The Joe Biden experience

Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States. And — counting the votes of people, not just land — it won’t be close. If current trends hold, Biden will see a larger popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, or George W. Bush in 2004. 

Commentary over the past few days has focused on the man he beat, and the incompetent coup being attempted in plain sight. But I want to focus on Biden, who is one of the more misunderstood figures in American politics — including, at times, by me. 

Biden has been in national politics for almost five decades. And so, people tend to understand the era of Joe Biden they encountered first — the centrist Senate dealmaker, or the overconfident foreign policy hand, or the meme-able vice president, or the grieving, grave father. But Biden, more so than most politicians, changes. And it’s how he changes, and why, that’s key to understanding his campaign, and his likely presidency. 

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, a sharp biography of the next president. Osnos and I discuss: 

• The mystery of Joe Biden’s first political campaign
• Why the Joe Biden who entered the Senate in 1980 is such a radically different person than the Joe Biden who ran for president in 2020 
• What the Senate taught Biden
• Biden’s ideological flexibility, and the theory of politics that drives it
• The differences between Biden’s three presidential campaigns — and what they reveal about how he’s grown
• The way Biden views disagreement, and why that’s so central to his understanding of politics 
• How Biden’s relationship with Barack Obama changed his approach to governance
• The similarities — and differences — between how Obama and Biden think about politics 
• Why Biden is “the perfect weathervane for where the center of the Democratic party is.” 
• Biden’s relationship with Mitch McConnell
• How Biden thinks about foreign policy
• Why Biden has become more skeptical about the use of American military might in the last decade 

And much more.

Book recommendations:

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman

The Ideas That Made America by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen 

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer – Jeff Geld

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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Chris Hayes and I process this wild election

This is not the post-election breakdown I expected to have today, but it’s definitely the one that I needed.

Chris Hayes is the host of the MSNBC primetime show, “All In,” and the podcast “Why is this Happening? With Chris Hayes.” He’s also one of the most insightful political analysts I know. We discuss the purpose of polling, the problems of polling-driven coverage, the epistemic fog of the results, the strategy behind Trump’s inroads with Latino voters, how Democrats might have won the presidency but lost democracy, what happens if Trump refuses to accept the election results, and much more.

More than anything else, this conversation has helped me make sense of everything that’s happened in the last 24 hours. I think it will do the same for you.

References:

“How Democrats Lost the Cuban Vote and Jeopardized Their Future in Florida.” by Noah Lanard, Mother Jones

Chris’s podcast on “Understanding the ‘Latino Vote’ with Chuck Rocha”

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer – Jeff Geld

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

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Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy

We’re one day away from the election, though who-knows-how-many days from finding out who won it. But there’s more at stake than whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be our next president. 

There is a fight behind the fight, a battle that will decide all the others. America is not a democracy, and Republicans want to keep it that way. America is not a democracy, and Democrats — at least some Democrats — want to make it more of one. 

Democracy has, in particular, become Stacey Abrams’ animating mission. In 2018, Abrams lost the George gubernatorial race by a razor-thin margin amidst rampant voter suppression. Since then, as the founder of Fair Fight, she’s turned her attention to the deeper fight, the one that sets the rules under which elections like her plays out. In her recent book, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, Abrams makes the case that the fight over democracy is the central question of our politics right now with more power and clarity than any other politician I’ve heard. 

In my view, Abrams is right. And so she’s exactly the person to hear from on the eve of the election. We discuss the GOP’s turn against “rank democracy,” the role of demographic change, how Republicans have cemented minority rule across America political institutions, why we potentially face a “doom loop of democracy,” the changing face of voter suppression in the 21st century, what a system that actually wanted people to vote would look like, why democracy and economic equality are inextricably linked, and much more.

One thing to note in this conversation: You won’t hear Trump’s name all that much. It’s the Republican Party, not just Trump, that has turned against democracy, and that is implementing the turn against democracy. And it’s the Democratic Party, not just Joe Biden, that will have to decide whether democracy is worth protecting, and achieving. Democracy is on the ballot in 2020 and beyond, but it’s not just on the presidential voting line.

References:

“The fight is for democracy.” Ezra Klein, Vox

The Dictator’s Learning Curve by William Dobson

My previous EK Show conversation with Abrams

Book recommendations:

Ida by Paula Giddings 

Charged by Emily Bazelon 

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead 

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Nate Silver on why 2020 isn’t 2016

As you may have heard, there’s a pretty important election coming up. That means it’s time to bring back the one and only Nate Silver. 

Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, boasts one of the best election forecasting records of any analyst in the last 15 years. His forecasting models successfully predicted the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 US presidential election and all 50 states in 2012. And in 2016, Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump a 28 percent chance of victory — a significantly higher percentage than virtually any other prominent analyst at the time. He knows what he’s talking about, and it shows in this conversation. We discuss: 

• What went wrong with the polls in 2016 — and whether pollsters today have corrected for those mistakes 
• Why a 2016-sized polling error in 2020 would still hand Joe Biden the election
• Why the 2020 race has been so incredibly steady despite a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and the biggest national protest movement in US history 
• The possibility of a Biden landslide  
• The not-so-small chance that Biden could win Texas and Georgia 
• The massive Republican advantage in the Senate, House, and Electoral College — and how that affects our national politics 
• Why the Senate would still advantage Republicans, even if Democrats added five blue states. 
• Whether the Bernie Sanders left took the wrong lessons from 2016 
• Why Biden’s unorthodox 2020 campaign strategy has been so successful 
• Whether Sanders would be doing just as well against Trump as Biden is doing 
• How a more generic, non-Trump Republican would be faring against Biden 
• Why Silver is generally optimistic that we will avoid an electoral crisis on November 3 

And much more.

References:

“How FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Presidential Forecast Works — And What’s Different Because Of COVID-19.” Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight

“The Senate’s Rural Skew Makes It Very Hard For Democrats To Win The Supreme Court.” Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight

Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College by Jesse Wegman

“Toby Ord on existential risk, Donald Trump, and thinking in probabilities.” The Ezra Klein Show

“The Real Story of 2016” by Nate Silver

Book recommendations:

The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

The Precipice by Toby Ord  

Credits:

Producer/Audio engineer – Jeff Geld

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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Sarah Kliff grades Biden and Trump’s health care plans

There are few issues on which the stakes in this election are quite as stark as on health care. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden plans to pass (and Democrats largely support) a massive health care expansion that could result in 25 million additional individuals gaining health insurance. The Trump administration, as we speak, is pushing to get the Supreme Court to kill the Affordable Care Act, which would strip at least 20 million Americans of health care coverage. 

There’s no one I’d rather have on to discuss these issues than Sarah Kliff. Kliff is an investigative reporter for the New York Times focusing on health care policy, and my former colleague at the Washington Post and Vox where we co-hosted The Weeds alongside Matt Yglesias. She’s one of the most clear, incisive health care policy analysts in media today and a longtime friend, which made this conversation a pleasure. We discuss: 

• The legacy of Obamacare 10 years later
• Why the fiercely fought over “individual mandate” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be 
• What Biden’s health care plan would actually do — and where it falls short 
• Whether a Biden administration would be able to pass massive health care reform — and why it might still have a chance even if the filibuster remains intact 
• The ongoing Supreme Court case to dismantle Obamacare 
• Whether Donald Trump has a secret health care plan to protect those with preexisting conditions (spoiler: he doesn’t) 
• The hollow state of Republican health care policy 
• The academic literature showing that health insurance is literally a matter of life and death 
• Which social investments would have the largest impact on people’s health (hint: it’s probably not expanding insurance) 

And much more

References:

“If Trump wins, 20 million people could lose health insurance. If Biden wins, 25 million could gain it.” by Dylan Scott, Vox

“Obamacare Turns 10. Here’s a Look at What Works and Doesn’t.” by Sarah Kliff, et al. New York Times

“The I.R.S. Sent a Letter to 3.9 Million People. It Saved Some of Their Lives.” by Sarah Kliff, New York Times

“Republicans Killed the Obamacare Mandate. New Data Shows It Didn’t Really Matter.” by Sarah Kliff, New York Times

“Without Ginsburg, Supreme Court Could Rule Three Ways on Obamacare” by Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times

Book recommendations:

The Healing of America by TR Reid 

And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts 

Dreamland by Sam Quinones 

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen

Credits:

Producer/Audio wizard – Jeff Geld

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.

In 2016, Julius Krein was one of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. In Trump’s critiques of the existing Republican and Democratic establishments, Krein saw the contours of a heterodox ideology he believed could reshape American politics for the better. So he established a pro-Trump blog and, later, a policy journal called American Affairs, which his critics claimed was an attempt to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.”

Today Krein finds himself in an unusual position. Upon realizing Trump was not committed to any governing vision at all (but was as racist as his critics suggested), Krein disavowed the president in 2017. But as the editor of American Affairs, he’s still committed to building an intellectual superstructure around the ideas that were threaded through Trump’s 2016 campaign.

This conversation is about the distance between Trump and the ideology so many tried to brand as Trumpism. We also discuss Krein’s view that the US has always functionally been a one-party system, the disconnect between Republican elites and voters, what a new bipartisan economic consensus could look like, whether Joe Biden and the Democrats take Trump’s ideas more seriously than Trump does, which direction the GOP will go if Trump loses in a landslide in November, why Republicans lost interest in governance, whether media coverage is the true aim of right-wing populists, why Krein thinks the true power lies with the technocrats, and more.

References:

“I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It.” by Julius Krein

“The Three Fusions” by Julius Krein

Book recommendations:

Innovation in Real Places by Dan Breznitz 

History has Begun by Bruno Maçães

The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys 

Credits:

Producer/Audio wizard – Jeff Geld

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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What should Democrats do about the Supreme Court?

If Democrats win back power this November, they will be faced with a choice: Leave the existing Supreme Court intact, and watch their legislative agenda — and perhaps democracy itself — be gradually gutted by 5-4 and 6-3 judicial rulings; or use their power to reform the nation’s highest court over fierce opposition by the Republican party.

Ganesh Sitaraman is a former senior advisor to Elizabeth Warren and a law professor at Vanderbilt. He’s also the author of one of the most hotly debated proposals for Supreme Court reform, as well as the fairest and clearest analyst I’ve read regarding the benefits and drawbacks of every other plausible proposal for Supreme Court reform. So in this conversation, we discuss the range of options, from well-known ideas like court packing and term limits to more obscure proposals like the 5-5-5 balanced bench and a judicial lottery system.

But there’s another reason I wanted Sitaraman on the show right now. Supreme Court reform matters — for good or for ill — because democracy matters. In his recent book, The Great Democracy, Sitaraman makes an argument that’s come to sit at the core of my thinking, too: The fundamental fight in American politics right now is about whether we will become a true democracy. And not just a democracy in the thin, political definition we normally use — holding elections, and ensuring access to the franchise. The fight is for a thicker form of a democracy, one that takes economic power seriously, that makes the construction of a certain kind of civic and political culture central to its aims. 

So this is a conversation about what that kind of democracy would look like, and what it would take to get there – up to and including Supreme Court reform.

References:

Jump-Starting America by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson 

“How to save the Supreme Court” by Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman

Sitaraman’s tweet threads about expanding the court , term limits , the 5-5-5 Balanced bench, lottery approach, supermajority voting requirements, jurisdiction stripping, legislative overrides, and what the best approach is.

Book recommendations:

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

The Public and Its Problems by John Dewey

The Anarchy by William Dalrymple 

Credits:

Producer/Audio wizard – Jeff Geld

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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Marilynne Robinson on writing, metaphysics, and the Donald Trump dilemma

Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest American novelists alive today. She’s the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Gilead — one of my favorite books, ever — as well as Housekeeping, Home, Lila, and her latest, Jack. She’s also produced four brilliant collections of nonfiction essays. 

But Robinson is not simply a beautiful writer; her work is inextricably bound up with the most important issues of our times: race, religion, education, geography, and democracy — so much so that in 2015, Barack Obama chose to interview her on the state of the country while he was still the sitting president. This was a joy of a conversation to have right now, and it covers vast amounts of ground, including:

• Robinson’s obsession with the doctrine of predestination 

• What we know — and all we don’t know — about the nature of reality 

• The power of loneliness

• How, for all the talk of polarization, there are certain ideas that Americans widely, quietly share

• How the logic of efficiency and growth has come to invade every aspect of our lives

• The differences between writing fiction and nonfiction 

• How to train yourself to notice the world around you

• The sobering purpose of studying history

• What it will take to keep American democracy alive and well  

• The particular problem that Donald Trump poses

• The baseline assumptions and practices a democracy demands we share

And much more. I found this conversation a tonic to have in this moment. I hope it’s the same for you.

Book recommendations:

Birdman of Alcatraz by Thomas E. Gaddis

Credits:

Producer – Jeff Geld

Audio engineer – Jackson Bierfeldt

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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The case for Trump’s foreign policy

As we approach the 2020 election, I want to make sure the conversation on this show reflects the actual choice the country is facing. So we are going to be doing a few episodes, including this one, with guests who believe Donald Trump is the better candidate this November. 

I wanted to start with foreign policy because that’s where Trump has been most influential. Trump has successfully broken the previous bipartisan consensus on key foreign policy issues. The way Republicans — and now even Democrats — talk about trade, alliances, Russia, and China has changed dramatically over the last four years. That’s an important shift, whether or not you agree with it. 

Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute where she specializes in nuclear deterrence and missile defense, a former adviser to congressional Republicans, and one of the sharpest defenders of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Heinrichs sees a clear foreign policy worldview animating the Trump administration — one with more successes to its name than critics are willing to admit. I see a worldview that is inconsistently applied, and whose goals are often undermined, by the President’s impulsive, anti-strategic behavior on the world stage. So I asked Heinrichs to come on the show and persuade me that I’m wrong. 

In this conversation Heinrichs and I discuss how Trump shattered the foreign policy consensus that preceded him, why he sees China as such a central threat to American interests, the trade-offs that come with engaging in multilateral agreements and institutions, whether the threats America faces require global cooperation to address, the importance (or lack thereof) of how other countries view America, the ways that Trump undermines his own purported foreign policy aims, Trump’s ally-bashing, the US-Saudi Arabia alliance, the Trump administration’s stance on human rights, what we can expect from Trump in his second term, and much more.

Book recommendations:

The World America Made by Robert Kagan 

The False Promise of Liberal Order by Patrick Porter 

Exercise of Power by Robert Gates 

Credits:

Producer – Jeff Geld

Audio engineer – Jackson Bierfeldt

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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Fareed Zakaria on how Biden and Trump see the world

Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, a columnist for the Washington Post, and one of the most astute foreign policy thinkers of our time. So much of this conversation is focused on just that: How Biden and Trump respectively see the world and want to shape it. In particular, the ways Biden’s foreign policy differs from Obama’s and has changed over the years, whether Trump has a coherent foreign policy at all, and why the most important US foreign policy question is “What is an acceptable level of influence for China to have?”

But I also wanted to talk to Zakaria about some broader trends — trends he’s been tracking for some time. Zakaria’s 2003 book The Future of Freedom anticipated the rise of illiberal democracies across the globe long before anyone paid it much attention. His 2008 book The Post-American World described the multipolar international order that, in many ways, we now inhabit. And just recently he authoredTen Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World which forecasts how Covid-19 will change the trajectory of our world. 

So in this conversation we also discuss the state of journalism, the dangers of great power war in the 21st century, why Zakaria believes rise of China is far less of a threat than either Republicans or Democrats seem to believe, why a global spike of economic inequality in an already unequal world is perhaps the most important pandemic trend, whether Zakaria has lost faith in America, whether anything short of violent catastrophe can upend concentrations of wealth, how the world’s views of China and America are changing, and much more.

References:

“The definitive case for ending the filibuster” by Ezra Klein

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

Book recommendations:

Cultural Evolution by Ronald F. Inglehart 

American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony by Samuel P. Huntington

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Credits:

Producer – Jeff Geld

Audio engineer – Jackson Bierfeldt

Researcher – Roge Karma

Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.

New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices