? That was the big test, is that Bernie Sanders' wing of the party has a theory of politics, which is that there's a kind of, like, more working class coalition that you can bring together with a relentlessly populist message and that you can kind of increase turnout to make up for maybe some of the, like, suburban moderates that you might lose. And it worked here. It's also a reality. I mean, Bernie, Bernie Sanders is in his 80s at this point. He doesn't have all that many obvious successors in the Senate. He does in the House with AOC. He actually has it in, you know, the New York City mayoralty now. But now El-Sayed comes in and is, like, a champion for this politics there, which, you know, when you think about the Democratic Party as a big tent, people tend to talk about that and what they're thinking about is, like, the right side of the tent expanding. Who do you run in Kansas? Who do you run in, you know, Iowa? But it also means having representation for the Democratic Party. for the left side of the tent and having that kind of creative energy in the party as well. I could be wrong, but I think that the thing we're going to hear Abdul El-Sayed talk about the most, my guess, is expanding Medicare. And that is really, really popular, right? And kind of having somebody bang away at that over and over again, I think can only help the party. I mean, it's also fascinating, I'm not hardly the first person to point this out, that he ran on Medicare for All, which we used to think was like an extremely electorally dangerous position. And it barely registered as sort of a point of attack. It is a reflection of where the healthcare system right now is that Medicare for All has never pulled as well as it has this year, right? And I've followed this for a long time. I've followed healthcare for a long time. Medicare for All in its broader forms is hard to pass because it's very hard to pay for. As a concept, it is very, very popular. And, you know, you also have Dr. Annie Andrews, who, you know, really hammers home on healthcare. So you've got these doctors coming into the. I think it's going to be a very, very interesting and, like, healthy part of that debate to have, you know, people with real medical experience behind that. I want to move to Kansas. The last time Kansas had a Democrat in the Senate was the 1930s. You know, I remember about two months ago, people started to tell me, they thought, Adam Hamilton really had a chance. And this was one of those, I could see a poll number, but I had a lot of trouble believing the poll number. And he did have a chance. He won convincingly. And so I want to get at the way he sold himself in Kansas. I think this clip is really telling. I have people say to me, I can't figure you out. Are you liberal or conservative? And my answer is, yes, of course. And they're like, no, no, which are you? And I'm like, I think we can be both. To be a liberal means to be generous of spirit, open to seeing things with new eyes, and to be open to reform. And to be conservative means holding on to values or beliefs that are really important. We can be both of those things at the same time. And I know this about all of you. Even the most liberal in this room, you're conservative compared to somebody you know. And all of you who are more conservative are liberal compared to somebody you know. And so we need each other. What did you make of his campaign? Again, I mean, I think we've talked about this idea of transcendence, right? But there, people, I think, are so exhausted with being enraged all the time. There's been so many families that have been split apart over politics, you know, friendships split apart. And I think people want to move beyond that. And so, you know, we've paid a lot of attention to the way James Tallarico did. This was maybe like a more sort of like slightly more sedate Midwestern version of that. You know, and if you are like a well-spoken Democratic, line pastor right now, I imagine that like Democratic operatives are coming. Because it does. It has a signal, right? That's not what people are used to from Democrats. And so just hearing that that is what you do, right? You are a pastor. I think it opens the door from the beginning to, well, maybe this person is different. Right. And the fact that he has like a big, you know, it's a big church, right? Like he already has this kind of credibility in the community. And he's already clearly, you know, he can't be painted as an interloper in the same way. But yeah, I just, I think that, you know, we talked about like vibe shifts. There is even maybe among people who voted for Trump, there's an exhaustion and just like a desire for some sort of national reconciliation. I think there's also a dimension here where looking at his campaign is a good moment to remember that populism, even though we say it's a good moment to remember, it's a good moment to remember. And I think that's something that we sometimes use it as like a synonym for progressive or leftist. It's not like a position point on the left-right spectrum, because he went really hard against his opponent, Roger Marshall, for the way Marshall had hounded past patients over their debts and the amount of interest Marshall had demanded they pay. Some of them ended up in jail, you know, after he turned it over to collections. So Hamilton was running in some ways a very populist campaign against Marshall. On the other hand, running as, you know, both liberal and I'm pro-life with a heavy heart. Scott Collum in Mississippi also ran as personally pro-life. I think both of them were also like pro-choice as a policy matter. He felt to me, Hamilton, more like the kind of candidate Democrats used to run like in the 90s, where there were like, you know, you had this sort of Southern populist tradition, but it was more culturally conservative. It like wore its faith on its sleeve. He feels like something new now, but he actually felt to me like something very recognizable from more when I was growing up. Yeah, no, I think 100%. I mean, part of this is just about the both the declining power of what, you know, people call like the groups and also a sort of acknowledgement, I think, among a lot of Democrats that on the one hand, like abortion rights, for example, can turn people out on its own that you see, you know, Kansas did pass this abortion rights referendum. A lot of these red did. But it doesn't necessarily motivate people to vote for Democrats. I mean, if anything, some of these referendums kind of gave people permission to vote for Republicans because they had protected their abortion rights. And there's also, I think, just a sense that people want to feel like their representatives are sincerely grappling with these issues instead of sort of like repeating the team's rhetoric. There are Republicans tried to make trans issues so salient, right? And probably this is just them just playing the hits from the last election. But I also have a theory that voters reward the side that seems to care about that issue less, that part of the reason it was damning for Kamala Harris in 2024 wasn't because people were so concerned personally about, you know, sort of whether people are getting their hormones in prison, as just that it was such a statement. I mean, people were so concerned about her priorities, right? And then it was like, they care about this stuff. They don't care about what you're facing. I'm interested in all the reporting you did as you watch us play out. What you think ties all these candidates together? What this sort of new Democratic party with all this talent? And I want to note, we've been focusing very strongly here on the Senate and a couple of governors. It's like, it's very hard to get at the House races because there's so many of them. But, you know, Democrats look to be on track for 250 to 260 House seats. It is an incredible, incredible number. So, I mean, this was happening there. This was all happening at every level. You know, state legislatures flipped. But it does feel to me like there's a lot of new talent. You know, not all these candidates are millennials, but a lot of them are millennials. It feels like a very big moment of generational turnover in the Democratic Party, which is one reason Sherrod Brown and Roy Cooper's victories, which are both very, very, very impressive, I think are getting a little bit less attention because I think people are looking to see what is this new generation going to be like? What do you think this new generation is going to be like? What do you think is different about the Democratic Party that is emerging out of the 2026 midterm from the Democratic Party that emerged out of the 2018 midterm? I mean, fundamentally, the focus on oligarchy, which I don't even remember as kind of using that word in 2018, but right, this kind of focus on oligarchy and corruption. And to some degree, this is just a function of the fact that Donald Trump has been so unleashed and has been able to kind of bestow so many favors on the coterie of people around him. But it has, I mean, and I've said this before, it has created the conditions for Democrats to be the anti-elite, anti-corporate, anti-billionaire class. And so that can mean a lot of different things in practice, right? I mean, I don't, I would be very surprised if they're able to, say, raise taxes or institute a wealth tax anytime soon. There's going to be this debate in the new Congress about like, you know, hold Trump accountable or move forward. And the middle of that Venn diagram, I think, is investigating corruption, right? Investigating the sort of like siphoning off of public goods to all of these kind of vulturous figures. And so, again, I think that you just have, it's not so much just a kind of an anti-Trump party where the most exciting new faces are kind of like faces of the resistance, the gestalt or the is people who believe that like our entire system has been kind of like taken over and that the power of these kind of malevolent figures needs to be broken. I both think that's true. And in some ways, I don't think it's true. I think this is going to be so salient between 2026 and 2028 because Donald Trump is going to remain the center of American politics and Democrats are not going to have to manage some of their own internal tensions. But the difficult thing about a big tent isn't so much running as one, but governing as one. And I've been very interested to see, you know, right after the election, how some of these different candidates are speaking as they think about what is it going to mean to hold a Senate seat and be popular among the rest of the country. And I think that's your constituents in Kansas, right, or in Texas. And Tallarico went on Fox News the day after the election. I think that's a signal unto itself. But I thought what he said was interesting. I am not interested in retribution. The people of Texas did not elect me last night for retribution. They elected me to deliver for them, to make their lives easier and better and less stressful. And that's what I plan to do. And I plan to do it even for the Texans who didn't vote for me. It's why I'm here on Fox News the morning after the election. We appreciate you coming on. We really do. I have a last easy quick question for you. Are you so glad you did that Joe Rogan interview? Well, I had a great time with Joe Rogan. And I'm always willing to go on to shows or podcasts with hosts who disagree with me on any issue because we have to build bridges in this country. We have to repair the ties that bind us together. That is the new form of politics that we pioneered in Texas is how we won. And by double digits in the largest red state in the country. And I think it can be a blueprint for our nation going forward. This to me is a big difference between 2018 and 2026. 2018, I think the Democratic Party still sort of felt this Trump thing was an aberration. That, you know, Butterfly had flapped his wings and James Comey had taken a laptop and Hillary Clinton had lost in a fluke. And you might just be able to like bottle this thing back up, right? Like shove it back into the basement of the country. And so you have to. We had this resistance politics, but it was a little bit of a doubling down politics, right? It's like we thought Donald Trump was bad for these reasons in 2016. Now you can see he's really bad for these reasons, right? Let's like end this forever. And I think now you have this Democratic Party that doesn't believe that, right? They got chastened after 2024, right? They got power back. And whatever they did with that power, it wasn't good enough, right? And instead, Trumpism roared back stronger than before, more popular than before, and fundamentally more dangerous and destructive than before. And so the sense of what happens if you wield power in a way that pushes people back to the other side, I think that's much more going to be much more front of mind for Democrats, right? They still have to win in 2028 to say nothing of then what, you know, if they do win, then what they do after that. I mean, to me, the biggest difference there is their theory about how you peel people off from that coalition, because the kind of in 2018 and really going through the Kamala Harris campaign, there was a sense that the people. That you could win over were sort of educated upper middle class suburbanites who were appalled, you know, and who kind of found Donald Trump like vulgar and were responsive to appeals about democracy. And I remember Gina Hinojosa saying to me, she's like, the people that we're going to win are not the country club Republicans. It's MAGA. And I was like, really? You know, and obviously that can be overstated. There are a lot of people, I think, who were in. MAGA for the mass deportations who are in there for the cruelty. But there are people again, and this is something that's hard for me to understand, that people who still believed even after the first four years of Donald Trump, that Donald Trump was going to make their lives better, that his you know, that he really was the man that they saw from The Apprentice. He really was this sort of like, you know, financial genius and that are going to be. Open to people who they feel like are not just kind of speaking to those anxieties and to the fact that their lives have been so hard, you know, right, who are speaking to them with respect and who can do something for them. I mean, that's the hard part, right, especially when you have Donald Trump in office, you can, you know, you can do certain things, they might be able to restore the ACA subsidies, but I think there's a sense that their potential coalition going forward is a. Different one than the one they imagined a few years ago. I think that's a good place to end. Also, final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So I read almost exclusively fiction in my spare time. And one of the books, a book that came out this year that I absolutely loved, and I think it did well, but I feel like I didn't hear people talking about it, was this book called Good People by Petmina Sabbat. And it's a book about a. Very assimilated. Afghan family in Virginia where the teenage daughter is killed in what may or may not have been an honor killing. It's about a killing. So it has, you know, these kind of like page turning thriller elements, but it's just like such a good book about assimilation and the limits of assimilation. It's like so heartbreaking. So anyway, that is one of them. A book I've been thinking about. Recently, for no particular reason, it's about the last days of a decaying dictatorial cult of personality is The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, which is a book about the assassination of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. And I mean, it's a brutal book. So just like, you know, trigger warning. There's scenes in it that maybe will like. Never leave my mind. But the reason I've been thinking about it recently is because you just get this sense on the one hand of this man whose presence is like all encompassing. And then the way it disappears again, it's like a book that you can't stop reading. But I think it has certain echoes of this moment, although obviously not in a violent way. And then finally, I'm going to recommend. I hope it's OK to recommend a book that I'm halfway through only because as I'm reading it, I'm like, how come I had not heard of this book before? And maybe half your readers have. And they're just like, where have you been? But this book called The Man Who Loves Dogs by Leonardo Padora. Have you heard of it? No, I haven't. OK, so I actually bought it a few months ago when I was going to Mexico City and it didn't come in time. So I've only just started reading it now. It's this like big, fat kind of like Russian novel style historian. Historical novel about the assassination of Leontrotsky, which, you know, if you like, I actually kind of love these novels that are like novelizations of exciting historical events. Yeah, I do too. And this is, you know, the assassination of Leontrotsky is just like a fascinating and kind of wild story. Again, I'm halfway through, so maybe it falls apart. But so far, I feel like it should be more of a classic than it is. Michelle Goldberg, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.