Jon Favreau on Where the Democrats Went Right

Ezra Klein: The ongoing government shutdown is the first real strategic test of Democrats in Trump's second term. It is the first time when they have overcome enough of their internal divisions to choose a fight, choose a message, choose a set of demands, and actually take a risk.

Behind this fight are a bunch of strategic schisms in the party over whether or not it makes sense to confront Trump in this way, to use what leverage they have, to take this kind of risk. Schisms over whether or not to fight on lawlessness, authoritarianism, democracy, or to only focus on pocketbook issues.

And now we're in the shutdown, and the road out of it and towards the midterms and eventually towards 2028 is going to require Democrats to face not just these, but a bunch of other schisms in their party over what kind of strategy works for them, what kind of voters they're trying to win back, and what those voters actually want.

To talk through both how we got here and where the Democratic Party is going, I want to invite on Jon Favreau. Favreau, of course, was director of speech writing for President Barack Obama, and he is the co-host of the hit podcast, Pod Save America. As always, my email is [email protected].

Jon Favreau, welcome to the show.

Jon Favreau: Thanks for having me.

Ezra Klein: So I want to start in the strategic divide that led to this. You go back a couple months, there's a debate inside the Senate Democratic Caucus, the House Democratic Caucus, about whether or not to have a shutdown, whether or not that is a safe thing for Democrats to do. What are the two sides of that debate?

Jon Favreau: I think the side of the debate where people did not want to shut down is that the party that causes the shutdown almost never wins, that it was going to be impossible to wring any concessions out of the Trump administration. So why are Democrats closing down the government? What is the end game? What counts as a win? How do you get out of it once you get into it? And would Democrats, who do not have as big a megaphone as Donald Trump and do not use it as well, really be able to make their case about the shutdown in a way that is as effective or more so than Donald Trump?

The other side of the argument is Donald Trump has basically usurped the power of Congress on a number of levels, whether it's tariffs, whether it's rescissions, whether it's impoundment, whether it's all of his immigration policy, whatever else. But he is on a number of those fronts, possibly violating the law. And things are getting pretty scary in America right now. And this is the one leverage point that Democrats will have between now and the midterms to potentially not just force changes in how Donald Trump behaves, but also grab people's attention.

And also that argument is: if we don't shut the government down, if we don't move forward, Donald Trump is just going to continue governing exactly as he's governing. He's going to continue to impose tariffs. He's going to continue to do immigration enforcement exactly as he's doing it now. And nothing will change. And then we'll have the midterms and maybe that will be enough for Democrats to win, just people's dissatisfaction with the way that Donald Trump is running the government. But maybe we shouldn't bet on that because right now the polling shows a Democratic lead, but small enough that it's not something that we can be confident about. And the Democratic brand is in tatters.

Ezra Klein: Yes. So then there's another division that opens up between the "let's have a normal shutdown" and "let's have an abnormal shutdown," which is to say, when you were describing the "persia downside," you were focusing on Trump's lawlessness, the authoritarian tactics. As I put it in my essay, masked men in the streets. This is a profoundly abnormal time. You can't run politics as normal.

But a big faction of the Democratic congressional wing, even among people who believe all that, say our voters or the voters we need to win over don't care. And our best issue is health care. And talking about democracy, talking about lawlessness is a loser. We should talk about something bread and butter. In some versions, it was tariffs, but usually it was healthcare. Healthcare won out. That's the shutdown we're in. But talk me through how that happened.

Jon Favreau: I think Democrats are absolutely right on the substance of what they are fighting for right now. If they voted with the Republicans to pass a Republican funding bill, the price of healthcare goes up for 20 million Americans. If they did nothing and they just went along with it, 20 million Americans see premium increases of double to quadruple. And this is at a time when the price of everything is still way too high, mostly because Donald Trump also raised taxes on everyone with his unconstitutional tariffs.

Politically, Democrats are already convincing people that the government is closed right now and 750,000 people are furloughed. Donald Trump is continuing to cut more programs, threatening mass layoffs. Air travel is getting delayed. And all he would have to do to stop this is stop people's premiums from going up, which everyone wants. Most people want. By the way, a lot of Trump's voters want it. Most MAGA voters want it. I saw a poll, I think it was 58% of self-identified MAGA voters wanted the premium credits extended, especially because the premium increases will disproportionately hit people in red states.

And so the politics is on the Democrat side. The substance is on the Democrat side here. My question is, if I'm the Republicans, it's in their interest to make a deal and to keep the government open again because they are now on the other side of an issue that the Republicans don't want to be fighting about in 2026. They don't want to be fighting about this ahead of the midterms. Their voters want an extension of the subsidies. It's a losing issue for them. They want to take it off the table. Why not just let the Democrats take it off the table with them and solve a political problem that they're facing right now and then just go on their merry way?

Now, to your larger question about Trump's lawlessness, masked men in the streets, the authoritarian takeover, my concern is: okay, so we get a deal on this in the next couple of weeks. This being healthcare. So we get a deal on this. It's off the table. Politically, does it benefit Democrats at that point? Democratic voters have now seen that their party will fight for something. That's good. They now know that healthcare was an issue where their party stood up for what people wanted and Donald Trump did not. In fact, Donald Trump not only didn't stand up for it, but tried to punish other federal workers and other people because he so badly didn't want to bring down premiums. So that's good politics there.

How long does that effect last? Do people remember that in the midterms? And then did we also miss our last chance to actually push back on Donald Trump's authoritarian takeover and what he's doing around immigration enforcement, which is very frightening and very un-American?

Ezra Klein: A couple of pieces of that I want to pick up on, but one just about the question of whether or not success here is actually good or bad for the Democrats. So your former colleague, Brian Beutler, wrote on a Substack, quote: "If we get healthcare subsidies without any new constraints on Trump's abuses of power, I believe we will come to regret it." He goes on to say, Democrats shouldn't have rescued Republicans from the pain of their own policies. And they should have insisted on a return to the rule of law when the leverage was there.

The argument here basically is that Democrats will have worked with Republicans to prevent a huge increase in premiums that would have made people very mad at Republicans. And so they will get this win in the shutdown. And already there seems maybe like some increasing willingness to do something about this on the Republican side. But at the cost of taking arguably their strongest issue and the proof of how much better they are on the strongest issue off of the table.

Jon Favreau: I think there is something to what Brian wrote there.

Ezra Klein: Yes.

Jon Favreau: And this is really tough because I'm not just a political hack here. I'm someone who genuinely wants to make sure that premiums don't rise on 20 million people. I think that's crazy. And I think if you can help people, you help them. So it's not necessarily like, "Oh, you got to touch the hot stove and everyone voted for this, so now we should let people's premiums go up because maybe that will help us beat Trump later."

But could you have made the shutdown about health care and still fought the fight over premiums, but also included "we have to reform the way that ICE is behaving"? Absolutely. You need a judicial warrant if you're going to do a raid. No more militarized tactics and militarized style. No more flashbang grenades. No more long guns. No more middle of the night raids. If they detain a citizen or a legal resident, you must release them within 24 hours.

There are proposals that you could put in that would tie ICE's hands and in some cases just force them to obey the laws and the policies already on the books. And if they don't do it, then you cut funding. You make sure you have more congressional oversight than we have now. You make sure they turn the body cam footage on and report back to Congress. There's a whole bunch of proposals that you could have put in there.

Now, is Donald Trump likely to accept those proposals? Much, much less likely than he is to accept extending the ACA subsidies. But that is one way that you could call attention to the lawlessness and the militarization of our cities right now, which is only going to get worse.

Ezra Klein: But this goes back to the strategic divide I was asking about a minute ago, which is there is a division in the party about whether or not you want to call attention to it. Many say look, Trump is not popular right now on immigration, but immigration is still a better issue for him than health care, than tariffs, than cost of living. Immigration is an issue where Republicans are more trusted and Democrats less trusted. This is true on crime. This is true on a number of places where the Trump administration is deploying its most lawless and frightening methods.

And so the argument from this faction is you do not want to make American politics about this. The path of wisdom is, yeah, criticize it, but do the smart things that will allow you to take back the House in about a year. And then you can actually start reining this in. But a shutdown is not really leverage to rein anything in. It's leverage to draw attention. So draw attention to your best issue. Try to use that. Try to win the midterms. You already see the way the Trump administration wants to make this about illegal aliens. Don't let them. What do you think of that?

Jon Favreau: It is a compelling theory that is predicated on politics and elections working as they have in the past. We have U.S. troops from red states deployed on the streets of blue states over the objection of people's elected representatives. Those troops are ostensibly there to defend the government's paramilitary force that now lands Black Hawk helicopters on Chicago apartment buildings in the middle of the night and drags people out who are citizens and legal residents and children half naked, screaming and crying, who have committed no crimes.

There was a priest who was praying outside an ICE facility. It was on video, and they just shot him in the head with a pepper ball. He was doing nothing. He was a priest. He was praying.

We might not want American politics to be about this, but American politics is about this. The Trump administration has decided to make American politics about this, and they have used the federal government to make sure that American politics is about this.

Am I surprised that the median voter, that the average American isn't as concerned about this as they are about their own premiums? No, of course not. Because if it's not happening in your city and if it's not happening in your apartment building and you're not paying as close attention to the news as political junkies like us, you are of course going to care more about your premiums. But that doesn't mean that it's not important.

And that doesn't mean that if we let this slide and we just ignore it, that Trump is going to stop at deployments in Portland and Chicago. We're going to Memphis, but then I'm going to look at New York. We have to save St. Louis. Then you have Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore. They're so far gone.

Remember, people thought maybe he would stop at deployments in Los Angeles and D.C. And then he realized, I guess, that he didn't get the reaction he wanted. And so now Chicago seems like the one city where he is getting more of the reaction that he wanted because ICE tactics have been so militarized and so aggressive.

And so the question is, we get to 2026 in the midterms. Are there troops stationed by the polls? Are there paramilitary ICE agents running around the streets around the election? Do we have faith that if the results are close and that there was some kind of problem at the polls and there was intimidation, that everything's going to be okay if there's a close election and we're going to do a recount and Mike Johnson isn't going to decide to seat the Republican in a close race because the House ultimately gets to decide who is seated in a really close election in the House? I don't know.

I hate being the doomer person and I don't like getting people alarmed unnecessarily. And I don't think we should be alarmed, but I think we should be clear eyed about what's happening here and what it's going to take to stop it. It is possible, like I said, that people being dissatisfied with the way that Trump is running the economy, the tariffs, cost of living, everything else, is enough to just win us the midterms comfortably. But that is a bet that we're taking that I don't think we need to, because I think that we have a year until the midterms. And I think that Donald Trump is moving very fast.

I've been talking to members of the House and Senate, and both politically and morally, I've been going back to my big shutdown piece a month ago on the side that says you can wrap health care and tariffs and authoritarianism into a single argument. And it is worth doing that if only to set up the argument you're actually making, if only to make American politics about what it is really about.

Ezra Klein: Part of you believes this is an intentional event. I was talking to my staff, and we were looking at coverage on the front pages. And it's interesting how few front pages every day are running the shutdown. In fact, the most recent policy of America at the top is the occupation of Chicago. And the shutdown has, instead of becoming the focusing event that ties together what is happening in American politics, it is one hermetically sealed event in American politics. And then there are these other events happening simultaneously and coverage is splitting between them. Which is new, by the way, for a shutdown. It's like the first time we've had a shutdown where it's not the attention. It feels like it is getting less attention than other shutdowns.

But the perception in the House, at least what you hear from them, is they've been just desperately trying to get the Senate to do something. Going back to March when there could have been a shutdown some months ago, the House wanted it. Schumer and a crucial number of senators didn't.

[Shifts to a quote from a senator]

Senator: I knew when I took this vote, there'd be a lot of protests, but I felt I had to do it for the future, not only of the Democratic Party, but the country. Because here's as bad as that CR bill was, and it was bad, a shutdown is 10 times worse.

Ezra Klein: So in this case, the House has wanted the Senate to hold strong. And then in the Senate, what the people running this will tell you is this was the argument that they could hold their members on. Already, they've lost about three senators: Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto from Nevada, and Angus King, who is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats from Maine. They can't afford to lose that many more.

And I think it gets to something that I've been hearing this whole time from people in the Senate. I will be told by different members of the Senate the biggest divide in the caucus is between the Democrats who think we are in normal times and the Democrats who think we're not. The Democrats who think that you could just kind of wait this out and win the midterms, and the Democrats who think something more like what you were just saying, which is that if you wait this out, the midterms might not be on a fair playing field.

You know, maybe Chris Murphy is probably the loudest proponent of this view in public.

Chris Murphy: [in a public statement] In countries that have lost healthy democracy, normally what happens is that over time, the party in power just contracts the space for dissent, for speech, for political opposition, such that while elections still happen, the opposition party can never win. That is what President Trump and the radicals around him are trying to do to America.

Ezra Klein: I think this is a hard argument. Also, because even if you hold the Murphy view, it's not exactly clear what you do about it without more power.

Jon Favreau: Right. I do think there are some Democratic senators who do believe that we are in a different kind of moment and that we are beyond normal politics. But they also think that the best strategy to get out of this is to...

Ezra Klein: I actually think that that's probably the biggest group. And they have said, look, it is just too risky to fight on issues that are not our best issues, because at the end of the day, it's going to be people going to the ballot box and the median voter there is going to be caring about cost of living and health care more.

Jon Favreau: And again, I don't think these are mutually exclusive issues. I see this as building an argument against what Donald Trump and this regime is doing that starts now, it goes through the midterms, it goes through '27 and '28. I see this as building a movement and building a story and an argument for the movement. And for that, you need to start laying the building blocks now, making the fight the fight and making it bigger.

And I mean, you mentioned immigration. Everything I just said to you about the Black Hawk helicopters and all that and the troops in the streets, I didn't even mention immigration. We knew that's what it was about. But I think the point is, I don't think people who know this is going on think it's about immigration anymore. I don't think they think it's about crime anymore. And you've seen this in some of the polls. They asked if crime was a big issue in the CBS poll, and it was like 8% said crime is their biggest issue. Immigration was down on the list too. Majorities of voters, near 60%, don't want troops in the street right now.

And I think if you made the argument about what ICE is doing, that they are these mass federal agents trampling on Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, your right to walk down the street without proof of citizenship, your right to call a lawyer or your family if you're suddenly thrown in the back of a van, even if you are here legally. If you ask someone, "Would you rather your premiums go up or would you rather your child ripped out of his apartment in the middle of the night by masked men and then released a couple hours later after they were traumatized?" I think they would take the premium increase.

And I know that we can say these are important to the broadest number of people. But authoritarian takeovers sort of start at the edges of society and then they work their way in. And one thing we've seen from Donald Trump this year is like, if you give in, he's not going to stop. He's going to keep going. It's working its way in quickly.

Ezra Klein: Yeah, we are. We got to the occupation of American cities quickly. The president's most powerful advisor calls the opposition party a domestic extremist organization and has announced and talked about, along with the vice president, how they're going to start investigating nonprofits that are left-leaning, funders, individuals. And they throw around words like domestic terrorism very loosely. "Insurrectionists," "legal insurrectionists" is another word we've begun to hear. They are cracking down on free speech. They've tried to get rid of comedians who've mocked him. I mean, I don't know what else we're waiting for here.

Jon Favreau: I think the comedy vote is going to swing in the next election. I think we're getting the comedians in 2026 and 2028.

Ezra Klein: I agree with everything you're saying. And I think most people following this podcast or who listen to Pod Save or if you're following politics on the liberal or leftist corners of X or Blue Sky, this is what politics is about right now. And this is how it feels.

I am so struck when I talk to members of Congress, how much it does not feel that way, how much Congress is operating completely normally, giving Republicans cloture votes on all kinds of normal bills to do various appropriations processes and fund defense and all the things that Congress normally does, it is simply doing normally.

And one thing I have been hearing often during the shutdown fight, in a way that feels strange, but I take it seriously, is from people who want to escalate the level of confrontation. They're almost describing this to me as a learning experience that they and their colleagues have to go through. That the Democrats in the House and Senate, but particularly the Senate, need to convince themselves in a safer and more contained battle that they can stand up to Donald Trump without political disaster resulting.

And that if they do that, if they win the healthcare fight, well, they're going to pass a continuing resolution and then they're going to need to come back in some months and do it again and do it again. I mean, this is how Congress works now. And maybe having developed more confidence, the next time they fight over tariffs, which is a place where I think the corruption and the bread and butter pocketbook issues come together a little bit more. Or maybe things get worse in Chicago and Portland. He deploys troops to New York, whatever it might be. And they have more confidence to fight on that.

I find it hard to describe this because I'm pretty much at an alarm level of 11, but there is a sense that the Democrats in Congress are in this fight, however many months into this as we now are, eight or nine months, learning that they can fight. But the point is that they have to learn that in order to have another fight in two or three months or four months when and presumably if they need to.

Jon Favreau: Yeah. And the way you just put that makes me want to pull my hair out.

Ezra Klein: But are you not hearing that, though?

Jon Favreau: Oh, yes. No, because I heard it before and every time I did. But honestly, it's the most persuasive argument to me for them. And as much as I wanted the other strategy and didn't want the health care strategy, I am very happy with Democrats for deciding to go forward and not give the votes to fund the government without this. I think that's good. And it seems wild to me that you needed a fight like this to make you feel better about it. But I also hope that we don't learn the wrong lesson from this, which is we can only fight on cost of living issues and that we should ignore the masked men in the streets.

Ezra Klein: That's true. But let me flip this and make a more affirmative argument for something we do seem to me to be achieving. Which is I have seen huge amounts of polling that is not just that Democrats' strongest issue is cost of living, but that if you look at what the voters they need to win care about, what they care about is cost of living and they don't really think Democrats care about cost of living. And Democrats have a genuine political imperative to convince voters that they don't just support health care, but it drives them. It drives them as much as immigration does, as much as democracy does, as much as LGBTQ issues do, as much as all the things that have become more associated in the minds of many voters with Democrats, a little bit to their detriment.

And something that is true is that there is a lot more coverage over the coming premium shocks than there was a month ago. I just did a full episode with Neera Tanden about how this is going to work. Would I have done that if they hadn't moved to a shutdown? Probably not, is the answer. Without there being a live fight, it would have been hard to decide to devote the whole episode to that, as opposed to the troops in the streets.

And so I would say where we are right now, the way the coverage of this is feeling to me, the way it's looking, I think this fight is going better than you might have or I might have expected. I think the Republicans in both choosing vengeance in the Trump administration level, canceling grants and threatening mass firings, and then this weird "healthcare for illegal immigrants" attack they've decided to settle on, that's also helped. The two sides agree that it's about healthcare. Donald Trump said the shutdown is about health care. So to the extent a shutdown is an attentional event, it has focused attention on health care.

Whether this will matter in a year, I don't exactly know. But they wanted to move attention to health care and they've moved more attention to health care than was there two months ago. That's for them, in the structure of this that they set up, that's a win. I think what I hadn't anticipated is how the coming notices from the insurance companies would be helpful in the fight. And I don't know that you're going to get that on other cost of living issues, right?

Ezra Klein: Like this is a cliff basically. And people are going to start getting notices in the mail that they're going to get premium increases. And this isn't even something we had when we were arguing over Trump's economic bill in the summer, because those Medicaid cuts very purposely were pushed to 2027. Yes, there were rural hospitals closing before then that we can point to, but people weren't feeling the effects of the Medicaid cuts for a couple years. And the fact that the premium increases are going to happen, or at least people are going to know that they're going to happen within weeks, I think is very helpful to making this a big fight that gets more coverage.

Senator Chris Murphy: Where we are in the shutdown is early. There isn't a lot of pain being felt. And right now, Democrats have not had to withstand real pressure. And Republicans are not seeming eager to start negotiations to get the government reopened. We feel in a holding pattern. I have one particular fear about the position the Democrats have staked out, which is that they seem obsessed with the polling question of who is being blamed for the shutdown.

Jon Favreau: I know.

Senator Chris Murphy: They really want to make the argument that they are not the ones shutting down the government. The American people see it. Every poll, we just saw one in our caucus today. They blame the Republicans. They blame them because they're not negotiating, because they're on the wrong side of health care, because they're in charge. They have the presidency, the Senate and the White House. and they've gone home. I don't think that argument holds a lot of water. I think that the correct argument is that it is worth shutting down the government. We are refusing to reopen the government until we see these healthcare subsidies extended because that is worth doing. We are not going to reopen a government just to see you get screwed. But already we have begun to see it's different polls, so it's hard to tell, but maybe some slippage on that question. And I'm worried that the degree to which they have been bragging to me privately, that on the polls they're not being blamed for shutting down the government the moment they see that poll number move, and it certainly could move, they will begin to lose their nerve because they've decided that not being blamed for it is the measure of winning in the court of public opinion. and it just feels to me like a real vulnerability or fragility in the way they are telling the story to themselves right now.

Jon Favreau: I think the vulnerability is if only they were just saying that privately but that message has come through very clearly publicly as well. I think they've gotten a little better about it since the very beginning of the shutdown. I think there's less of that now. But I mean, you heard me when we started the conversation. I talked about like democrats shutting the government down. I'm not pretending the Republicans shut the government down. I do think an honest argument you can make is we are not going to give our votes to fund a government that is going to jack up premiums on 20 million Americans. And if you want to keep that government open without giving anyone help on premiums, you are free to change the rules in the Senate and you have the 50 plus votes that you can pass it and get rid of the filibuster. And you are free to do that. You run all three branches of government. Go for it. But we are not providing votes for that because we are fighting to make sure that people don't have health care premium increases. You lose moral high ground if you start saying, oh, I got blamed. You got blamed. It's their fault. It's our fault. The Kaiser Foundation poll shows that we're winning. I would not be reading polls if I was them. I would not be talking about how they're winning. I would just be talking about. This is a core moral issue for the Democratic Party and for people in this country who are already suffering from high prices and high taxes because of Donald Trump's tariffs. And we are not going to let this happen anymore.

Ezra Klein: Yeah, I just think people have gotten a little obsessed with a very Washington way of thinking about this. I was just going to say, one thing we've learned over the last decade or so is people don't give a shit about process arguments. This is why, you know, you were out there years and years ago. and I was right behind you on the filibuster, on getting rid of the filibuster. And I think it is substantively the right thing to do in order for Democrats to pass an agenda ever again with the way that the Senate map is. But I also think politically, I was never afraid of that fight because most people in the country don't give a shit about the filibuster. They don't know what it is. They don't care about arcane Senate procedure. And I think that the government shutdown, who shuts the government down when, who's supporting the CR and who's not, that all gets lost with people. To the extent that they're paying attention, And they are going to know that there are disruptions in government services, which will happen when more, you know, especially with air travel. It's already starting to see some of the delays. They'll know that. And then they'll know that Republicans don't want to do anything about health care and Democrats do. That's probably the message that's landing with people to the extent that they tune into the shutdown. So I don't think the blame game is important. I don't think Senate procedure is important, what Republicans do. But like, I just I think you've got to make it about health care and that's it.

I want to talk about the Senate map, which you just brought up. Let me do it this way. Why don't we talk about the House briefly first, because I think it's more straightforward. And then let's talk about the Senate, because all of this is leading to the midterms. The next moment of political accountability, the next moment of power shift is the midterms. Democrats are in an OK position to take back the House with the big question being redistricting. And so you have Texas moving to do this mid-cycle redistricting. Now you have California moving towards a ballot initiative. I think those are actually beginning to go out in the mail pretty soon or even now.

Jon Favreau: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: To suspend the nonpartisan redistricting maps they have there in order to sort of counter Texas. You then could have this sort of chain reaction of other states countering each other. How do you rate what that looks like right now? The people you talk to, the conversations you're having, how does the fight for the House look to you?

Jon Favreau: So I think the Prop 50 here in California, the polling for that looks good. Republicans are sort of that they just pulled some money back on that campaign because I think they they believe it's not going well for them. So I feel good about that. The best estimates I've seen if Prop 50 passes. So California gets to redraw the maps to partially neutralize Texas, Missouri, and then all these other states go. Republicans pick up around anywhere from six to eight seats, I think I've seen. But if Democrats win the generic ballot by three, four points, that'll still be enough to take back the House. But it's, you know, it's close. It's not like 2018 blue wave territory, at least not right now. It's a full year. So who knows? And so I think that the people that I talk to that are working on these House races, they think these frontline members, they want to talk about cost. They want to talk about cost of living. That's what voters care about. And so that's what they're focused on. And they feel confident about the House. I think the Senate is more of a reach, but, you know, there's more optimism there now than I think there was when Donald Trump took office.

Ezra Klein: Recognizing that we don know how the midterms are going to go It also my sense from the polling and from talking to people that it is not feeling to the people working on house races like 2018 2006 blue wave territory I curious why you think that is, though, because you compare this Trump administration to the first one.

Jon Favreau: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: This Trump administration is inflicting much more real pain on people than Trump did in his first two years of his first term. The tariffs are real pain. There is ICE agents in the streets. There's much more chaos around RFK Jr. at HHS. They passed something that is tax cuts, but also has embedded in it something more like Obamacare appeal, given how profoundly they gutted Medicaid, the kinds of destruction of health care that, you know, was very mobilizing for Democrats in the first term. You know, Trump isn't popular. He's looking, you know, about as bad as he did. in his first term. He's about 42%, which is more popular than I'd like to see him be, given what he's doing, but is not a great number. So why doesn't this look like blue wave territory?

Jon Favreau: A few things. I think the shock value has worn off. And so when Trump was doing everything he did in 2017, it was the first time people like, you know, think about family separation and what talk about an attentional moment. And he actually had to walk that back because of political pressure. and we are so far past family separation now in terms of what he's doing on immigration enforcement. But I think people get used to it, unfortunately. I think people are used to the pain of a Trump administration, which is a really depressing thing to say, but I do think that's playing a role. I also think people are exhausted after a decade. I talk to people in my life all the time who were, you know, in the first Trump term, were very politically active, paying attention to the news all the time, wanting to get involved. and this time around, you know, especially after the loss in 2024, there's just this feeling of defeatism. There's always been cynicism, but the cynicism has almost morphed into nihilism with some folks and people are like, I just can't do it. I can't pay attention anymore. I can't do it again. It's been too long. I'm tired. I got to go about my life and maybe we should just wait, wait this out. And at some point, you know, he'll be gone and things will be normal again. and I don't want to be involved in politics because politics sucks. But that explains why you don't see the level of resistance organizing you did in the first term. I get that. And, you know, I end up in these conversations often where people say, well, you know, why doesn't, and you do have no king's marches and other things that have been significant. But when people, I think, are asking the question of why there doesn't seem to be as much resistance as there was in the first term, I think a lot of people in the resistance feel it failed. I don't totally agree with that, But the sense that Trump got back in, like we gave it our best shot and now they don't really know what to do. I think that's very real.

Ezra Klein: That doesn't explain why Republicans haven't collapsed on the generic ballot. They are battering the economy with tariffs. They've slowed the labor market. I mean, they have done things that are genuinely unpopular and are causing people pain where you wouldn't need the reaction people are having to be, I'm going to be out in the streets every single night. Right. You know, you could just have people saying, I want to give these guys a chance. But when a pollster calls me, I don't like what's happening. So I'm going to tell them I'm supporting the Democrats. You've not seen a collapse in Republican support, even as Republicans have, you know, signed on to some pretty profoundly unpopular things and on tariffs in particular. The idea that they came through a cost of living election and they decided to increase the cost of goods all across the economy. It's a wild political decision to make that has not had particularly wild consequences for them, at least as of yet. Do you have a view on why that is?

Jon Favreau: I think we're early on the effects of the tariffs. I think those will get worse. But I think if you look at the polling, who has Trump lost? He's lost some of the younger voters, the Black and Latino voters that sort of moved his way in 2024. I think the core of Trump's support, as it has been for the last decade, remains because even if they are feeling sort of pinched on cost of living issues, he is doing what they want him to do. For a good portion of his base, they like seeing all this. And so he has that support solid. I think if you look at his numbers with independents and the independents that are left are going to be more left leaning anyway, because some of them have already voted for Donald Trump and become Republicans over the last decade. But the independents who are left, I mean, he has collapsed in a big way. Right. He's sitting at like probably closer to mid 30s, low 30s than he is in the 40s. And, you know, it's like he's two percent of Democrats approve. but it's the support among the core base of Trump voters where he's delivering what he at least talked mostly about delivering outside of the economy, the support's holding up. But again, it's not a year yet. And I do think that the pain from the tariffs is going to get worse. I think the economy is not by any means chugging along. And there is a year left of Donald Trump sending troops and masked men into the streets all over the country, which could cause a lot of chaos.

Ezra Klein: How much do you think the Democratic Party's brand is part of the problem? In polling, Democrats have never been lower, at least in modern polling. Elections are ultimately a choice. How much of why Democrats aren't doing better on the generic ballot is that people don't really like Democrats?

Jon Favreau: Yeah, I mean, Democratic voter dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and its leaders is at an all-time high, the dissatisfaction. And the last time voters of either party were this dissatisfied with their leaders was with Republicans in the Obama era right around when the Tea Party basically took over the Republican Party. And so I do think a lot of this is Democratic voters saying, and people who would tend to be Democratic voters to the extent that they vote, they are probably very unhappy with what Trump is doing, if not alarmed, but have not heard much from Democratic politicians. Now, part of that is we're the party out of power, so we don't have one leader. Our congressional leaders aren't necessarily the most effective communicators, Schumer and Jeffries. That's why you have the 2028 potential contenders. You got Gavin Newsom out there and J.B. Pritzker making a lot of noise. But even a lot of the 2028 contenders are relatively quiet, aside from Newsom and Pritzker. They're quite quiet.

Ezra Klein: I found it strange.

Jon Favreau: Me too. Me too. And I assume that's a strategy to be like, okay, I'm going to hold my fire until we have a primary and I don't want to piss anyone off early. And I don't know. I can't tell the strategy. If anything is being rewarded in American politics recently, it's caution.

Ezra Klein: Well, you know, I could see someone saying, OK, you know, there's just a poll out of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, more popular than he's ever been in Pennsylvania, would beat J.D. Vance in that state by, I think, double digits, according to that poll. And so maybe Josh Shapiro was right to stay out of this. And he could just sit there as a figure who is quite popular in one of the most important swing states in the country, if not the most important. So I get that, but I also think that the information environment, the attention economy requires you to be communicating all the time if you want to build a following, not just in your party, but in the country at this moment in politics. People expect their leaders to be communicating constantly about what's happening, especially people who decide primaries.

So you're talking a bit about the relationship between the Democratic Party's leaders and the Democratic Party as an organization and its base. But I'm also thinking here about the people who are not Democratic primary voters who, you know, are maybe people Democrats could win over or have won over in the past but have soured on Democrats. And I think that brings us to the Senate map. So in order to win the Senate in 2026, Democrats would need to successfully defend seats in Georgia and Michigan. They would need to win seats in Maine, which they have often thought they will beat Susan Collins in Maine and failed. They would need to win the Senate seat in North Carolina that former governor there Roy Cooper is running for. That seems plausible to do. Then they would need to win in two states that Trump won by big margins. The ones you hear mentioned here are Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, Florida, or Texas.

Jon Favreau: Alaska.

Ezra Klein: Alaska. Maybe Alaska. Tough states for Democrats. Yeah. What would it take for Democrats to win in two of those?

Jon Favreau: First of all, you need a national environment that is much better for Democrats. So I think you need the generic number up much more than three or four points. So you need a national environment that is quite poor for Republicans and quite good for Democrats. And then you need candidates in those states that I think are well-known, which is why you've got, you know, the Roy Coopers of the world running and people excited about that who are well-funded and I think who have strong communication skills, maybe most importantly. I've been able to work with Republicans in North Carolina, and I have been able to try and stop them when they do bad things. Time and time again, we are seeing Washington hurt everyday people, taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. You know, I've thought that I need to make a difference at a time like this.

Ezra Klein: Yes, but who are the well-known enough Democrats? I mean, Ohio, actually, where Sherrod Brown is running. that that's the the answer there but iowa nebraska texas florida

Jon Favreau: Well even that I think in in nebraska like if you have dan osborne running again he at least ran statewide before so he has the name id colin allred in texas has name id james tallarico and that primary is you know getting some national notoriety mary palata in alaska right she won uh the house seat from alaska which is statewide so if she ran for the senate there she's well known in maine Janet Mills as the governor and now Graham Plattner in that primary is also generating a ton of national attention. And, you know, we'll see if that translates to attention in Maine as well. So I do think you need these candidates that are well known within their states who either because they have they've held office there statewide or they've run before.

Ezra Klein: So the thing that's been on my mind is how many states the Democrats were competitive in just normally competitive in a dozen years ago, in the 2012 cycle, say, now feel like these incredible reaches. So when Obamacare passed, Democrats held Senate seats in Iowa, in Ohio, in Nebraska, and in Florida. That wasn't long ago. Like, I am not that old, nor are you. You've been in politics this whole time. What happened, in your view, that so many of these states became so much tougher for Democrats to compete in, that Florida and Ohio, say, went from the canonical swing states to red states, that Iowa went from a place that Barack Obama wins to a place that Democrats lose? What went wrong?

Jon Favreau: I mean, I think most of it is the result of a political realignment along lines of education. I think two thirds of the electorate does not have a four-year college degree and a third does. And so when you have states like an Ohio, like an Iowa, where there are more non-college educated voters, then you're getting a realignment that has probably been lagging for a while because you had, to the extent you did have Democrats in those states when Obama was president, they were very conservative Democrats. And so at some point, voters think, do I want a conservative Democrat or do I just want a Republican? The real thing.

Ezra Klein: But that just restates the question. Why are Democrats the party that sees themselves as the party of the working class? The party that is still much more pro-union, party that is still trying to expand your healthcare, that is raising taxes on billionaires rather than cutting taxes on billionaires. Why are they hemorrhaging voters who don't have a college degree?

Jon Favreau: I think because the economic policies that Democrats have passed over the last couple decades, while they have improved the lives of millions of people, have not improved them enough to sort of neutralize the effects of an economy where wealth inequality continues to grow. Their view of the national party has become, and part of this is, you know, the fault of the Republicans or the success of the Republicans, they view the National Party as a party of elites obsessed with cultural and social issues and not focused enough on economic issues. And this has basically been the Republican message and the Trump message for many, many years now. And I think that when we've been talking this whole time, like cultural, social issues, identity inflected issues, they get more coverage and more, they generate more attention than cost of living issues and fights over cost of living issues. And so if you're someone who is more conservative on immigration, trans issues, abortion, whatever it may be, and you look at the national debate and you tune in, you're likely to see Democrats stake out progressive positions on that. Republicans fight them on it. And you're not as likely to see fights about health care like we're seeing right now, which is, again, what led Senate Democrats to the strategy that they're pursuing right now is this very dynamic.

Now, do you just run an economic populace like Sherrod Brown? And maybe that's enough. Possibly, possibly. But I also think that ignoring the identity inflected issues at this point is not feasible because again, Trump and the Republicans have a vote and they get to make the election about something as well. And again, the way that the information environment works, right, those issues are going to generate attention. So you do have to have a message on all those issues. And it has to be a message that resonates with people who may be more conservative than national Democrats or more moderate than national Democrats on those issues. This is not about like, so then we have to change all of our positions and moderate all of our positions. But like, at the very least, let's try telling a story about our position on those issues that appeals to people, or at least doesn't push them away. And I don't think we've done a great job of that.

Ezra Klein: I think a debate you're getting at here, which I think is a pretty big strategic debate in the party, is, is economic populism enough? Or in order for your economic populism to be heard, do you have to, in these states, run Democrats or have Democrats run who are more culturally in touch with their own state, who share the views of more of the people in their states? So Dan Osborne, I think he's interesting. Dan Osborne runs in Nebraska. He's an independent. Every Democrat I know wants Dan Osborne to win. No Democrat I know wants Dan Osborne to run as a Democrat. Right. Because the Democratic brand is trash and it would destroy his chances. But Dan Osborne runs quite far to the right of where the Democratic Party is on immigration. Social security to illegals? Who would be for that? I'm where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border. If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I'm pretty handy. And I mean, the last time you had a Democrat representing Nebraska, it was Ben Nelson, who was a pain in the neck during Obamacare, but was also the crucial vote to get it passed. He was a pro-life Democrat from Nebraska. And I think there is a pretty big divide in the party of can you hit the economic populism button so hard that you don't need to do anything on the other stuff? You can maybe tell a bit of a better story maybe de it Or do you have to run candidates who make liberals in New York and California uncomfortable with their cultural positions Do you have to re the Democratic Party have much more variation in the actual positions of the Democrats running You know, the way Joe Manchin was quite different than other Democrats. How do you think about that?

Jon Favreau: I think the one gift politically that Donald Trump and Republicans have given us in the second Trump term especially is that they have become so extreme on so many of these issues that we're talking about these, whether it's immigration, whether it's trans issues, whether it's abortion, that Democrats simply staking out positions that are mainstream, that are reflective of where most of the public is. reflective of where the party was under Barack Obama for a lot of this. I'm thinking especially of immigration here. I think you just need to do that. And when I think about Arizona and West Virginia are very interesting to me because in Arizona, we had Kyrsten Sinema who became an independent and was a pain in the Democrats ass for quite some time. And then you have Joe Manchin in West Virginia who got a lot of shit as well. I think we all wish we had Joe Manchin in the Senate still right now, as opposed to Republican Jim Justice, who has that seat. We don't know when there's ever going to be a Democrat again in West Virginia. And would Joe Manchin be voting to keep the government shut right now? Would he have been with Angus King and Catherine Cortez-Master? Yeah, he'd probably be with them. But I don't know. I'd rather have that vote in the Senate right now. He voted with Democrats on the Inflation Reduction Act. He voted on judges, right?

Jon Favreau: Like that's the best we're going to get in West Virginia. Arizona is a different story. Ruben Gallego is culturally in tune with his state, including on the issue of immigration, but is much more progressive than Kyrsten Sinema was and is much more mainstream Democratic and won that state, which is a tough state. The Democratic Party's right on immigration, but he would support health care and child care in a way Sinema was incredibly difficult on.

And I will say for Gallego, I remember interviewing him right after the election and we talked about immigration and it was right when Kilmer Obregola Garcia was sent to El Salvador. And he was in the camp that this is a trap. We shouldn't be talking about this too much. This is what Donald Trump wants. And as Donald Trump's immigration enforcement agenda has become more extreme and they've been picking people up off the streets, I check out his Twitter feed and he is much more forceful these days on immigration. And so I still think he has this position on immigration that is pretty mainstream and where most of the country is, but that has not stopped him from speaking out forcefully about what's happening right now. Issues change in relationship to actual events.

Ezra Klein: Yes. I mean, I think people think everything is stuck and you don't want to rerun the last election. I do, though, think this issue of the Democratic Party's national brand is an important one. What I would like to believe is that Democrats could find candidates in these states that match the states and that would be enough to win. And I think that's increasingly untrue.

Jon Favreau: Yeah, because everything's nationalized.

Ezra Klein: Everything's nationalized. And so Sherrod Brown, he held the Ohio Senate seat for three terms. Sherrod Brown is as economically populist as you get. Not just as a Democrat, he is one of the anchors of economic populism in the Senate and before that in the House for a very, very long time. For decades, corporations have had all the power in our economy. It's going to take a lot of work to undo those decades of bad trade and tax policy that gave corporations every single day the upper hand. I want to see employers competing for workers. That's a good thing. It's how you get rising wages, which gets spent in the community and then create growth for everyone, whether in Santa Fe or Columbus. He knows his state. He is trusted in his state. He gets beaten by Bernie Moreno, a wealthy owner of car dealerships who had to settle a dozen wage theft cases, before he beats sterling economic populist Sherrod Brown. And what I take from that, what I take from Dan Osborne who, whatever he is or is not in his soul, absolutely cannot run as a Democrat under any circumstances, is it's not going to work. Even good candidate selection is not going to work if people feel the Democratic Party's national brand has so little room or respect for them. I don't really know how you change it. I have some thoughts that will probably expand as the weeks go on. But I think it needs to be understood as a more central concern that a world where the Democratic Party brand is so bad that it is an anchor that will drag Sherrod Brown down with it. I mean, that's a problem you need to find some way to fix.

Jon Favreau: Yeah. Versus just never having the Senate or never having it with more than 51 votes. Ever again. Democrats have gotten used to having a lot less power than they used to be able to have.

Ezra Klein: Yes. They've also gotten used to, and partly this is Trump's fault, but being primarily a reactive party to what Donald Trump does. And then there's this conversation that, okay, well, we need a positive agenda. And then it goes right to like policies. And I do think we're missing a story to tell about where the country is and where we want it to go. And we are on the cusp of revolutionary technological change, again, that's going to reshape the economy and how we interact with each other. And we didn't do so great the last time at figuring that out. We're still dealing with the effects of the attention economy. And now we're heading into artificial intelligence. And I think Democrats have to figure out a story about what kind of country we want to be, how people are going to work, how people are going to interact with one another.

We are in a political crisis right now. I think Democrats need to — it's not enough to say vote for me and the political crisis will end. It's how are we as a country going to get out of this political crisis together? And in your poll, in the New York Times poll, cost of living is now being eclipsed by political division as the issue that people bring up as the issue that concerns them the most. Telling a story about where we want this country to go. We want a path for every American to make a living, make sure there's a living to make, and make sure that we have a government that protects our rights and freedoms, no matter who we are, no matter who we voted for. And you don't want a country where people who don't vote for the right leader get punished after the election. I actually think that's quite a popular position that would really resonate with people. And so I do think that Democrats who have something to say about the moment we're in, the crisis we're in, both in the economy, in politics, and in how we interact with one another, technologically and culturally and how we can get out of that, that's the story we need to figure out how to tell. And if someone who tells a compelling story about that is going to help the brand more than any number of polls and research and focus groups.

Jon Favreau: Let me try a thought out on you. I think part of the problem the Democratic Party is facing, the part of how it ended up in its current ditch, is that it really hasn't had a strong party leader since 2016. Hillary Clinton loses in 2016, so she doesn't become the party leader. Joe Biden in 2020 is just a very strange kind of candidate. He has already, I think, suffered a significant deterioration just in his communication abilities. It's not as bad as it'll be four years later, but he doesn't have the energy. He's a kind of consensus candidate in a strange way. People fled to him after South Carolina as a safe bet. But he's not a candidate the party falls in love with in any real way. And he is acting in his own way from a place of coalition building and a certain kind of insecurity. So he's really trying to keep his tent broad. The Joe Biden of 15 years before, I think would have had much stronger views on what the Democratic Party should be and how it should sound and act than the Biden of that era.

But then four years later, he's in no shape to craft his administration into an argument about what the Democratic Party is and isn't. And so then you have this crazy period after the first debate. Kamala Harris ends up as a nominee with 107 days to go or whatever it is. And she obviously doesn't win, but you don't have a full primary. People fight out what the party should be and what its direction should be and how it should work and what issues it should emphasize and what it should let go of. She makes a series of moves, like moving to the right on immigration and moving to the right on fracking, but with no explanation ever of why this huge change from her 2020 campaign to her 2024 campaign is happening. So the party doesn't have the fight about itself that leads to change.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is changing the Republican Party in all kinds of ways. He's bringing RFK Jr. and he has changed it on immigration and changed it on Medicare. I think it's very hard for parties to change without an agreed-upon leader who decides on the change. And the Democratic Party has been just leaderless now for a long time. And as such, it's ended up in a space of drift. I think that a lot of Democratic politicians, and I think this spans generations, have sort of lost confidence and do not trust their gut instinct anymore about politics. And I think that was true after, to some extent, after Trump won the first time. I think after Trump wins again, after everything we've been through, they're like, well, I have no idea what works. I have no idea what people actually want in this country anymore.

And I think when a leader has come along and changed their party — Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or even leaders who don't make it to the presidency, like Bernie Sanders — it is because they believe something so deeply. They have a theory of the case. They have a story they want to tell about the country and where it should go. And if it works, it works. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. But they're going to try it out. And they're going to have confidence in that story. And you're going to be able to sell it. And you don't have to worry about which medium you go to and what shows you're doing. Everyone talks about how we have a million conversations about media and stuff like that. Bernie Sanders, everyone knows what Bernie Sanders stands for. And do you agree with his policies? Do you not? He knows what he stands for. He feels good about it and he's going to keep talking about it. And I think to be a leader to change the party, you have to have a story and have to feel confident in it. And I think right now, too many Democrats don't feel confident. And so they are looking around and asking too many people and looking at too many polls and too many focus groups to try to figure out where they should be as opposed to deciding, where do I think the country should go? What do I believe about the country? And then let's look at the polls and the focus groups to figure out how best to message that. But you got to start with the core conviction. And I just don't think we've seen that yet from a lot of Democrats. And they don't project confidence, which makes it hard to get people to follow you.

Ezra Klein: Yes. Do you think it matters that the Democratic Party's leadership and its best known figures over the past decade or so have really ended up completely concentrated in New York and California in a way that wasn't true before? So you think about, you had Tom Daschle, who was a Democratic Senate leader from South Dakota. You had Harry Reid from Nevada. Now, leader of Senate Democrats is Chuck Schumer from New York. Leader of House Democrats is Hakeem Jeffries from New York. The most prominent House Democrat is AOC. The biggest Democratic name in campaigns this year is Zoran Mamdani. Prior to this year, Pelosi, the leader. The last Democratic nominee was Kamala Harris. Currently leading in the polls is Gavin Newsom. I can't really remember a time when the party seemed quite so concentrated. And look, I am a Californian who is currently living in New York, talking to somebody in California. So I am noting a problem I'm part of. Maybe it doesn't matter. Good leaders can come from anywhere. But it seems weird. And I wonder if it, in ways that people don't quite want to face up to, affects the party, the way it sees politics, its instincts, its sense of what strategies are acceptable even to try. Like, do you think there's something worth worrying about there?

Jon Favreau: Yes. And I think most people would say that it's ideologically related. And perhaps that's true. But I also think when you are in New York, in LA and San Francisco, in Washington, especially, you're sort of ensconced in a bubble of people who don't just think like you do in terms of what's my position on a given issue, but how I see politics and how I say — to the extent that politics is nationalized, it is very nationalized when you're in one of those cities. And I think when people hear, oh, we need more Democrats from the middle of America, a lot of progressives, their mind goes to, okay, we don't want some conservative Democrat like Joe Manchin. But I think that some of the most promising leaders in the party who speak in ways that I find compelling — like I think John Ossoff in Georgia, we talked about Gallego to some extent, Alyssa Slokin in Michigan — some of these younger Democrats in states where they have had to win the votes of Trump voters and have done so while still maintaining their political identity as mainstream Democrats, not conservative Democrats. And I think that those leaders, especially the younger leaders in those purple states, are probably where we're going to find the next leader of the party.

Ezra Klein: Let's leave it there. Always our final question: what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Jon Favreau: I've gone from reading about what life is like in authoritarian countries. I feel like we've already passed that now. I'm trying to be more hopeful. I'm trying to figure out books about nonviolent protest and resistance. *Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know* by Erica Chenoweth. Had them on Pod Save America a couple months ago. They have the three and a half percent rule, which is no authoritarian regime has been able to withstand a protest movement, a nonviolent protest movement that is three and a half percent of the population or more.

Martin Luther King's *Stride Toward Freedom*, which is his book and firsthand account of the Montgomery bus boycotts. I was reading that again, and I find that just a fascinating study in the strategy and discipline necessary for nonviolent resistance and protests and political movement and social movement building.

And then this is not a book that's out yet. It's out next week, but I just read the long essay by the author in the New York Times. John Fabian Witt, *The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America*, about a very wealthy philanthropist who decided to donate all of his money to progressive causes back in the 1920s and sort of ceded the ground for a lot of the most progressive policies that we would end up seeing in the New Deal. When he was doing this, it was also a time in the 1920s where we are seeing a lot of the political and social and economic conditions that we are seeing right now. So I thought the essay was excellent. I'm excited to read the book.

Ezra Klein: Jon Favreau, thank you very much.

Jon Favreau: Thanks for having me.

[Credits music begins]

Ezra Klein: This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Amin Zahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristen Lynn, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Carol Saburo and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Simulowski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser. Thank you.