Democrats Don’t Think They Have This Election Won

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started you're at the convention now the already selected a nominee inla Harris so what's there left to do yeah what what are conventions for is a a wonderful question in the modern era so conventions used to be where you pick the nominee that is still true technically most years but it is not technically true this year there was a virtual roll call where kamla Harris was selected so the part of the convention where officially the nominee gets selected that has also already happened so why are so many people here in Chicago the way I would think about the modern convention is that it is a place where political parties gather to Define themselves and they do that in a number of ways they do that through creating their platforms they do that through choosing who gets speaking slots and when right who is featured and on what night and at what time at political conventions is a party telling you a lot about who the people now in charge of it think that it is and and want it to be seen as and they do that through meeting and and talking in the hallways I mean there are so many people here from every faction of the democratic party and they're having delegate breakfasts and they're having caucuses and they're talking to each other and they're making connections and that too is sort of how a party structures itself and builds the interstitial web that allows it to operate in the off years so a lot of what I'm trying to do here is try to understand what the Democratic party is right now who holds power within it how it wants to be perceived by the public and also what it sort of learned having just done this remarkable this genuinely historic Collective action of persuading its incumbent president to step aside and and then coaling around KL Harris the vice president I mean this is the Democratic party coming to Chicago to celebrate a party action of a type that there's no precedent for in the modern era so let's get more specific into that you're in those hallways you're going to dinners and breakfasts like what are you hearing like how are you seeing the Democratic party Define itself now so a couple things and we're going to see the Democratic party's definition emerge and unfold over the course of the week so I wouldn't say anything too firm yet but one thing that was very notable about the first night to me was that there were seven Union presid up there on behalf of 1 million active and retired members of the UAW I am honored to support KLA Harris and Tim Walls to be our next president and vice president and I want to say thank you to Joe Biden for making history by walking the picket line with the UAW the display of closeness between the Democratic party and organized labor which was I think emphasized even more this year because Republicans have at least been fainting at making a play to break that although Donald Trump giving an interview with Elon Musk where he compliments Elon Musk on how good he is at firing striking workers I think was probably not helpful for the Republican party's efforts on that score but you really saw the Democratic party emphasizing its relationship to labor look I came up in Democratic Party politics covering Democratic Party politics at a time when I mean organized labor has been a democratic constituency but it has been treated I don't want to say with at an arms length but not with This ferocious level of embrace and it speaks to something else you saw up there last night which is there's just a lot more populism in the party right now there is a sense of the populism of Donald Trump needs to be blunted but I thought the the strongest speech of the night was AOC and that was a very very very popular speech and I for one am tired about of hearing about how a two bit Union Buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day to lip working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life the truth is D you cannot love this country country if you only fight for the wealthy and big business and the way she tried to draw Donald Trump outside the circle of patriotism was really interesting I I think a lot of politics is about defining who stands in the center of the American story and the way AOC pushed Donald Trump out of the center of that story was saying that he stands with big business he stands with greed not with ordinary Americans right patriotism in her telling was recast as class as where you are inside of a class war you compare how things looked when you know Mitt Romney had the Republican convention and it was about makers and takers and Democrats were always being accused of waging class Warfare and they were trying to say no we don't wage class Warfare so that felt very different to me the other thing that I would just note is there's a lot of unity when I saw Gina Rondo the former governor of Rhode Island and the current sitting Commerce Secretary who's very much from the party's moderate Wing up there on the same night as AOC and rander was attacking corporate monopolies kamla Harris will give more than 100 middleclass Americans a tax cut she'll build 3 million new homes for the middle class and she's going to forge an economy with Fair competition free from monopolies monopolies that Crush workers and small businesses and startups I mean you really see a party that has bridged huge divides at another time and not long ago the fundamental fight inside the party was between the factions driven by Bernie Sanders and then also later somewhat represented by by AOC and now you have AOC giving keynote speeches on behalf of kamla Harris Let's Stay on this factional divide for a second do you see this more as the left wi of the party moving toward the center or the center moving towards the left I'm not sure I think there are ways in which it is both on the one hand I think Joe Biden has had a much more Progressive presidency and he has worked very hard to bring progressives into his presidency it is notable that when the fight over Biden's future was happening the faction of the party that stood most strongly behind Joe Biden was it's left where flank right it was Bernie Sanders who wrote the oped in the New York Times reiterating his endorsement and telling people to stop challenging Biden it was AOC who said the matter is closed and you know did an hourlong Instagram story defending Joe Biden and and and saying that you know there wasn't a really good other alternative and so it it speaks to a bridge that Biden himself built from you know what he was understood as a faction he led the Moder faction to the progressive faction and if anything now I think Biden is now Associated more with the the progressive faction and and Harris to a large degree also benefits from that I think there's a a sense that that that that relationship can continue because it's not just a relationship of personal relationships it's also a staffing relationship it's also about who is actually serving inside the Biden Administration which is also people we would expect to be serving in a comma Harris Administration but that said there's also a way in which the left has moved towards the center right if you think back to 2020 what are the big fights in the party it's about Medicare for all well nobody thinks kamla Harris is going to run on abolishing all Private health insurance this year it's about defunding the police later on in that year nobody thinks KLA Harris is going to run like that but more than that there's been an Embrace of kamla Harris's identity and record as a prosecutor so this sort of big split that existed in 2020 where the left made life really hard for KLA Harris saying KLA Harris is a cop KLA Harris is a cop that was one of the attacks on her now you look at the ads it's like kamla Harris a cop and doesn't everybody love cops so there are just ways in which some of the fights have calmed and then you know Donald Trump exerts a unifying pressure on the party people want to beat him and so there is a a tendency for the party to converge in a quite powerful way to accomplish that goal one of the big exceptions we've seen to party Unity has been over uh the Biden administration's role in Israel's war in Gaza how are you seeing this point of division play out in the party it doesn't feel as divisive here on the ground as I think a lot of people feared the protests have been quite undersubscribed there was a protest that was you know predicting 30 40,000 people it got a small fraction of that I don't think to a lot of Democrats right now this feels like a genuine split in the party because kamla Harris is known to be quite to Joe Biden's left on Israel and Gaza inside the administration she has been much more for a ceasefire she's been for being much tougher on Netanyahu and she's called now for a ceasefire the protest is saying an arms embargo too which he's not called for that said I've heard a lot of Democrats ask in some frustration why are there these protesters here at Harris when Harris is so much better on Palestinian rights than Donald Trump would be why are they disrupting at all the Democratic Convention when they should be actually allying with Democrats to beat Donald Trump people who want to see healthc care insurance expanded in this country aren't protesting kamla Harris they are working for her to be elected because they know that Donald Trump will take Healthcare away from people and I actually think that reflects a misunderstanding of where the protesters are I just spent time in Israel I've been thinking a lot about this set of questions and what used to be often a question about a peace process is for many of the protesters now a question of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish State at all and from that perspective the more traditionally liberal two-state perspective that kamla Harris represents is not actually necessarily friendly in some ways it actually might be less friendly because there are many people who believe that that's actually a way of papering over from this again not my perspective but from this perspective the fundamental immorality of the Israeli or the Zionist project and one thing I will say having just been on the ground in in the West Bank and and Israel the degree to which the two-state solution feels quite impossible right now if you were there I think people have not connected to fully like to me right now there actually some legitimacy to the view that the Democrats calling for two states in a world where in the Israeli knesset they just adopted a resolution against a two-state solution and many of Benny gon's allies voted for that that there is something to the argument that the two-state solution is kind of an illusion now at the same time there's no appetite for a one-state solution either people have heard me say before that we are not in a solutionary space here but but the division which exists is sort of different than the division that I think people thought about in the past the division that exists which is a more extreme division is about the question of Israel at all so I think a lot of energy has drained out of the protest because Harris has ended up being on the side of what you might understand as its more moderate Demands a ceasefire and certainly a skepticism of whether the Israeli War Machine at this point is moral or legitimate and to some degree what is left are the people who fundamentally believe that Israel is illegitimate and that is not where Harris is but that's also not a deep division inside the Democratic party so we saw at the RNC that they came in with the impression that they were on the path to Victory The Vibes were good then what are The Vibes like at the DNC now so I want to be careful in how I answer this because I got here yesterday and I my my reporting is not a representative sample of the entire uh DNC but I have been a bit surprised by how cautious a lot of the people I am talking to are about the the makeup of the election which is to say that if you're on social media or something right now and you're reading the polls it looks like kamla Harris has really pulled into the lead here and that is not the thing people are saying to me what they're saying to me in a way that feels like they actually feel it is this is a 50-50 election I've heard people say here people I trust and people are very influential inside the party that it's an uphill election for Harris that they think that if the election was held today Trump would win it or at least have a very very good shot of winning it and one of the things influencing that is there are different polls that are treated in different ways in the parties right and a bunch of the polls are public but they're not all public and one of the major super packs that is very well respected among Democrats is future forward and they have done a bunch of battleground State polling I don't have the exact numbers but this has been reported on that polling is showing it closer than a lot of the public polling is it is showing it to be very much a tossup it is not showing Harris with a lead in all of the battlegr states in which he needs to lead or at least not a safe lead so there's a real feeling inside the party right now that maybe it's not as good as it looks right maybe some of the polling bounce is a early bounce for Harris because people are excited there's something in polling called response rate bias when one side becomes more excited they have a tendency to respond more often to pollsters so it is possible that the polling is overstating Harris's strength right now there's worry that if you look at the internals of polling that Harris is doing so well with white working-class voters that it just doesn't look plausible to people in the Democratic Party that she's improved that much on where Joe Biden was with white working-class voters or if she has that that will probably not sustain until election day so there is a feeling that this election is very far from one she might even still be somewhat behind and that the party still does need to figure out how to win it there's also a feeling and you hear this in the consistent things that the speakers are saying that it's very unclear who's going to win the house and the Senate and Democrats are particularly very worried about losing the Senate they're going to lose Joe Manson's seat they are worried about losing John tester's seat they're worried about losing shered brown seat in Ohio it is not out of a plausible outcome that they could keep the Senate at 50 or 51 but it would also be very easy to see them going down to 49 going down to 48 going down to 47 and that could be true even in a world where kamla Harris wins and if KLA Harris wins but Republicans control the Senate and particularly if she wins in the control the Senate and the house she's not getting her agenda through you mentioned earlier that people told you that the elections still looking around even odds 50/50 one of the arguments for getting Biden to step aside was that the new candidate would have better odds so do you get a sense that there's buyers remorse now or a sense of regret no everybody believes Harris has way better odds incling including people who were skeptical of the the shift I I'll note that future forward polling they were giving Biden a chance of victory in the single digits like that is how unlikely they thought a Biden win had become so that was the level of of grimness in the party so going from singled digit shot of winning in the eyes of some of these people polling and modeling out the election to functionally a coin toss that is a huge huge difference so what are the theories that people have to improve those odds get it to I don't know like 55 45 so this is an interesting thing about where the party is right now usually by this point the Strategic direction of the party has been decided typically when you have a candidate running who is not actually the incumbent they will have run in a primary and when they've run in a primary a primary is a contest of a number of things but one of the things it is a contest of is theories of how to win the election right you think about 2020 Joe Biden is offering a more moderate Theory you have Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders saying you know you're G to juice enthusiasm by by running much more significantly to the left you know you have Cory Booker arguing for a candidacy about love and about Civic virtues there's been nothing like that this year and so Harris who had the benefit of this instant coalescence around her she didn't have to articulate one answer inside the Democratic party it has been so new for everybody who is arguing she's light on policy detail typically candidates have an entire primary to work through and roll out their their policies it isn't something you can do overnight it actually takes time to work with your policy team and work through the numbers and try to figure out what it is you want to do and say and how you conceptualize a problem and which kind of advice you want to take so she's having to do everything at warp speed and that means a lot is not yet done she has released a couple of economic policies and functionally nothing else I frankly as a policy person would not want her to come out with an entire policy platform in 3 weeks if you've come out with an entire policy agenda in three weeks three weeks when you were also planning a convention choosing your vice president figuring out your stum speech and beginning to campaign then what you have done is rushed your policy agenda I'm not giving her a pass here I'm being realistic about the fact that policy is hard and it takes time and so there's a of room for people to influence her and one thing happening at this convention happening you know from the speaker Podium but also happening behind the scenes is people making their cases to each other people making their cases to her advisers people doing breakfasts where they show polling data supporting the way they see the situation so there's a faction of the party right now that is saying we need to moderate on key issues which he's actually doing some of right moderate On the Border show that we're a party of tough border security we're losing on immigration we need to show that that we get it there's Arguments for moderating on economics for talking more about deficit reduction for showing they better stewards of the public money for doing this on on crime you know Etc there are the arguments of the economic populists um you've heard a lot of those but that you can only blunt Donald Trump's populism with a stronger more authentic form of populism be the real deal of the thing him and JD Vance are are only claiming to be they're the people who really understand this is intentional and viral right and sort of you know don't want to say what they want to do is meme their way to Victory but there is a sense that that Harris can kind of build a movement without having to choose between these different theories it is true that the candidate is already chosen at this convention but it is less true than it normally is that the shape of that candidacy is already chosen now because Harris is Vice President some of it reflects the shape of the Biden presidency but not all of it and so there's actually more clay that is being molded here and more strategic arguments being debated than at other conventions I've I've attended or covered you've also told me before that Harris is much stronger at campaigning over over rights so can you talk a bit more about that different candidates in the party and different figures in the party have different kinds of of expertise and and comfort if you run a general from the military which is often something that that parties consider doing although they usually don't do it that person is probably going to be very comfortable on foreign policy and National Defense and not that comfortable talking about healthare and and the economy a lot of candidates come out of more economic background that's a very very normal thing you know maybe they've governed in in a state you know they're good at talking about the kinds of things Governors handle but they don't really know how to talk about North Korea about Israel about NATO uh Etc Harris her background is much more around law and rights the work she did in California was as a prosecutor uh as an attorney general she's very very comfortable talking about constitutional rights she's very very comfortable talking about Law and Order about Justice a lot of her close advisers um if you look at people she's been talking to for a long time in the party they're lawyers right they're people who teach in law schools or people who run legal nonprofits but Harris is not associated in the way a lot of candidates are with an economic faction within the party she's extremely strong on questions of voting rights on questions of Reproductive Rights on uh questions of criminal justice but in terms of which side of the party she sides with on the economy and on some other matters of domestic policy I mean I think you should understand her as a kind of mainstream Democrat I think you should understand her as not very far from where Joe Biden was so it's not that I'm predicting uh a huge break at least not at first but yeah she is coming from a different part of the party party than a lot of presidents have recently and has just had less experience on running campaigns based on economics than some of the other candidacies we've seen let's talk about more of the specifics of what we know about Harris's economic platform she gave a speech last Friday outlining quite a few of them can you talk a bit more about that absolutely so I think the really interesting thing about the set of economic policies Harris relased East is actually looking at the ordering of them in the fact sheet they they put out because what comes first it's build the American dream lowering the cost of renting and owning a home I have not seen ever a Democratic party Presidential nominee who puts at the very top of their economic agenda lowering the cost of housing whether her policies will actually do that I think is a bit of an open question because she sort of pushing in two directions at once here she has on the one hand number one calling for the construction of three million new housing units to end the housing Supply shortage in the next four years there's not that much detail on how they would do that you have to cut a lot of red tape that exists at the local level and change a lot of process at the local and state level to get there but it does suggest that the Democratic party has at least developed a theory of the housing problem that is a housing supply problem in the past what housing policy meant among Democrats was you subsidized rent here what it means is that you need to build a bunch more homes on the other side of it she has an idea to give new home buyers $25,000 in certain conditions and there's I think reasonable concern about that in a lot of places where what you have is a constraint on how many homes you can build if you just give new home buyers a credit that's just going to increase prices sellers are going to pocket that so whether or not she has like the the policy exactly right here I think is an open question and I would need to spend more time reporting that out but I I do think the emphasis is interesting to me the other major policy in here which reflects something that both the Biden Administration actually did and that Harris was a leader on when she was in the Senate is proposing a very expanded child tax credit which would be an up to $6,000 tax credit per child and that's just good policy would do huge amount to cut child poverty and it's just good to give families with children particularly poor families with children help like when you talk about wanting to make it easier to have families like that is a great way to do it so I I thought the the plan overall it reflected the right emphases right if you ask me what I would prioritize right now in Economic Policy housing affordability and an expanded child tax credit would be very much the top couple things on my list too so I was happy to see it all right and to end the conversation what' you think of Joe Biden's speech last night I thought it was quite moving I thought a couple pieces of it were very moving in particular the thing where people kept chanting thank you Joe and he would say thank you Kamala thank you Kamala it really spoke to a decency in him the long Applause for him that he was dabbing tears from his eyes as he hugged his daughter when he came out all of that it was very moving [Music] I did not myself find Biden's speech that effective I guess it was reminder of how grim and existential the tone of his campaign often was which is not to say it was wrong but it was actually in this era of kamla Harris and Tim Walls and Republicans are weird the shift back to the tone of the Biden campaign that dark democracy is on the line tone we saw at the campaign re kickoff it was jarring to go back there and it felt to me less effective like it really did feel like Democrats have come into a kind of joy in their campaign that when I saw a prime time speech that lacked it you're like oh this move has been good for the party Biden's defense of his own record and description of his own record I thought that was quite strong and true right he's done a tremendous amount he's been a very strong president but in many ways to me what was the real evidence of what Joe Biden has done was the whole night of the convention itself this is the party that Joe Biden built these connections between the moderate wings of Joe Biden and Gina Rond and Bernie Sanders in AOC that is Joe Biden's Legacy he actually did that no one else did that he did that and the passing of the torch to kamla Harris he did that yes there was pressure but he did that he chose KLA Harris he is the one who signaled to the party when there's genuine doubt about whether it should do this that it should unite around her it is true that before that people around him had seeded a lot of doubt about her and use views about her weakness to sort of bolster his position but when he stepped down he ended that and said a different tone around her now it is seen as like a remarkable decision and Joe Biden could step out on that stage and in a way people would cheer for say the first decision I made on getting the nomination and the best decision I made as president or I think actually said in his political career was to choose kamla Harris as his vice president right so we are looking right now not at the Democratic party that kamla Harris built we're looking at the Democratic party that Joe Biden built and it's also worth noting that past democratic presidents have not left the Democratic party in good shape the Democratic party in terms of its down ballot strength was wrecked at the end of not only Obama's second term it was in pretty bad shape at the end of Obama's first term too and Joe Biden and this is not necessarily all due to him it had to do with DOs and other things but the 2022 midterm was a much better election for Democrats than the 2010 midterm or the 1994 midterm they're doing really well in governor manans right they have a lot more state legislatures right now than they've had at at some points so there is a strength in the Democratic party a unity in the Democratic party the the sort of deeply restored connection to unions the fact that Biden actually marched on a picket line that is a connection that Joe Biden has rebuilt and put unions back at the center of democratic identity Biden was a party Builder and he built a party and if Democrats win this year if they win with his vice president at top the party Coalition he built that really is his legacy it's not just his record as president it is his record as leader of the party and that wasn't said explicitly last night but I think if you watched the night it was really reflected like the whole night was a celebration in a way but also a demonstration of the democratic party Joe Biden redesigned and I found that actually quite moving to seea all right we'll leave it at that thanks for having me Ezra thank you [Music] Rand this episode of the as kin show is produced and hosted by Roland who fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker our senior engineer is Jeff geld with additional mixing by amen sahota our senior editor is CLA Gordon the show's production team also includes Annie Galvin Elias iswith and Kristen Lynn original music by Isaac Jones Audi and strategy by Christina simusi and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose ster [Music] Walmart has Straight Talk 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