Hello, Surgeon Generation, it is Friday, November 6th, the week of what in America feels like a historic election, possibly the end of a 10-year chapter in our political life. And the thing nobody knows is the answer to the only question I can think about. What's next? While the future is fundamentally unknowable, human beings have developed one tool for trying to define it, an ancient form of technology known as the Emergency Podcast. After a short break, a conversation we recorded just hours ago, I will press the glowing red button in the studio. Here's something I have wondered and worried about a bit in the past few years. Is this the model for what politics in America is just going to be for my lifetime? The model goes like this. Mago wins an election, Donald Trump behaves like he's been appointed dictator for life. Masked agents in the streets killing people, golden monuments to him everywhere, we invade other countries at random, and then American voters get angry and punish them. They put a Democrat in charge. And then Democrats hold power for 15 minutes before squandering it, either by pursuing unpopular ideas or by putting in uncharismatic political leaders or sometimes both. And then Democrats get voted out, Mago wins another victory, and we just do the same thing over and over again until the country really breaks. That's what America has sometimes felt like to me for this 10 year chapter, a country that just ping-pongs between one side which is malevolent and scary, the other which can be scolding and anti-social. And I didn't even think that would end with Trump necessarily. I thought Vance or somebody else would take the helm and it would just go on like this. But this week I don't feel so sure. Not just because of the midterms, it's also the rise of these new Democratic leaders, particularly Mamdani, who just seem able to talk charismatically about things voters actually care about. And then yes, there was this week's enormous blue wave and the many different kinds of Democrats who won. And I just find myself wondering, wait, what are the politics of our country now? Are things going to be different? What would it mean for Democrats to not fuck this up? So I wanted to talk to my favorite politics podcaster, Ezra Klein, whose work helps me figure out the kinds of things I'm trying to figure out this Friday morning. Welcome. Glad to be here. Chief political correspondent for Search Engine. I can see huge promotion. I guess I had assumed on election night there was like a place that you go and I don't know if I was picturing like a room with like lots of screens like NASA or just like a fancy place with lots of Democrats. Where did you begin election night this year, though, on my couch with your phone? With my phone. How is that? So I have a particular approach to election day and election night, which is I try to not hook myself in until I can barely stand it anymore. Because it's a day when you have the most desire for knowledge and there is the least to know. In fact, most of what you will learn on election day will mislead you. I will never forget I'm scarred for life by the release of the exit polls in 2004. I remember giving my friend at UCLA a giant hug because John Kerry was going to route George Debbie Bush. And I've had that happen, like as a professional now many, many times. So on election day, I went to the gym, I went to the dentist. I took care of my kids. I was at home. And it was only when South Carolina began to move that I decided I should go be around other people for this. This is going to be a big one. This is like the next we're going to win tonight. And so that was the moment. I wanted to ask what was the most surprising thing you felt that night. Is it watching like South Carolina shook as soon as South Carolina began to shake? I mean, we had some early things coming in from Florida. But when the New York Times in Needle began to swing its way, cutting back through years of built up trauma in Liberals back in the other direction on South Carolina, once things began happening in the States, you took for granted that they could not happen in, then you realize you're dealing with an election in which you can't predict the set of outcomes. And what is sort of beautiful about this election is I don't know anybody who predicted it. Not one person. And the beauty of that is not just like the ideas that you support one, but the feeling that like, oh, this country might not be entirely predictable. I think we might all be surprised about where we live. I want to be clear that if this was the other way, the other way, I would not find it so beautiful. I'm not just in here for high variance. But I think one of the tragedies of modern American politics is how much is taken for granted. And how stuck in our perceptions of the country and political action and political boundaries we are. And when you get stuck, when you operate from the perspective that, you know, a Democrat can never win, South Carolina or Florida or Mississippi, you know, they're a Republican can never win in California or New York, what happens is that the parties and the political professionals with their affect of knowingness, stop trying and stop being creative and stop acting as if you might be able to stop acting with agency. Yeah. And there's a term in political science and you'll hear it. Donald Trump used it on election at 2024, a realignment, a realignment election that comes from a 1950s political science paper and it describes elections that have very, very high turnout that have very surprising results given existing political patterns and whose results then persist over a period of time. And so like realigning elections are like the new deal where a bunch of constituencies moved over the Democrats and stayed there for a very long time. There was a lot of talk in 2024 of being a realignment election because it built on the surprising result in 2020 where Hispanic voters, Asian voters, to some degree black voters, young voters, working class voters, had moved towards Trump. And so you were beginning to see this realignment theory about a multiracial working class Republican coalition. The 2026 midterm is a dealignment election. I don't know any Democrat who thinks, well, South Carolina belongs to Democrats now permanently below. What it is is first the realignment melted away, the biggest swings in the electorate were Hispanic voters, young voters, Asian voters, all kinds of groups that Donald Trump had begun to really win. Now, how much of that is persuasion? How much of that is them staying home a little bit unclear? We don't really have that data yet. But first, that new coalition not only didn't materialize, it went into hard reverse. But then the other thing is because the swings were so big, the political map like melted from red and blue into just like whatever happens if you combine red and blue, right? Democrats didn't just win a Senate seat in Texas against a scandal plagued adulterer. They won all of Texas, right? They won statewide, they won the governorship, right, against a completely normal gubernatorial candidate. They won House elections in Texas, Senate elections in Texas. Democrats won not just in Ohio with shared brown, who's in no quantity there, but Amy Acton routed the vague Ramaswami in the gubernatorial election. So you're seeing an election this week where after it, the things people thought they knew about politics, about where particular Democrats could compete are not true. And that means going into the next election, and a lot is going to happen between now and then, which I think is an important thing to really talk about and keep in mind, that creates this strategic possibility to think in a way where you're asking yourself, what would it mean to wield power, to recruit candidates, to run campaigns such as Democrats won the next Senate seat in Kansas? Such a Democrats didn't just win the Secretary of State election in Indiana, which they did this week. They won the presidential in Indiana, which Barack Obama did in 2008, right? So it's not an impossible thing to imagine. What would it mean to use these two years with this incredible taste of winning power? You didn't know you could win and didn't think you could win to build that power. So what is, I mean, like what confuses me is I understood, I mean, I think I understood the country we were in 15 minutes ago, which is like, there's just places that are always going to be red and places that are always going to be blue. And there's a few places that are purple. And we just like, both of the parties just fight for those places. What does it mean in a world where like assuming that this is not just one really unusual election with one really unusually unpopular president, what does America look like in a world where nobody could take for granted that any state is anything, that like, that everything might suddenly be up for grabs. The world you're describing is the world of American politics. For most of you.
the existence of America. And the reason that was true, and this is sort of, in part, what my first book, "Wire of Polarized" is about, the reason that was true was that the parties were less different from each other. You had conservative Democrats, you had liberal Republicans, there are times where you didn't have Democratic or Republican parties, at least in the way we do now. And it was totally normal for people to split their tickets and swing wildly election from election. I am gonna forget these numbers a little bit by memory, but what I'm telling you here is roughly right. - Okay. - So these are numbers from a couple of actions ago, but I think it's in the 50, 60, 70s. If you look at how much a state would swing, presidential election to presidential election, it was something like 13-ish points, huge swing. - Yeah. - By the kind of late Obama and Trump election errors, it was one to two points. So the likelihood that California was gonna vote radically different one election to another had gotten very, very weak. - Yeah. - The, another political sense term for this is calcification, they're frozen in place. That reflects, in part, the way the media nationalized, people used to get very different information in different places. It reflects, in part, the way the parties have changed, but it also reflects, in part, what the parties have done. And so this is not just like a fact of political life, if the parties acted very differently, different outcomes would happen. Donald Trump himself is an example of this. He came into the Republican Party, he took it over, he gave it a very, very different face, whatever you think of that face. And it did alter the political map, it did alter the composition of the political coalitions. The strange thing about what happened with Donald Trump, the thing that doesn't even really have like a conceptual explanation for it, is Donald Trump heralds in this huge transformation because he's so radically alters what the Republican Party stands for. And yet we remain this super narrowly divided electorate where like 2% of the vote in the swing states and the respald states decides functionally every election. - Yeah. - Historically, this is really weird. Francis Lee is a political scientist who studies us and he's used in a whole book about this. And in American politics, it has traditionally been the case that you have a dominant party for decades and then a minority party in that period. So post Civil War era, the Republican Party is dominant for a long time. Post New Deal era, the Democratic Party is dominant for a long time. This period in American politics is competitive in terms of power swinging back and forth in a way no previous era has ever been. We have never seen power swing back and forth at the house, Senate and presidential level as often as in the last 25 years. - But I mean, I don't know to get out of the future but maybe it's over. - I don't know. I wouldn't predict that. What I would say is, wouldn't it be interesting to try? And this is the thing, I think one of the things you're gonna try to ask me here is what should the Democrats do? - Yes. - And here's my answer to that. And this is I actually think what most of their voters ultimately really want from them. There are things they're gonna have to do with the power they have been granted. And I'm thinking here nationally, not in the governorship, et cetera. There's gonna be a lot of accountability work to do. A lot of investigation. There's gonna be a certain amount of actual legislating. But I think what the Democrats need to do, I think what the Democratic base wants them to do is build power. Not win the 2026 midterm and then lose the 2028 presidential election or win it very, very narrowly, right? You can have a very big midterm result in 1994 for the Republicans, 2010 for the Republicans and go on to lose the next presidential. You cannot draw straight lines from a midterm to a presidential but you can also build power between 2006 for the Democrats leads to '08 and '08 they get a super majority in Barack Obama. So what they need to think about how to do is they have power and sometimes you have this metaphor in American politics comes from George W. Bush where he says after his reelection, I've earned political capital and I intend to spend it. He does spend it. He tries to privatize social security and it makes him hideously popular and in part leads to the '06 midterm. But I've been thinking about that line lately because actually what rich people do with capital is not spend it. They invest it, right? That's the point of capital. Capital, you invest it thoughtfully and then you get all this extra capital, right? It begins to build for you. And the question for Democrats right now is not how to spend the power they got, it's how to invest the power they got. And what would, like in your mind, what is the obvious kind of? 'Cause I was like, I've been talking to friends this week just like normal people who follow the news who are stunned by the size of what just happened who's immediate thought is kind of like how are the Democrats going to fuck this up? Like what would squandering or spending in a like, there have been many times in the past where, whether it means like, I don't know, like pursuing impeachment in a way that seems kind of unpopular, like what would the fumble look like if you saw an immediate fumble? It would be Democrats who listen to themselves and not to the voters. We so often think of politics as about talking, like who's gonna be a great Democratic candidate? You know, you were talking about Mamdani a second ago, a lot of excitement right now about John Asif. We're always like excited about how good people are talking. - Yeah. - But also the people who are really good at talking have to first be really good at listening. That's not true always and for every one of them. And we like to imagine our leaders taking us to places we have not been and maybe we're not even ready to go. That is often what great leaders do. But also great leaders are able to listen. And by the way, it's notable about Mamdani that the video that begins his actual, like rise into major politics right after the 2024 election is a video where he goes around and talks to Trump voters and listens to what they are saying, right? And it's like, oh, they care about affordability, right? Mamdani did not run on Trump as an authoritarian. Mamdani ran on New Yorkists to expensive for you. But one of my kind of one sentence summations of this election is that Donald Trump didn't listen to the country and Democrats did. And I mean, Donald Trump didn't even listen to himself. He ran in 2024. He said he was gonna bring down the price of groceries. He wasn't gonna start any new wars. He's raised a price of functionally everything. - Yeah. - He started some insane new war. He has aligned his family's pockets. His things are getting more expensive for everybody else. He was hired to do a job by the people who made up the winning margin for him, which was not MAGA. And now I did he not do that job. He did the reverse of that job and bragged about it. You know, overhauling the ballroom and the reflecting pool and meanwhile, you know, you can't afford gasoline. Democrats meanwhile, the biggest failure the Democratic Party tends to make is it stops listening to the electorate and it instead listens to its own people, its own staff, its own groups, its own kind of hardcore base voters and what they want is different than what the broad electorate wants. (gentle music) We're gonna take a short break. If politics works better when politicians listen to voters, I think we can agree that podcasts work better when listeners listen to ads. But after those ads, what the broad electorate might actually want from Democrats? (gentle music) (gentle music) This episode of search engine is brought to you in part by Mooby. Mooby is a global film company that handpicks an incredible selection of international films, modern masterpieces, and unforgettable documentaries. Right now, I've been enjoying one of their latest releases, Making, Marie, and Tornet. Back in 2005, Sophia Copilot was granted unprecedented access to shoot at the Palace of Versailles at just 34 years old. Her mother, the late Eleanor Copilot, captured 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage that's at unseen for two full decades. Now that material has finally been crafted into a breathtaking documentary, it offers an extraordinarily intimate look at Elena Canonaro's iconic costume design, the immense pressure of directing as a young woman, and this rare moving dynamic of two brilliant generations of women behind the camera together. It's the kind of film that stays with you long after the credits roll, inspiring you to talk, read, and dream about cinema in a whole new way. You can try movie-free for 30 days at movie.com/sturchengine. That's m-u-b-i.com/sturchengine for a whole month of great cinema for free. (upbeat music) Welcome back to the show. For the next two years, Democrats will have the House, they will have the Senate. Most states, governors will be Democrats, but the presidency still belongs to Donald Trump. In that world, I wanted to know, what does Democrats exercising their power even realistically look like? Particularly when what voters have been promised relentlessly is affordability. I ask, as you're about this. - So first, to be blunt, Democrats cannot substantially lower the old prices of everything from the House and the Senate in the next two years. That is not within their power set. There are bills they could pass.
could be helpful. You know, those like a big permitting reform bill would make it easier to build all kinds of big energy, and this is going to split the Democratic caucus in different ways, because it would make it much easier to build clean energy, which is why a bunch of Democrats need to go shade it out this bill, also make it easier to build dirty energy, right? Which is why a bunch of Democrats don't like the bill. The bill is, I think, a unnet better for climate, but you could argue it. The bill is definitely better for affordability. So there's going to be a question here of, well, which thing do Democrats actually actually prize, because the other thing is you can put in affordability skin suit over all of your normal political opinions. Yeah. But actually, you don't care about affordability. You care about all of your other political opinions, and you just like talking about affordability. So there's going to be places where they have to make governing decisions about lowering prices. That's, I think, not going to be the core of it, though, because fundamentally Donald Trump is not going to want to work with him that much. Donald Trump is not a bipartisan deal maker. He never has been. Yeah. And the thing that is going to happen over the next two years is Donald Trump is still going to be president. Like, here's a question for you, PJ. What did Democrats do with power in 2007 and 2008? What did Democrats do with power in 2017? I asked you. I don't remember. Last couple of years before Obama, what were they doing? Until the financial crisis, when the economy bottoms out, nothing anybody remembers. Right. The thing is the opposition party in Congress is not the one held responsible for the condition of the country. Right. And what is going to happen for the next two years is Donald Trump is going to go on tilt. I think people are making a bit of a conceptual mistake and thinking that there is going to be the straight line from the country here to the country in 2028. There isn't going to be one. Donald Trump is a 80 year old decompensating, erratic, reckless person who is going to come under tremendous investigatory pressure, not just him, but his family and his administration, many of whom have been lining their pockets or seeking investment that when sunlight shines on it, people are not going to like it. Like, how much money from the Gulf States did go into Jared Kushner's investment funds during this period? And what did the Gulf States want for that money? Are they just so impressed by the kind of investor Jared Kushner's? So it's going to be that. You have AI, which is, I mean, AI was a major part of the selection and it is reshaping everything in ways people don't like kind of across the board and Trump is extremely bought in on a letter rip AI strategy. But in the next two years, it is entirely possible. You will see big loss of control incidents, entirely possible. You will see more effects on the labor market, particularly for young workers, entirely possible. We will have, you know, frightening geopolitical things happen. So I think the question of how AI shapes politics in this period is very open. Then there's AI and the economy. The economy is currently held aloft on a wave of cap expending and like in video evaluations. But if for instance, you can't build data centers anymore and then you get a bad loss of control incident, that could pop the stock market lead to a pretty significant correction very, very quickly. So we could end up in a recession. We don't really understand. I don't buy anybody who says they fully understand the way this sort of circular private financing deal making is happening. So I don't think we're looking at a '08 style global financial crisis. You never really know what is connected to what in private credit markets. It is very possible things could pop and they could get like very, very, very shaky and very, very uncertain and people could panic. You have the war in Ukraine right versus invasion of Ukraine. You have Israel and Gaza. You have China and Taiwan. You have the things we're not even thinking about. I mean, who thought when we were talking in 2018 that in 2020 the election would happen amidst lockdowns and face masks. So we have like a world that is just thrumming with risk right now. That is how I perceive it. Thrumming with risk. And honestly, Trump got more or less lucky by mainly the bad things that happened during the first years of his term. He just did them. Yeah, totally. What happens when he doesn't do them and he has to respond. I mean, we watched the strength of the pandemic. He didn't respond well. So it's not even clear that 2020 election will be about affordability. It could be about some total other crisis or financial crisis or it's all here. It's just, you know, it's like my imagination and like everybody have been talking to this week, their imagination goes to like, well, what mistakes might the Democrats make or how might they do things? Well, the thing you are thinking about is more Trump is still present for two years. The world feels like it is in a very uncertain wobble right now. He still has power. He's cornered. He's erratic. He never sort of behaves well under those circumstances. And he has very little incentive to care about how he leaves government after he leaves government. So your thinking is more like you're still thinking about Trump as a source of instability, less than you're thinking about like what? Like he is still the person with the most power to change things for the worse. Absolutely. And the person is going to be focused on. So Democrats have to do the job of an opposition party and investigate and legislate and keep up pressure and be disciplined. Honestly, I'm not that worried about them doing that in this period. You know, one reason Democrats want the shutdown is they just remain disciplined and Trump acted crazily during the shutdown, right? Under that pressure, he wasn't negotiating. He was releasing AI videos about Russ Vaud as like the grim reaper. He was acting like a complete lunatic. And he lost the shutdown. Because under pressure, he didn't respond in a way that made people sympathetic to him. So there's that. I've also just been thinking about the difference between the Democratic Party coming out of the 2026 midterm and the Democratic Party coming out of the 2018 midterm, right? Both you know, big midterms. I mean, this one was bigger, but 2018 was a gigantic victory. I think that Democratic Party was actually quite different though. And the reason is that I think of that Democratic Party still thought Trump was a fluke. Yeah. He was in aberration. He had one by accident and that if you just mobilized and you doubled down on who you were and you got like the whole country to see Trump the way you saw Trump, it would be over. It would be over, right? This thing that should have never happened would never happen again. I don't think Democrats have that delusion anymore. I think that they've seen Trump like politics take off all over the world. Right. It's not just here that we have this kind of thing, but also Democrats, one in 2018, they won in 2020. And then the way they wielded power alienated, disaffected people sufficiently, the Trumpism roared back stronger than ever, more popular than ever, with more allies and ever like Elon Musk. Now, that had its own counter effect because Trump then had the actual power to run the administration. He had always wanted to run instead of being constrained by Democrats, by a Republican party that wasn't entirely in his pocket as he was in the first term. Trump was surrounded by yes men and excellence. He could do whatever he wanted and he did and people hate it. I don't think Democrats think though that all they need to do is double down on who they always were to win. There may be some people who think that, but I think they understand that if they're going to maintain popularity in Texas, where they now have a governor's mansion, they need to be a party that appeals to Texans who have not voted for Democrats for a very, very long time. What does that look like though? What is the version of a democratic platform that people in Texas get excited about and stay excited about? I mean, I think it'll be a mix of things, right? On the one hand, you're going to need real border security. Democrats really fucked up on the border in the Biden era. The sense that people don't care about order at the border that that's simply like a racist Trump thing is just not true. Now, people also don't want cruelty within the country, right? As it is not an immigration expert, it always just sort of seems like what people want is they want the way that people get in to be like basically fair. But if people are here, they do not want them like pulled apart from their children outside of school. I'm sure the actual policy of how you have a tight border and then humane enforcement is hard, but it doesn't seem as complicated as our political system seems to make it. A simple cut to say, is a democratic party is popular when it focuses on economics and not that popular when it moves into other areas. And I don't like the economic cultural language because I don't think say immigration is a cultural issue or at least not just a cultural issue, but it's basically true. The way that you know, Rosa ran in Texas was downplaying a lot of traditional other fights, right? She would say, for instance, you know, I might be pro-choice, but I'm not going to focus on abortion because abortion divides us. I'm going to focus on what we agree on, which is, you know, data centers not being owned by Elon Musk, you know, making groceries cheaper. The democratic party, the dangers for it are there are things that its own base is very, very excited about, like, say spending two years on impeachment, which, you know, Trump could do something without
That becomes popular in the country, but the country did not elect Democrats to impeach Donald Trump, even if impeaching Donald Trump would be sort of satisfying. The country elected Democrats to make things cheaper and so they need to be focused and then when they wield power, this is like the harder part. When they wield power, if they win in 2028, then they actually have to deliver that, right? And not just that, they need to be caught trying to deliver that. I actually think the public is pretty forgiving of politicians not achieving everything they said they would, so long as they really think you're trying. So Obama wins in 2012, not because the economy is great in 2012, the economy is not great in 2012, but the public believed that Obama was trying, that he had been handed a bad hand and he was doing maybe not a perfect job with it, but a good job with their interests in mind and it was worth giving him more time to keep doing the work. And you know, Mandani here is, say, not governing really as a hardcore Democratic socialist from the New York mayoralty, like we are not socializing the means of production in New York. Mandani is constantly out there in front of people getting caught trying to make government work better on their behalf. Yeah. You can just endlessly see him out there working for you and not getting distracted on a bunch of other issues, right? Not kind of all over the place on everything and that kind of focus like listening to what people want from you and trying to deliver it and trying to keep the place where you and them agree at the forefront of American politics is really important. That can be hard to do because there are issues who may not all agree on that are important. The fact that climate change is a more controversial issue and particularly big action on climate change is not, you know, necessary winning platform in every state. It doesn't mean that greenhouse gas science isn't real. So you have situations where you're dealing with something where maybe the public doesn't feel the problem yet or they're not where you are on it yet and you might still have to try to act on it. But day in day out, they have to feel that you hear them and they also have to feel that you like them. I mean, this again, you know, this is other side of building power, which is candidate recruitment and political campaign design. And Democrats did a really good job, you know, with people like Adam Hamilton in Kansas and James Talleriko in Texas and some of these other candidates, you know, Josh Turek and Rob Sand in Iowa, nominating people who seemed like they were really of their places and seemed like they really liked their neighbors. Like the biggest problem Democrats have politically is not even what they believe. It is a sense that Democrats kind of look down on you. And the Democratic Party needs to make its face, people who the public sees has different than that. What happened that they seem to figure that out this time? Like what happened behind the scenes where all of a sudden you had rather than a bunch of candidates from different places, saying the exact same things in the exact same way, which is what it felt like a few years ago. It did feel like this year, there was just like a slate of people that felt ideologically somewhat different, we get felt like something had shifted in the giant factory where Democratic candidates are constructed. Parties respond to defeat. To go back to what we were talking about at the beginning, like what might make this midterm different? Parties respond to defeat and they respond to victory. They don't always respond well to either, right? You know, you can get defeated and radicalize even further, right? That's the Republican Party after the 2020 election. You can get defeated and rethink everything. You can win and you can wild the overreach, right? You've won enough power now to make yourself unpopular again, or you can win and you can use that power very carefully, very thoughtfully, very wisely. And I think basically what happens in 2018 and 2020, it's not the only thing that happens, but particularly in 2020, Democrats helped a very much along by social media and by this sort of counter radicalization to President Trump. They just went into a mode of overreach. They were driven sort of mad by, like, this can't be our country. We have to stop this from happening. And I do think algorithmically, there was like a big thing happening where they were like trapped in a Twitter echo chamber. Yeah. I continued to think Elon Musk buying Twitter is functionally good thing for the Democratic Party. Because he deranges himself and the right deranges itself where it's like, they become convinced that what America really wants is anti-ideat racism and right deranges itself on Twitter. And the left is fractured across too many competing social media platforms to believe any one of them is representative. Nobody is like, you know what really represents the American public? Blue sky. Yeah. That's got its, like, finger on the pulse of Oklahoma. So nobody believes that, which is good. It's fine to have a place to talk to your co-partisans, there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't mistake anything being said there for reality, right, or at least for the representativeness. So there's that. There's also just a reality that there was a massive global inflation spike during Biden's term. And Joe Biden was 80 than 81 and rapidly losing his ability to communicate. Yeah. You know, if you imagine that same election and that same presidency, but you put in a younger more communicatively capable president, and there's not a historic rise in prices, it probably looks pretty different. Yeah. So I mean, you also, there's a, look, if Democrats take power in 2029 and the economy bottoms out, that's going to be a big problem. Yeah. So the reality has its say in all this too. What about like, how do you balance like, I feel like the last time to have a foresight side power, there was this feeling of like, oh, what we need is accountability. So what that ended up looking like was impeachment and what that felt to a lot of voters like was just like, score settling and distraction. On the other hand, this is an election where people really do care about corruption. The corruption has metastasized like, how do you strike a balance between, there needs to be accountability and you're telling voters we care about gas prices, not about getting another mug shot of Donald Trump? I think on the accountability side, because gas prices are going to be different, but they are elected to contain Donald Trump. That's true. Investigations and rules. So they're going to need to do a lot of investigations and I do think people want to know who is paying for what in the Trump administration and around the Trump family and what are they getting for that money? Yeah. I think following that money and you can listen to somebody like John Assef, that kind of investigatory work connects, actually, to their getting rich and you're getting poor. Right. You get billions of dollars over here and you can't afford your rent. So there actually is a way to connect those into one super-conductive political message. Assef's capacity to do that is why he's vaulted to the front of the 2028 prediction markets. So there's that. There's also rules, right? So they should be passing bills through the House and the Senate that then they are forcing Donald Trump to have a sign of veto that say end stock trading by members of Congress. Yeah. That impose incredibly intense rules on the president and the people in the administration about what is happening with their money and what their families kind of can't do. Right. There's like a million ways you can actually legislate like tight rules on ethics. And I can tell you for a fact, that is where Democrats are beginning to start. You could do a lot on money in politics, certainly on bills about money in politics. Should we have Elon Musk or for that matter on the left, Michael Bloomberg, who put in a lot less money than Musk, but still, I think it was $80 million at the end of the election. I don't want this situation where America's richest people can warp the reality of an election by pumping in enough money. Now, that money didn't do much in this election because I actually think Musk made himself such an issue that it was counterproductive because people in Texas didn't want to feel like he was buying the election. But it is still the case that we do not want our elections so oriented around the set of people who can donate between $40 and $400 million because the amount of time they're getting and the ways the parties try to serve them in advance to either neutralize the threat or win over the funder is corrosive to democracy. So your thing would be make rules that are almost impossible to argue with unless you're arguing for corruption. And then either the rules get passed, which is good, or Trump has to take a positive stance towards corruption, which will be unpopular. Yes. Sometimes he's called messaging bills, I was talking to somebody in the house, he's like, you know, like we are trying to create conflict. Conflict is what gets attention. And you do bills to, you know, maybe Trump does sign them, right? Sometimes he just capitulates, right? I don't say the Epstein files, but you are doing bills to make clear what the two sides believe. What are the conversations you're having with Democrats and leadership right now? Like, when I talk to just the people I know, they're like, this is exciting and new and I hope they don't fuck it up. When you talk to the politicians, they're like, this is exciting and new and we hope we don't fuck it up. Yeah. They were not ready for how much power they were going to win. I don't mean that negatively, they're sitting there quaking in the boots, they're thrilled. But they like everybody else were like probably the Democrats when they did not see the size of them. Yeah. They thought probably Telleriko wins in Texas and probably Gina Hina Hosa doesn't, right? You know, which is like what the polls said, what the prediction market said, they all of them have been burnt by all the wrong polls we've all been burnt by. Yeah. And so they don't go into elections thinking the polls are going to be off by three or four points in our favor. Yeah. That is not the psychology of the Democratic Party.
They are adjusting, right? Well, they still don't know how many seats they have. They, right now, it looks to me like Democrats are going to win at Alaska and Mississippi. So, they'll be 56 in the Senate, that was, that was, it is really worth saying that eight months ago, Democrats were not expected to take the Senate, except in an extreme scenario. They were not expected to get to 51, except in extremists. Now, they're going to be at 56, that is shocking, it is shocking. It looks like the end of few seats shy of 260 in the House. That is the largest house majority in like half a century. They didn't plan for that. Now, I'm not sure how different planning for that actually is, because again, Donald Trump is still president and these are not veto-proof majorities, but they're waking up to a different world and the thing that it also makes possible is, well, if you have 56 Senate seats now and Donald Trump fucks things up further in the next two years, is it really so impossible? You get 60 and if you have 60, then you have a filibuster-proof majority or separately a majority that could pretty easily get rid of the filibuster or carve out new exceptions to it, then you could do a lot more. So again, I think like the key thing here is power building. It's not what do you do with the power now. It's how do you build on all this power so you get more power in 2029 and you can actually dramatically expand Medicare, dramatically expand pre-K. You can actually regulate AI. You could end a gerrymandering, you could pass campaign finance reform. You could do all these things, you've not been able to do because you didn't have the unity and you didn't have the power. So the exciting thing I think for them is not what can you do in the next two years. That is the necessary thing. But if you do the necessary thing well, Democrats don't get into office because they're excited about being the opposition party to Donald Trump. They get into office because they want people to have health care. They get into office because they want people to have clean energy. They get into office because they want people to have child care and good school and clean water. So what happens if you can actually do that? Ezra Klein. He's the host of the very excellent Ezra Klein show. And he brought us answers to our question this week. How the Democrats might not fuck up this political opportunity by listening to voters, by trying to keep the focus on the issues where the party's trusted, like the economy and cost of living, and not on the issues where it's not. And he says, rather than the Democrats just spending their political capital, they should try to accrue more of it. Set in two years, the Democratic Party might deliver more to voters than just a block against MAGA. Although, as of November of 2026, it seems that that is also something American voters have been radically asked for. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthie Pinomini, who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer, Emily Maltaire is our producer, theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bazarian. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Restennis, thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Moira Curran, Josephina Frances, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Shep. If you have a question you'd like our show to answer, please shoot us a line at PJ Vote
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