Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won | The Ezra Klein Show

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Strong rec Gareth321 · 2025-03 · on “Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo”

If you have the time, I highly recommend this interview between Ezra Klein and Democrat strategist David Shor ( [this video] ). He goes into a lot of the details around the question you imply. Long story short, Republicans have done that, but also on the issues people actually care about. This has given them a large trust lead in topics like the economy, crime, immigration, the border, etc. If Democrats had also hyperfocused on kitchen table issues, they might have won. By the time Kamala was campaigning, it was far too late to convince everyone that she actually cared about important issues. She had four years to prove she did not.

Recommends awongh · 2025-04 · on “Secret Deals, Foreign Investments: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm”

> "racist", "bigots" and "single-digit IQ yokels" One of the narratives I hear repeated a lot that is simply untrue is around white americans. Trump doubled his numbers for minority (male) voters vs. the last time he was elected. But rather than coming up with a new, more nuanced view of what's happening people would rather trot out old tropes like *republicans are white and racist and bad*. Even with all the anti-immigrant stuff Trump increased his share of non-native born american voters. The refusal of people on the left to update their world view was one of the big reasons why they lost the election. I thought this Ezra Klien interview taling about election polling data was informative:

Recommends gsf_emergency_2 · 2025-07 · on “Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us?”

Sorry! That was careless phrasing. Thank you for fuzzing the careless thinking behind it. It should have been "Trump is now seen (and wants to be seen) by the right+(white) center left as moderate" Is that more reasonable? Imho Ezra Klein explains it better here [this video] (Is he going for "Leto I Atreides"?)

Recommends everdrive · 2026-07 · on “Americans are angry about data centers. Politicians are feeling the pressure”

Thanks for the clarification. The interesting thing about the 2024 election was that Trump's turnout was higher than 2016, and in addition, according to the polling and analysis I saw, this was one of the first times in a long time where if _more_ people had voted, he would have had _more_ votes. This is in pretty stark contrast to presidential voting trends for the last 30-40 years. So although I think you could paint 2016 as an "apathy" election (I would still argue that 2016 was more about two deeply unpopular candidates than anything else) I'm not sure that same analysis really applies to 2024. I'm basing a lot of this on this very interesting interview here -- [this video] -- so to the exten

Cites PaulHoule · 2025-07 · on “Rust Belt Voters Are Sick of Both Parties”

It's a position some people in the Democratic Party would have but that it less likely to endorse at the national level and even less likely to act on. Number 4 is a position that is rising in popularity generally that is somewhat well articulated here [LINK] One simple story about the 2024 election is that college educated people voted for Harris and the rest voted for Trump which is the big takeaway of a conversation Ezra Klein had with a pollster. [this video] Jacobin has the problem that Marxism is something that appeals to highly educated systematizers, e.g. the college educated. The reason why the U.S. doesn't have representation in the fourth international is that in the 1980 the leaders o