David Shor
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And, you know, what you could see is just there's a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much it increased by Donald Trump, you know, towards Trump. You can see in counties like, you know, Queens, New York or Miami-Dade in Florida, Trump increased his vote share percentage by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so when we go and we look at the precinct election results, what we see is that in immigrant communities of all races, particularly Hispanic and Asian communities, but Trump even increased his vote share in Haitian precincts in Florida. When we do that, our best guess is that Immigrants went from being a Biden plus 27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
This group of naturalized citizens is roughly 10 percent of the electorate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That's exactly right. You know, our estimates and it's really hard to know exactly what happened. You know, it turns out that working class immigrants do not answer a ton of surveys. But our our best guess is that they swung 23 percentage points against the Democratic Party.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so the crazy thing is, if you believe this and, you know, there's some uncertainty, but I think some version of this is probably true. Then something like half of the net votes that Trump received came from immigrants. And, you know, this wasn't efficient for him personally. It's one of the big reasons, you know, why the bias of the electoral college went down by so much this cycle.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Because if you look in the battleground states, things swung toward Trump maybe by like half a percentage point, and that was enough for him to win or, you know, one percentage point. But if you look at like the four biggest states where immigrants are concentrated, you know, New York, California, Texas, you know, Trump did extremely well. And so it wasn't very efficient for him.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But in terms of people changing their mind, it was a massive, percentage of the story.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
No. Inflation probably played some kind of role here, though, you know, the flip side is if you look in the UK again, it happened the same year. It's just that the incumbent was right-wing instead of left-wing. And, you know, their labor did also, you know, drop with, you know, Black and Asian and Hindu voters increasing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so I think that there's some kind of globalized right-wing phenomena that's happening. It's hard to know exactly what, but I agree completely. So now I just move on, you know, to the next slide. Here we have Harris support by single age year, by race and gender.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And one of the things you can see here is if you just look at 18-year-olds, you know, 18-year-old women of color are the only of the four that Harris won. Trump narrowly won, you know, non-white men.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by, I think, in the last four years, is that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we've experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years. And so, you know, the next chart, you know, just to describe it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I agree. This is, to me, the scariest chart in this entire presentation. And again, you know, something I'm very surprised by. So on the bottom, we have age. And at the top, we have the gender gap and support between women and men, you know, for support for Kamala Harris. And so what you can see is that, you know, for voters over 30,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The gender gap was fairly stable at around 10%, which is roughly where it's been in American politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, I think that a lot of people underestimate how recent the gender gap is. You know, historically, Republicans did better. with women than men. And, you know, this was true across most of the West that center-left parties did better with men than women. And, you know, that's changed in the United States in the Clinton era. But, you know, it's been stable since then.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But what's crazy is if you look at people who are under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. If you look at 18-year-olds 18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics. Is that abortion? You know, I think it's too early to say exactly what the cause is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
What's interesting is that this is happening in other countries as well. Obviously, different countries have different political systems, but I've seen similar patterns in Canada, in the U.K., in Norway. There's a lot of research, you know, to do here. But it's still very striking. Like a lot of people talk about the Democratic young men problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I think it's still somehow underrated because the actual numbers are just a lot worse than people think.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Right. And I'll say, if you look at the UK election last year, you know, the Labour Party did a lot better, you know, because the incumbent party was unpopular. But I think what's interesting is that if you look at it by age, the Conservatives actually increased their vote share among 18 to 24 year old voters, I think by two or 3%, even though they did eight or 9% worse overall. And so I do think,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It's not just inflation. It's not just backlash to the incumbent governments, though I'm sure that's part of the story too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, I do want to just stress that this seems to be a global phenomena. And, you know, I don't want to over-center the particular things the Democratic Party has done rather than, you know, the broader cultural... Peterson and Tate are global figures. No, exactly.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, what I'll say is I just think that, you know, we're in the midst of a big cultural change that I think that people are really underestimating. You know, if you look at Zoomers, there's just a lot of really interesting ways that they're very different in the data. They're much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
They are a lot more, if you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them. If I was going to speculate, I think that phones and social media have a lot to do with this. How that translates into partisan politics depends on what the parties do, but I think it's a big shift.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, I agree with that entirely. Online communities are way more gender segregated than offline communities are. And so in that respect, it should be unsurprising that suddenly shifting a bunch of young people's social worlds to be entirely online all at once caused the political situation to change.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, I have to admit, I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems like I was wrong. You know, the future has a way of surprising us. You know, the flip side of this is that Democrats made a bunch of gains among old voters, and I'm sure that they'll be happy that they did two years from now in the midterms.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But if we don't do anything about this, then this problem could become very bad. And so now I'm just going to move over to a little less descriptive and just kind of talking about how this happened. So right here I have this slide. This is very simple. This is just showing exit poll favorability for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidate in 2020 and 2024.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And, you know, I think it's just really important to ground any discussion of the election with the simple fact that Donald Trump was just as unpopular on Election Day last year as he was in 2020 and maybe even a little bit more unpopular. But what changed is that Biden had a net favorability rating of plus six and Harris had a net favorability rating of minus six.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And that's why we see this chart. I think the best explanation for why Kamala Harris was unpopular is in this next slide, which is just that... The Biden administration was extremely unpopular for most of its term. You know, they saw their approval fall off a cliff after Afghanistan, and then it dropped further as inflation and immigration and the budget fights all happened in the fall.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And then it never recovered. And so, yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can never tell a counterfactual world, but I think that Biden would have had an even harder time distinguishing himself from his record.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, I think that that's the big salient fact about this election. And I don't think it was impossible for Kamala to do better. This was a winnable election at the end of the day. It was very close. But this was the big thing that was weighing Democrats down.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so, you know, I just want to move forward, you know, just in terms of why in our polling, the way that we measure issue importance is we show people two random issues and we just ask which of these problems is more important, you know, to the, you know, to the problems facing the country today.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And, you know, people pick and, you know, when you model it out, whenever you have cost of living or inflation put up against something else, eight or nine out of 10 people picked that cost of living and inflation was more important.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
No, we did. But, you know, we did a survey where we just asked people, you know, what's more important right now, preserving America's institutions or delivering change that improves people's lives? And it was 78 to 18, delivering change that improves people's lives. But, you know, what's really hard...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think this has been one of the hardest things about being a political consultant in the last eight years is that every day Trump does terrible things that I think are objectively awful and scary and that piss me off. I'm going to prosecute my enemies or whatever. And then we do a bunch of tests. And voters really don't want to hear about it from us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think that Trump would do better if he didn't do that stuff, for sure. But I think that voters want us to talk about concrete ways that they're going to improve people's lives.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, I mean, I think it's when we measure issues, you know, we measure how important voters find it. And then we just measure, do you trust Democrats or Republicans more on this issue? And what you see here is if you look at the top issues that voters care the most about, cost of living, the economy, taxes and government spending, you know, the deficit, foreign policy, you know, health care.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Other than health care, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages, 15 points. on all of the issues that voters care the most about. And so the story that I would tell in response to your question is that in this election, voters trusted Republicans way more than Democrats on all of the most important issues
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
but also bought into this idea that Donald Trump was a terrible person who couldn't be trusted with power, that made the election be close. But four years from now, Donald Trump will not be the nominee. And maybe they'll nominate somebody who's just as terrible and just as unlikable. But if we don't get out of this trust deficit, I think that, you know, we'll have a lot of problems.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, I think it's just worth saying that four years ago, the number one issue was COVID and healthcare. And those also were the issues that people trusted Democrats the most on. And so the strategy was really obvious, you know, just talk a lot about COVID and healthcare. But, you know, this time we had a much harder problem, which was that
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The issues that people cared the most about, for the most part, voters didn't trust us on. And the issues that people did trust us on, you know, climate change and reproductive rights, probably the big ones, voters just didn't care very much about. And so that was just a very difficult strategic position. And it's also one that was just very different than it was four years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I'm glad you asked. I'm the co-founder of a research firm called Blue Rose Research. We did 26 million interviews last year. We have a team of about 45 people, machine learning engineers, software engineers from companies like Google. And we've done a lot of work to try to figure out what actually happened last year.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, what we saw in our data was that as the Biden administration became a lot more unpopular, all of these things dropped a lot. So some of it was uniform shift. But I think that the last four years, there were some things that structurally changed a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
In every center-left party in the world, you know, generally the left has its issues that it owns and the right has its issues that it owns. But usually the economy is pretty neutral. During the Trump administration, the economy was fairly neutral.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Another really big shift was just that education has gone from being basically one of the best issues for Democrats to being something that's basically neutral now. And, you know, we saw that, you know, in the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2021, we even saw it be an advantage for Republicans.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And then, you know, the other big shift, you know, on the other side was that reproductive rights used to be a fairly neutral issue for Democrats. And immediately after Dobbs, we saw party trusts on reproductive rights shoot up. And so I think, you know, these numbers, they do change.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And this is, you know, one of the big messages I want to get through is just that the world has changed a lot in the last four years. It's going to keep changing and we have to kind of adjust in response to what happens.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, one of the big things that my firm does, it's probably our biggest product, is that we do randomized controlled trials on ads. The idea is that for a given ad, you take a thousand people, you split them into a treatment and control group. You know, 500 people see the ad, 500 people don't. And then you survey them after and you ask them who they're voting for.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And then the difference between treatment and control is can be described as the causal effect. And so, you know, we tested... you know, on the order of, I'd say probably like four or 5,000 Harris ads last cycle. And I just wanted to call out these two ads that were in the top 1% of ads that we tested. One is from Kamala Harris.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Obviously, there's a lot for several parts of the Democratic coalition there. And then on the another ad by Future Forward just shows tax him for a national sales tax for the idea that Trump. Tax him being Trump. Yeah, tax Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
These were obviously the best ads in the campaign. And the point I just want to say is I think this reinforces the point that what voters cared the most about was the cost of living and that voters were really mad, you know, about the actual situation. And I think that Harris being able to, you know, in this ad, acknowledging, oh, things are actually very bad. I don't like this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I have a plan to fix this is part of what made it so effective.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think that there was this big strategic question that Democrats faced, and it wasn't just the Harris campaign, which is polling would tell them you should talk about the economy or voters care a lot about the cost of living. But it's very hard, one, to get media attention on those things. And two, I think that Trump has done a good job of baiting us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think what's really interesting about a lot of the democracy and authoritarian stuff is just that It's how concerned you are by it really varies a lot by political engagement and by education and the kind of people who set media decisions, you know, at CNN or who work in politics are the kinds of people who are going to be much more concerned about it than working class folks are.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The fundamental problem with survey research is just that people who answer surveys are really weird. There's kind of two ways that you can try to fix that. One is that you could try to get a normal representative set of people. That's just impossible in today's day and age. And the other is that you can just try to collect a lot of information and
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Asking the hard questions. Yeah, I think, you know, obviously, I think that democratic messaging last cycle was not economically focused enough. I think that it focused too much on, you know, narratives of defending institutions, defending democracy. And I think it's just very easy for folks to fall into that trap.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The thing I'll say, you know, in terms of why I'm sympathetic to the people who actually had these jobs and had to make these decisions is it just feels wrong. You know, like I have a situation, I mentioned this before, where donors will email me and they'll be like, oh, look at this crazy, absolutely terrible thing, this evil thing that Trump is doing. We need to test it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
We need to tell the voters. You test it and it really doesn't work. People want to hear about eggs, you know, and it's easy for me to say that, you know, because I don't really, I'm not directly in charge. But I just think it just feels really wrong when you're in the moment. It's just very, it's very hard to totally shift direction, you know, just because data tells you one thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So that you can, you know, adjust for how weird they are. You know, the reason I feel fairly confident about this is just, you know, in our work, every time we make any change, you know, to any part of our system, you know, we go back and back test and see how it affects accuracy across, you know, every other election that we've ever surveyed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Each coalition's campaigns are ultimately going to reflect, you know, the aesthetic and cultural choices of the people who staff them. And it makes sense. Like if you had just said two years ago, oh, Trump's going to end by showing up at a McDonald's, like it just wouldn't have been surprising, I think. And so it's just hard to escape, you know, that kind of demographic pull.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But we have to try because we have to actually win these people over. OK, and so now I just have a couple more slides I want to go through. I talked about this before, but voters cared a lot more about delivering change than preserving institutions. And then we have this other polling question here, which I think is interesting, which is just asking people to pick between the statements.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Things could be going better in America, but what we need is a return to basic stability. And the other is things in America are going poorly, and what's needed is a major change and a shock to the system. And when you have those two things, it's 53-37, which is a lot wider than the election result ended up being.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
We can't be fully confident about any particular thing that we say. A lot of the data isn't back yet. But I think that there's enough data to tell a coherent story. And there's the 26 million survey respondents of 8 million unique people. There's precinct and county-level election results. We're also going to try to tie together all of the external data that other people have done.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
there's an enormous amount of status quo bias in politics. Campaigning on big policy changes, you know, can be pretty unpopular. But I think, you know, the way to thread the needle is that this, what this is really saying is that voters were very angry about the state of things. And what they wanted tonally was someone who acknowledged that anger.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Because, you know, Ruben Gallego did a lot of criticism of the status quo and was able to outperform.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
When people think about moderates, they think of somebody like Joe Manchin, someone who's just like down the line on everything. And, you know, the reality, I think that's an accurate description of what highly educated moderates are like. But most low socioeconomic status moderates, they're very extreme on some issues. They're very conservative on other issues.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
When you think of that, it's maybe less surprising that a lot of them like
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That's exactly right. And, you know, the way I like to put that in math terms, you know, the issue correlations for highly educated people are just a lot higher than they are.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
All right, but I'm glad we started talking about ideology because that dovetails to the next slide. Here, we just ask for each of the candidates, do you think this candidate was more liberal than me, more conservative than me, or close to my views?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, 49% of voters said that Kamala Harris was more liberal than me, while only 39% of voters said that Donald Trump was more conservative than me. And so there was this big difference ideological perception gap where a lot of voters saw Donald Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So in 2016, it looked fairly similar to this. In 2020, perceptions of Donald Trump being too extreme went up relative to 2016, and perceptions of the Democratic candidate being too extreme went down from 2016 to 2020. Now, you know, that I think wasn't a property of Joe Biden per se. Like, obviously, him being moderate was a big part of his brand at that time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And what I'll say about this election is that our forecasts this cycle were very accurate. Our overall error was about a third of a percent nationally. And I think that most of the things that we thought would happen did bear out. And, you know, just I do want to spend a second to answer, you know, something that you had asked a second ago, which is just like, why look at survey data?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But, you know, in our polling, you know, we would ask, you know, do you think that Joe Biden is too liberal or too conservative or whatever? And we saw that over the course of 2021, as his approval ratings dipped, the perception that he was too liberal also went up.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That eroded. But, you know, the thing I want to say here before... I move on is I'm really not trying to beat up on Kamala Harris here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Like, I think if you just step back, if you have a situation where only 42 percent of Americans trust the Democratic Party on the economy relative to 58 for Republicans, you know, obviously the standard bearer of the Democratic Party is going to be perceived as too left wing unless they unless they do a lot of stuff to try to counterbalance that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, I just want to say, you know, the TheyThem ad that everybody talks about, it was a good ad, but it was like a 70th percentile ad, you know, in our testing. If you look at all of the best testing ads from Donald Trump, it was basically the economy, it was gas prices, it was immigration, crime. And so I think that there's definitely been an overfocus on DEI, on wokeness, on trans issues.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think it definitely, you know, played a role on the elite discourse and why, you know, So many tech CEOs have become more right wing and, you know, all of all that. But I think the Republicans are making a mistake, honestly, to focus on these things so much relative to concrete issues that people actually care about.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But I think that, you know, super politically engaged people are overrepresented at every single step of the political process. And I think that the only point other than election day when regular people get a say is in polls. So I take that point.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, I think that there's this bigger picture point I want to make where I think that a lot of people see the Trump administration as kind of. A break that shows that all of the traditional rules of politics no longer apply. And I think that to some extent that's wrong, that a lot of what's happening is really very easy to understand.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, Donald Trump, you know, to go back to the ideological thing. He broke with his party. You know, he might have been dishonest about it, but he disavowed Project 2025. He said that he wouldn't cut social programs. He ruled out a national abortion ban. And I think that, you know, that kind of thing just plays a big role in his success.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I think that a lot of these newer things, you know, that we talk about might be less important than we think. So now I just have the last slide of the retrospective. And so, you know, what I have here is we have the share of voters who get their news from TikTok by year, the share of voters, of young voters who get their news from TikTok more than quadrupled in the last four years.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
This is the biggest and probably fastest change in media consumption, you know, that has happened in my lifetime. And it was... quite correlated with support change. Now, obviously, TikTok users are younger, they're less politically engaged. It's not surprising that we dropped among this group. You'd expect that from demographics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But if you go and you do the regressions, I think there was definitely a causal element there. And when you zoom in, particularly, to people who get their news from TikTok who don't care very much about politics, this is a group that's eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago, and that's a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I don't know the answer to that. It's totally possible. We know that they do dial turning on some topics, stuff like Ukraine or Tiananmen Square or whatever. But what I'll say is I think that TikTok represents something fairly radically different than social networks that came before it. And I'm sure that there could be some malfeasance on the part of people who work there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But the thing that I think about sometimes is just that I think TikTok is really the first social media platform that is really truly decentralized. And what I mean by that is just, it's not based on follower graphs. Like if you look at Reels or Twitter or whatever, how many people see a video or a piece of content is highly correlated with how many followers that person has.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
TikTok's a lot more random and there's like very interesting machine learning reasons for why. But I think that it really allowed a lot of content that never would have gotten a lot of views on Twitter or on television to suddenly escape containment and get directly into the eyes of people who don't care that much about politics. And I don't know.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok and Democrats are going to do great now. I don't really know. But I think that... For whatever reason, this big change, I think, really did help Republicans. And it's just an example of how the world has really changed a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think there's a lot of truth in that. I think that TikTok is genuinely strange relative to platforms before it in that its audience is more politically disengaged and more working class. And I think it's just been very hard for us as a party to find creators and content that appeals to people like that. Because all of the people who work in democratic politics are not like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I think that in the old traditional media world, we were a lot like the media gatekeepers. And so it was kind of clear how to win that war. And I think Democrats did a good job of doing it. But now we have a totally different fight. So... You know, just, you know, to move on and talk a little bit about the present as opposed to the long, long time ago of, you know, four or five months ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So you've talked a lot in your previous episodes about Trump's flood the zone strategy. And what we've done here is, you know, we've pulled all his executive orders and stuff that he's campaigned on. I think we have something like 60 dots here. Every one of these dots is a policy that we've pulled. And, you know, what you can see is that there's a lot of variance.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, a lot of the things that he campaigned on, you know, no taxes on tips, deploying the military to the border, voter ID laws, ending remote work for federal employees. A lot of that stuff is very popular.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
While the flip side is a lot of stuff that he's actually doing, you know, he talks about this stuff less, but Medicaid cuts, repealing the ACA, extending tax cuts to billionaires, a lot of that stuff is really unpopular. I mean, just to say something a little controversial, I think a lot of the challenge of the Trump era is, is that they're going to try to bait us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And, you know, we should do everything we can, you know, to actually meaningfully resist and protect the populations that we care about and everything. But I think we need to make sure that we're preserving a considerable amount of time, you know, to attacking Trump on the most effective things that voters are concerned about.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
All right. So first, you know, I'm just going to start with this slide over here that just looks at support for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 by race and ideology. In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. And in 2024, Democrats got 58% of Hispanic moderates. That's only about 7% more than the 52% that they got of white moderates.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You could imagine a theoretical world where we would have really... hard and unpleasant trade-offs. But I think the world we actually live in is that a bunch of the things that we're extremely concerned about are actually really unpopular.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And just kind of going forward to the next slide, here's some randomized controlled trial data that we did that, like I was talking about earlier with the ads, where we just kind of went through and we looked at 58% different things that Trump's going to do. And then we kind of rank ordered them by how persuasive they were at actually changing people's votes and making people disapprove of Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And, you know, I think that a lot of the things that we're most concerned about, Elon causing chaos in the federal government, cuts to, you know, Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security, extending tax breaks for the rich. Obviously, this list of things is not exactly the same as my top five things that I am personally most concerned about with the Trump administration.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But I think that the Republicans are making a lot of unforced errors that make it easier to thread the needle on these things than I think it otherwise would be true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Can you just like think for a second? Can you imagine 70 words? You like stop a Trump voter on the street and you say the 70 words to him and then there's a 2.5% chance he changes his mind. I think that's incredible. Like, I think it is a big deal.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I just think that these two pieces of data tell a story of how we should try to shape the campaign against Trump in the next couple months, which is that he is... wrecking havoc in the federal government.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think that is consistent with our principles and also something that voters are very concerned about, you know, that he is trying to slash support for the safety net and that he's trying to do tax cuts against the wealthy. And, you know, I think that a lot of this critique of Trump is really very similar to the campaign that we ran against Mitt Romney.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I think that this kind of gets back to what I was saying before of I feel like, you know, we were so shocked by Trump that we kind of forgot the old rules of politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think the main story with respect to this is just a continuation of the trends that we saw four years ago. That basically, throughout the entire Trump campaign, we've seen this racial depolarization.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Thank you very much. to tie what he's doing to harming individual people. In ads, one of the clearest patterns in ads is that getting a real person and just having them stare at a camera and talk about the ways that Republicans have personally hurt them. It's the best content. It's funny, if you hire actors, it doesn't work as well. People have tried.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And that's why, in some ways, I'm optimistic that Democrats will be able to thread the Because the two things that we should do is fight against social welfare cuts and also attack Elon Musk for the chaos he's creating. And I think that that's something that basically every wing of the party should be on board with.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
The most predictable thing in American politics, and we get surprised every single time it happens, is the president comes in, he wins a trifecta, and then he does a bunch of unpopular stuff, he overreaches, and then he becomes very unpopular and loses big in the midterms. You know, that doesn't mean you can't avoid the cycle.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But I think that in order to avoid it, like when you look at the people who did the best job, you know, Clinton in 1998 or Kennedy in 1962, you know, they did it by engaging in an enormous amount of policy restraint. And that is just not what Trump has been doing at all. And I think that you can just see in the data that his approval rating is dropping pretty quickly.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And you can see that he's just pissing off lots of people and that a lot of the stuff that he's doing and drawing attention toward is really quite unpopular.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. But, you know, that said, it gets to this, like, tension in all of these, like, Democratic soul-searching conversations, which is if Democrats do nothing, really, like, they'll probably be okay in 2026. Because all of these voters, you know, who get their news from TikTok, who don't care about politics, these, like, voters under 25, they just really...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
are not going to vote very much in the midterms. But if we don't fix this problem, then four years from now, we could be in the same trust deficit on all of these core issues. And these voters that didn't turn out in 2026 will come back. And except we'll be running against a candidate who's a lot less unpopular potentially than Trump. And it could be a real pickle.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
If you had told me in 2019 when I started worrying about the 2024 Senate election that we would have 47 seats, I would have jumped for joy. You know, the really big factors there is like Republicans ran a bunch of really terrible candidates in a bunch of swing races. And it turns out those Democratic candidates did a good job of distancing themselves from the party.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, I don't want to spend too much time speculating about the 2026 map. But I think that even though the bias in the electoral college has gone down quite a bit because of the swing among immigrants, that doesn't really change that the Senate—it's very hard for Democrats to take the Senate unless they can consistently outperform how Harris did and how Biden did in most of the country.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
These problems won't be fixed unless we spend the next two years or four years changing the party's brand among, you know, working class voters who are overrepresented in the Senate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
OK, the one exception to this, I think, and, you know, this is just controversial and, you know, might get me in trouble, is I think that if you look in Nebraska, the single biggest overperformance that we had was Osborne, you know, running as an independent candidate. He outperformed the top of the ticket by 7.1%. Now, obviously, Nebraska is an extremely red state.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I think that we've only ever tried this strategy of running people who are literally formally not tied to the Democratic Party in extremely red states. But I think the argument for doing that kind of thing in merely red states, in places like Florida or places like Ohio or Iowa, you know, those are hard questions and it's not up to me, you know, what we end up doing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But I think it's something that we have to really seriously consider. And, you know, then that also just brings up the really awkward point of like, well, what do we do with the reality that by land area in most parts of the country, it's almost impossible for a Democrat or someone with a Democrat on their ticket to win?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Democrats are not in power right now. And so we don't have agenda control. And I think a lot of this just depends on what Trump does and then who replaces Trump. You know, like something I'll say going back to the first time that Trump was president is that when we were looking at polling of non-college whites, you know, and these Obama Trump voters, their approval rating for Trump was...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
was really very stable for most of his term. And the only time that it declined was when Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But once that was out of the news, they switched back. Like at this moment, given that there is no party leader, I think it's mostly a question of if Trump does successfully push a bunch of welfare state cuts, then that might change the realignment.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But I think realistically, at least until 2026, it's mostly a function of what Republicans do. But, you know, when we pick a new presidential candidate, that will be a reset. And I think it's, you know, I don't think it's too early to talk about that. But I think that you could imagine us picking candidates who would do a much better job.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I want to just call out Hollow Parties by Danny Shazman. He's a good friend of mine. And Sam Rosenfeld. And Sam Rosenfeld, of course. My old colleague. Yes. I think it's hard to talk about a lot of these questions that I was kind of dodging about, you know, why parties were doing what they did without kind of reading that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
You know, the other thing I want to call out is something that was usually influential for how I think about politics. This is a really nerdy pick, but the origin and nature of mass opinion by Zoller kind of gets at this question of how much does what people say in surveys matter versus how much of it is downstream of what people are saying, you know, what elites are saying.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And I think his answer is mostly elites, but both. And then the last thing I just wanted to call out was Victory Lab by Sasha Eisenberg. You know, it kind of talks a lot about, you know, the history of the democratic analytics industry. A lot of the stuff that these numbers that I've shared here kind of come out of that machine.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so if you're just interested in kind of the history of the Democratic Party's internal analytics and research structure, it's the only book really that's ever been written about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think that a lot of political analysis in America has been, you know, really centered around viewing everything through a very America-centric lens. Because there's this story in American politics. Like, if you want to understand 20th century American politics, then the big story is that there was this giant Southern realignment in 1964. And then... Driven by the Civil Rights Act.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, driven by the Civil Rights Act. And that carried forward. It took a really long time, you know, for that to really work its way through down ballot. And so I think it was really tempting for American political scientists and kind of a lot of the, you know, more detail-oriented American political pundits to just kind of see everything.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
People who wrote books like Why We're Polarized, for instance. Yeah, exactly. Just to see everything through this transformation. But I think the most important trend politically of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world, at least Western country that has elections, has been the story of education polarization.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Everywhere we've seen highly educated people move to the left and, you know, working class people move to the right. I think a lot of people's analytical error when looking at Trump is that they saw Trump as this kind of reincarnation of, you know, the 1960s of like George Wallace or something, when really I think he was representing this global trend.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
That's exactly right. And I would just say, I think this shouldn't be that surprising. I think now, you know, we identify the Democratic Party as straightforwardly liberal. You know, the Democratic Party used to be a coalition between liberals and moderates and conservatives.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And as liberals kind of became the dominant coalition partner, it makes sense, you know, that the conservatives and moderates in our coalition who were disproportionately nonwhite, given that this ideological polarization happened, you know, among whites 20 years ago or 30 years ago, that you would start to see this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And what you can see here is just that in 2020, in their data, people who didn't vote, if they had voted, would have been a little bit more Democratic than the country overall. But over the next four years, people who didn't vote went from being a somewhat Democratic-leaning group to a group that Trump won by double digits.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
So the second graph here, we have, you know, for every precinct, we look at what percentage of people voted in 2022. And then we just look at what was the change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024. And so what you could see here is that for the lowest turnout precincts, you know, Trump increased his vote share by, you know, something like 6%.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
While for the highest turnout precincts, Harris actually increased her support. And, you know, that's really the story of this election is that, you know, people who follow news really closely, who get their news from traditional media, who like say that politics is an important part of their identity, they became more democratic in absolute terms.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
But for people who don't follow politics closely at all, they just became a lot more Republican.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah, and I mean, that's 100% right. And I just want to stress that this is a new problem. This problem didn't exist four years ago. And it's not just that New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population. That's definitely true. It's that they're more liberal than they were four years ago, even though the country went the other way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so there's this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don't.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And so as a result of these changes, this has really reversed a decades-long truism in American politics, where for the longest time, Democrats have said, and it's been true, that if everybody votes, we win, and that higher turnout is good for Democrats. And this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite of true. Here, I just have some numbers.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the electoral college fairly easily. While if everyone had voted, you know, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
And, you know, generally what you see now is that every measure of socioeconomic status and political engagement is just monotonically related to your chance of liking Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I'm the problem. But it's basically just that even the lowest political engagement categories, the lowest education categories, you know, the poorer, the lower socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, now the more Trumpy you are. And that just wasn't true four years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
who didn't feel ready to vote for a Republican, but were still mad at the Democratic Party. And so they stayed home in response. And if you just look at the demographics of who these people are, who voted for Biden last time and stayed home this time, they're generally low education. They're fairly politically disengaged.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
They're much less likely to watch shows like MSNBC and more likely to watch shows like Fox. And they frankly just look a lot like the voters who trended away from us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Right, exactly. And that does show up. You know, if you look at African Americans, for example, African Americans who didn't vote were much more likely to say that they supported Trump than the ones that did this cycle.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
It's true that overall turnout fell in a lot of the country, but in the battleground states that actually decided the presidential election, turnout was roughly where it was from four years ago. And it just is clear as day that a bunch of people changed their mind.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
I think that that's a very reasonable explanation. You know, it makes sense that the people who care the least about politics are going to be the most mad about prices going up. And there's a lot of academic reasons to think that makes sense. And so I don't think it's necessarily true that it's impossible for us to win those voters back. But, you know, I'll talk about this later.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
There have been dramatic shifts in the media consumption habits of these people in the last four years. And so it may be a harder problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
Yeah. So here, you know, we have a plot that we just took from The Economist. And in the bottom, we just have foreign-born population. And on the top, we just have increase in Republican vote share. And, you know, what you could see is there's a very clear correlation. This is by county. This is by county.