For the first time in a decade, Democrats have won the Presidency and both houses of Congress, giving them a greater ability to pass Joe Biden’s agenda, which includes economic relief measures and legislation tackling climate change and immigration. Many in the Party want to embark on major structural changes, such as abolishing the Senate filibuster and granting statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. But, because the Democrats control only fifty Senate seats, moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia hold outsized power, and have already spoken with skepticism about some of their party’s more ambitious plans.
To talk about the state of the Democratic Party, I recently spoke by phone with the political commentator Ezra Klein, who recently left Vox for the New York Times, where he is an opinion columnist and the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show.” Last year, Klein published the book “Why We’re Polarized,” which argued that Americans have solidified their political affiliations around issues of identity and culture, and that structural changes, such as eliminating the filibuster, might save the political system from more partisan gridlock. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the mistakes of the Obama Administration, the best way to persuade moderate Democrats to go along with the Party’s agenda, and how the media will change in a post-Trump world.
You recently wrote a column titled, “Democrats, Here’s How to Lose in 2022. And Deserve It.” What do you think Democrats need to do over the next two years to succeed?
Make it such that Americans feel a difference in their daily lives from Democrats having the power to govern. And that’ll mean a really strong rollout of vaccinations because nothing is going to make more of a difference to people’s lives than an effective vaccination campaign, but it also means passing the kinds of legislation that Democrats promised Americans they would pass in order to get elected in the first place.
As obvious as this advice sounds, it is not typically what Democrats do. In many ways, it is not what they did during Barack Obama’s Presidency, which was the last time they had a governing trifecta. They tend to let the filibuster stop them in the Senate. Even when they don’t let the filibuster stop them, they have a tendency to construct plans in a very complex way, such that the benefits take some time to begin delivering. The Affordable Care Act, which I covered very closely, didn’t begin delivering health insurance on a mass scale for four years.
You don’t get reëlected on things that are not yet happening in people’s lives. The stimulus in 2009 had what was called the Making Work Pay tax credit, and it was designed to be invisible. It was literally designed so people would not notice they were getting it, because there was some behavioral science research the Obama Administration got into that said people would spend more of it.
You don’t get reëlected on things people don’t know you did. So Democrats have to govern in a way where they actually pass things, and the things they pass have a direct, noticeable effect on people’s lives before the next election. And one reason it’s so important for Democrats to feel that sense of speed and urgency is that the electoral geography has become more and more biased against them. And then the final thing is that they can’t create an opportunity for Trumpism to roar back in two years.
Parties in power typically lose seats in a midterm. It seems intuitive to me that, if Democrats can pass economic legislation that would make people’s lives better, that might mitigate the likely losses. But there is also an argument that there is a group of people in the country who would like to see divided government and who don’t like big change, and that part of the response to Obama in 2010 was not just that people were not feeling the effects of the Affordable Care Act but that at least some people felt that change was happening too quickly. Do you think that’s a reasonable argument?
I take the point that public opinion is sometimes thermostatic, that it moves in the opposite direction of whoever’s in power. There’s a lot of political science research to that end, and I assume it’s largely correct. At the same time, I believe—having done a lot of political reporting, and having watched how policy feedback loops operate and how parties do and don’t develop durable majorities over time—that there is more frustration that comes out of failed promises than comes out of well-kept promises. If you look at things like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and even, over time, Obamacare, there’s just no doubt that they created positive feedback loops for the parties in power. I think if you look at other countries, there’s been a lot of research on things like cash transfer payments. They seem to help the parties in power. Now, if you pass unpopular things, including things, by the way, that may be important and need to happen, you’re going to get hit in the election. And it’s also true that you don’t control the media and you don’t control how people understand things. And we are fractured, and there’s a lot of disinformation. And so that’s going to make it hard. But I think that only makes it more important that the policy passed speaks for itself as clearly as possible.
Let’s say I’m completely wrong. Let’s say that if Democrats leave the filibuster in place and don’t pass nearly as much of their agenda as they promised or actually pass very little, that in that world Democrats would do no worse in the election, or maybe even ever-so-slightly better. They would lose somewhat fewer seats. I would say it is still worth having passed legislation that dramatically helps people in their lives, that they expand democracy or deepened democracy in important ways, because you leave a policy legacy.
You mentioned the necessity of defeating Trumpism, and in the piece you write, “This is the responsibility the Democratic majority must bear: If they fail or falter, they will open the door for Trumpism or something like it to return, and there is every reason to believe it will be far worse next time. To stop it, Democrats need to reimagine their role. They cannot merely defend the political system. They must rebuild it.” There’s obviously a lot of truth to that, but Trump’s rise in 2016 came after a President who a majority of the American people thought had done a successful job governing. And so I wonder if we overstate the degree to which, at least in America in 2020, it’s about ineffective governance, even if broadly we can say that increases populism’s appeal.
I definitely don’t think we overstate that idea in America, because I think we actually almost never talk about that idea. I don’t at all think there is a robust discussion about the ways in which government paralysis over an extended period of time has actually sickened the system and made it more dysfunctional, more problematic. I think that, still to this day, the dominant view in Washington is that, well, maybe in a divided country, we just shouldn’t get things done. I think the dominant view in Washington is still that we’re so polarized that we need something like the filibuster to encourage compromise, even though it obviously does the exact opposite. I think there’s an unbelievable level of whistling past the graveyard on the systemic defects of the American political system. And that doesn’t just apply to Trump. I think it speaks to the appeal that Obama had running as a change candidate in 2008. In some ways, it speaks to the appeal George W. Bush had running as an outsider candidate in 2000. There is a reason Americans don’t like politicians associated with Washington—obviously, Joe Biden, in this case, being an exception. But, after Trump, the exception that proves the rule. When neither party reliably passes the agenda it promises, it is going to create a rising background level of frustration and disengagement. It just will.
I am open to a lot of different ways of addressing this, but actually what stuns me about both parties in Washington is how little they care that they routinely do not do what they promise voters. I actually think this is changing in the Democratic Party. Over the last couple years, we’ve seen Harry Reid come out against the filibuster and Barack Obama come out against the filibuster. Joe Biden said he would consider it. Like he said, it depends how obstreperous Republicans are. I think there is a change happening here, but it took a really long time. And the degree to which politicians just price in that they’re going to run for office, constantly promising people things that are never going to happen—what do they expect is going to happen?
In our conversation, you and I are both talking about the Democrats as a united block, but you have certain Democrats, like Jon Tester or Joe Manchin or other Democrats from red states, who may be reluctant to go along with these things. You write, “Red state Democrats like Manchin have long held to a political strategy in which public opposition to their party’s initiatives proves their independence and moderation. And there was a time when that strategy could work. But the nationalized, polarized structure of modern American politics has ended it.” The one counter-example I’d bring up is Susan Collins, who bucked her party on their biggest issue in the last four years, repealing Obamacare. She went against that, and she’s done it on a couple other things, even if not as many as liberals would like, and she went on to outpace Trump by, I think, as much as any Senate candidate in the country. Why, even if you are right that the Democratic Party as a whole should go big on policy and structural change, including getting rid of the filibuster, why is it right for someone like Joe Manchin?
The argument I make in the piece is that this strategy is working less and less often. The frequency of ticket-splitting has just gone way, way, way down over time, not that it never happens. It’s that it has just become very rare. And so this is actually just an extraordinary statistic: in Obama’s first election, there was a seventy-one-per-cent correlation in a given state between votes for the Presidential candidate and votes for the Senate candidate in the same party. Pretty big. The fortunes were clearly tied, but there was some room to maneuver. By 2020, there was a ninety-four per cent correlation. So, again, it’s not that there’s no room to maneuver. And there are a couple politicians in American politics who still manage to do it. Susan Collins is one, and Joe Manchin is another, but there are way fewer of them than there were eight years ago, than there were twelve years ago—way, way fewer than there were twenty years ago. This is a dying strategy. Not dead.
But definitely a dying strategy because your whole party needs to win for you to be in the majority. So the point here is simply that this is not a reliable way to govern. Now it may be that, for someone like Joe Manchin, there is not a strategically straightforward play here. Joe Manchin is holding a Democratic seat in a very, very, very red state. So what he is doing is hard. I would also say what he is doing is important. And Joe Manchin has won many more elections than I have, but I do not think Joe Manchin is going to do well if Democrats are not seen as governing effectively.
So I think the strategy that somebody like Joe Manchin might pick up on here is to oppose a lot of things Democrats do that really smacks of liberalism to folks—everybody can come up with their examples—but, in terms of checks that go directly to your constituents, it’s a pretty safe bet that’s going to be popular. Medicare is popular in West Virginia. Medicaid is. I don’t buy into the left populist argument that all you need to do to win in this space is to be a democratic socialist. If that were true, more democratic socialists would win in these states. But I do buy that people, even as they are brought into a nationalized political structure, even as they consume nationalized media, even as they have political identities that have become increasingly detached from local concerns, they do care about what happens to them personally.
And so the more immediate politics can be in their lives, the more information they have with which to make that choice. And that is my big macro theory in all this and in all politics. The thing I always try to get people to pay attention to is that there is a feedback loop that is supposed to govern politics that, for a hundred different reasons, has broken down. That feedback loop should be that parties or politicians run for office on an agenda, and the public chooses one side or the other because they prefer that agenda. They get something like that agenda, and then they judge whether or not it had a good impact on their lives.
Instead, in American politics, parties run on an agenda. The party that wins the most votes may or may not take power after that. The party that takes power probably does not pass very much of their agenda. And there’s a lot of bickering about who’s to blame. And the American people are asked to be congressional reporters as they try to assign blame for why things in their lives aren’t getting any better. I think it’s at least worth trying the other option because the current one isn’t working that well.
What is the pitch that you would give to Joe Manchin or Jon Tester, specifically, if you were Chuck Schumer, about getting rid of the filibuster?
What I’d say to this, No. 1, is that nobody anywhere cares about process. The Republicans did not lose a bunch of seats for eliminating the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees early in the Trump Presidency. Process debates that happen in Congress just do not last very long. Think of all the things that happened in the Trump era and how little effect they had on the numbers. I think it actually depends, a little bit, on what their personal moral commitments are, but the argument I would make is that you want to get rid of the filibuster and then do things that are going to make the public back home like what you’ve done. You actually do have to use your power wisely. There are reasons Democrats should fear getting rid of the filibuster. The Senate has a sharp Republican bias. It would be somewhat ameliorated by giving statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico—which they should do for moral and principled reasons. But they could just be creating a situation where Republicans who hold power in the future will be able to govern more and will be able to govern more aggressively. And that is the thing that sits in Democrats’ heads when they think about this.
I just believe you should fear the problems of being unable to govern and unable to show people that your agenda is better, more than you should fear the problems of the other side governing. There is also a way in which having the narrowness of the majority Senate in this case is actually really good for guys like Joe Manchin.
So imagine if Democrats had fifty-eight seats and got rid of the filibuster. Now they can do whatever they want, and the tie-breaking Democrat is seven or eight people to Joe Manchin’s left. And so maybe he worries that what the tie-breaking Democrat does is going to be unpopular back home in West Virginia. But, in this case, the tie-breaking Democrat is Joe Manchin. Nothing Joe Manchin thinks is unpopular back home in West Virginia is going to pass. So Joe Manchin has two possible Senates here: one where he is the tie-breaking vote and he can pass or block anything that he wants, or he could be in a Senate where he is ten senators away from the tie-breaking Republican vote. It just seems crazy to me that you wouldn’t prefer the former situation.
My cynical take on what you’re saying is that American politics now is a culture war and that Joe Manchin, by opposing aspects of Biden’s agenda or by throwing a wrench into things, shows people that he isn’t on Team Blue and he’s a tough guy who stands up for himself, and that, when you’re running in a state like West Virginia, that’s more important than any specific policy that’s going to filter down to people.
The truth is, I don’t know. I would not tell you that I’ve won a bunch of elections in West Virginia. I think, on balance, that if a political party wins office and can do the things it promised to do, it is in a better condition. And then there’s this broader question that I think you’re getting at, which is, well, is it still possible in this scenario to be a Democrat who wins in the red states? That’s tricky for reasons that really don’t, I think, relate to this. We have seen total disruption for those Democrats in recent decades, and the same thing is true for those Republicans. I’m from Orange County, California. Orange County, California, used to be a red area, in which Republican members of Congress were consistently voted in by massive margins. It was in 2018 that the district I grew up in elected a Democrat to Congress for the very first time. They elected Katie Porter.
And what was interesting to me about that is that in 2016, when Trump was running against Clinton, Orange County elected Porter’s Republican predecessor by a massive margin, even if it went for Clinton. But, once Trump won and people in that district saw Trump, they were nationally on the other side of that war. And so they flipped. And so the question for Manchin, I think, is how can Joe Biden’s Presidency be something that people in West Virginia don’t hate? I continue to believe that the single best shot he has is if people feel a marked improvement in their lives from Democrats coming into governance.
If that is not possible, if it is the case that governance is just one more thing that simply cannot break through the political identities that we have, the noise in the media, the fracturing of the media, then you’re in a nihilistic space in American politics.
Speaking of the media, I watched inaugural coverage on CNN, and I thought it was pretty embarrassing, with them fawning over Biden. And it made me anxious that the media was going to be too easy on his Administration for the next four years. At the same time, I think it’s extremely important that the media take into account that one party’s leader basically turned against democracy, and almost his entire party supported him for four years. I think there has to be a way to balance those two things. How do you view this?
This is a hard problem. Put Trump aside, even for a minute. I think a lot about how to cover the Republican Party myself in this era. And I’m an opinion journalist. My views are very clear, and yet I’m somebody who prides himself on taking other ideas seriously. I talk constantly to members of the Republican Party. I really try to understand what Republicans are thinking. And I can watch the Republican Party begin to adopt a series of messages and claims that are completely belied by their actions throughout the Trump Presidency. So forget turning against democracy and possibly trying to reject the outcome of a fair election. The move toward talking about deficit concerns after passing trillions of dollars in unfunded tax cuts and spending increases under Donald Trump, the calls for unity after uniting behind Donald Trump—how you cover a party that has no consistency is a genuine problem.
I’m not so worried about the question of being too hard or too easy on Joe Biden. I will try to write things that I think are true about the Joe Biden Administration. When they’re doing things that I think are good, I will try to convey that to people. When they’re doing things that I think are bad, I will try to convey that to people. And I put my chips down in a pretty clear way. But what do you do when you call Republican members of Congress who are going to be important votes on things and what they said to the press meant nothing when their guy was in power? How do you take those arguments seriously? I want there to be a conservative party in this country that I can cover seriously, and I can take their critiques seriously, and we can argue about what the multiplier is on stimulus spending or whether or not it’s the government’s role to provide health insurance. But I can’t take a party seriously that is proclaiming a deep concern about debt and deficits after watching what they did in the Trump era. I cannot take a party seriously in calling for unity after watching them in the Trump era. So this is hard. I think it is the media’s job to hold people to account. And right now, frankly, the Republican Party has a hell of a lot to account for.
