How did Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, come from nowhere to so thoroughly dominate the primary that Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, dropped out or suspended her campaign, I should say, and didn’t even come back in as Platner was rocked by even more scandals. “Now the national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by. But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us.” The answer is that he had the most important political resource right now, and she was not able to grab any of it. That resource is attention. It’s a constant theme now for me on the show that you need to see attention as its own substrate of American politics. And attention is working in really unusual ways. This year, in the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate, where Abdul El-Sayed is now in the lead. “Who here believes in Medicare for all. And who believes it’s time to abolish ICE.” And who believes we’ve got to get money out of politics and in your pocket.” In Texas, where James Talarico, another person people haven’t really heard of a couple of years ago, is now the Democratic nominee for Senate. “One thing is clear today — we’re about to take back Texas.” In Los Angeles, where we actually saw it fail in the mayoral candidacy of Spencer Pratt. “Reality TV star Spencer Pratt’s insurgent campaign for L.A. mayor has officially run its course.” “These corrupt crooks really do look out for each other, don’t they.” What’s happening with Jon Ossoff and the sudden rise in interest in what he’s doing. “He’s a failed president and a national disgrace.” All of it has a lot of lessons, I think, for how attention is working right now in American politics. To help me unpack them, I want to have on my favorite person to talk about this particular topic with, my friend Chris Hayes. “Good evening from New York. I’m Chris Hayes, host of All In with Chris Hayes and author of the great book on attention and the modern moment, “The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” As always, my email, if you need our attention, is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. Always great to be back. So I want to have you here for one of our every so often check ins on how attention is working in American politics. And I want to start with The Wall Street Journal interview that was with the people who recruited Graham platner. How did you find Graham platner? Well, so I mean, we went through thousands and thousands of prospects. Through a number means assessed just a huge amount of people. Then Leanne pulled up this video of this guy with an oyster farm. My name is Graham Plattner, and I live in Sullivan, Maine. The owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company. And then she pulled up his FEC history and saw the money he’d given to Bernie Sanders and some other people. And that was enough information to know that we had the best prospect that we’d maybe ever seen. O.K, I want to flesh this out because I’ve been told this story by multiple people. How this played out, this group, they were like, who could run in Maine. Like lobster farmer. Oyster farmer. Some kind of fisherman Yeah and so when he says we looked at thousands of people the computer, looked through occupational and other forms of records, right. It was like which lobster farmers. Like who has donated to a populist candidate, which is to say that know we normally think of candidates as being recruited because they are important in their communities or a lawyer. They run a hospital or something like that. A lot of people grow up wanting to run for office. But Graham platner was cast. It was like Hollywood looking for somebody to fill a role. There’s a long history there. I mean, the Democrats are running someone in Tom Kean’s district who’s a helicopter pilot. Mikie Sherrill was a helicopter pilot. They like that’s a bio. That’s Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer. So that part of it is an interesting version of grassroots, lefty populist group doing what the D trip will do or the DCC. But the reason this worked was because of the charisma and charisma. At one level, it’s like, I do think there’s a kind of full circle thing happening in politics, which is like, of course, charisma is important to politics, but I think particularly at the level of scale, there was a period where the formula really didn’t take into account charisma. It was like bio social capital, connections, ability to raise money, all that stuff, and then whatever, we’ll cut some ads for them, we’ll get them a good team and they’ll be fine. I think charisma matters much more now because attention matters more, and charisma is the talent for grabbing and holding attention. So I want to hold on what you just said about the arc, because I think we both know a fair amount about the way they recruit, and one of the grim realities of how they recruit is they very heavily emphasize how much money you can raise. One, they will force you to sit on the phone six hours a day, six hours a day, and they will punish if you don’t. You want to be on things like their red to blue lists. And so I know candidates who are just browbeaten into being on the phone and raising money for hours and hours and hours a day, and the D C, which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, isn’t doing that because they’re cynics or have a fetish for it, or they love money Yeah, you need money. But the thing money is buying largely is attention. I mean, it also buys field and organizing and other things that buys attention. It buys TV. And so what this group is doing when they cast Plattner. He’s not a person who you go to and think, can you raise the money to buy attention. He’s a person you go to and think, can you unleash the charisma to earn attention. Yes, exactly. Which then will bring in money. Yes but even if it doesn’t, attention. And this is the point, is that you have to. I think you have to have a theory of attention for a successful campaign right now in a way that when that formula was as dead set as it was in the high point of broadcast TV ads. Like, raise as much money as possible. Hit the airwaves with a ton of broadcast TV. And that’s the recipe. That’s 90 percent of a campaign as broadcast TV particularly, and as broadcast TV ads decline in their salience. You have to have some alternate theory of how you’re going to get to people in some places, in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, everyone in the state knows who Roy Cooper is, right. He doesn’t have the same problem. The guy has been elected statewide I think five times at this point, something like that. So he doesn’t have to do that. But if you’re running another race, you do have to come up with some theory of how you’re going to do it. In this case, it was casting, and then it was finding a person who genuinely has real, obvious, raw political talent and charisma. But we’re underselling here the accomplishment of Plattner because they are running in that race ultimately against a Roy Cooper figure. Yes in Janet Mills. Yes This is not a situation where there is an open primary of nobodies. It’s not a situation where they’re going into a place like Nebraska where they recruited Dan Osborn, the independent who ran a cycle ago and is running again this cycle. This is a situation where Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senate campaign committee had a candidate in mind. They have a Democratic Governor of Maine, and they’re going to run the Democratic Governor of Maine against Mills to pick up that seat. And what happens just very, very, very quickly, is it. Plattner squeezes Mills out intentionally. She just the charisma gap between them and the ability that he has to command attention, particularly online. But that then translates into all other forms of attention because the newspapers follow it. The cable news follows it. He’s on your show. He also he knocks out a sitting governor. But he also I mean, this is the other part of it. Is he out campaigns her in that state on the ground, it’s not just the online part of it. I mean, and again, this is part of attention to Maine is a small state. I mean, Maine is a state where Susan Collins at this point knows like literally knows a shockingly high percentage of Mainers. This is just the way it works when you’re an institution like her. It’s the kind of state where you can make inroads in retail politics in a way that you can’t. The California governor’s race, right. So part of it, too, is that he just outworks her. But I think that much younger than she is. I mean, Mills is a 78-year-old candidate, and I think there’s actually an interesting relation here between attention and risk appetite, because I think the two are so related. I think a lot of the things that have guided Democratic politics around attention have also related to risk aversion. Don’t get negative press. If you’re choosing between no press and negative press. Minimize downsides. Other people could have run that primary. They knew that Schumer was trying to recruit Mills. She actually got in after Plattner officially. Almost all of the big name politicians in the state of Maine went for the governor’s race. Which was going to be vacated. It wasn’t going to have a sitting incumbent, and you weren’t going to take on the electoral Colossus of Susan Collins. That’s a lower risk choice. Plattner made a high risk bet. And I do think there’s a relationship between risk appetite and attention. That’s very much part of Democratic politics, which there is a kind of institutional low risk appetite. I want to pick up on the word institution there. So Democratic Party, the Republican Party, pre-trump is like this too. They choose people who succeed in institutions. So, I mean, if you think about the candidates after Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden in a different way. Kamala Harris. They’re all people. They were not electoral juggernauts. Clinton lost to Barack Obama, but she was beloved within the Democratic Party. At that time. Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, and it kind of goes down like this. I think that there is an inverse relationship between the personality type that succeeds institutionally and the personality type that succeeds intentionally Yeah, that’s often true. I think it is related to what you’re talking about with risk Yeah, but I think it is created an almost structural problem in party recruiting because parties, as you were noting, they look for all these signals that are fundamentally signals of institutional capacity Yeah social capital. Ability to raise money, jobs that tend to have risen through the institutions. I mean, Plattner is a downwardly wordly mobile oyster farmer whose oyster farm doesn’t really make money and sells to his mom’s fancy restaurant. He is not. You wouldn’t just look at it and think, that guy is the most impressive person in Maine, right. It’s not like Mikey, Cheryl as a Navy pilot. But the people who succeed in institutions are often do not have personalities that are spiky in the way the intentional moment currently rewards. So I think that’s true. I think there’s a few things going on. One is we should talk about success and institutions and credentialing, which are two different things. It means a lot in the world of Democratic, progressive politics. As someone who went to Yale Law. So there’s the credential part of it. There’s actual success in institutions. There’s relationships to those institutions, and then there’s the kind of personalities that succeed in those institutions. The old term that you would use in the 50s and 60s, right. In a different era, was like a company man. And a company man is someone that gets along well with others in an organizational setting, doesn’t make waves, doesn’t upset people. And I think the idea of a company man is what has been the template. Again, almost necessarily. I mean, if you like, as you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, the Democratic Party is an institution. One thing that Plattner is able to carry in a way that feels authentic is a genuine feeling that the system is hollow at its core. People talk about, which is not a put on with him, which is the key part of this. I think that’s really yes, I think that’s important. I mean, you can say a lot about his life and what he has done or has not done, and we’ll talk about some of that too. But he is somebody who believes the institutions have failed because they have failed for him, and he has failed out of them Yeah, right. The hostility is authentic Yes And when you listen to him on the stump, more than he is carrying a message about single payer health care or a Green New Deal. He is carrying a message about in a very different way, I think, than Bernie did, but using similar language about an unspecified political revolution he is carrying a message about this is all wrong somehow Yeah and what you need is somebody who fundamentally believes it is all wrong. Somehow the world that we live in today is not natural. We do not live in a political and economic reality that is organic. It is a system that is built by policy decisions policy that is written by establishment politicians in Washington, DC at the behest of their donors and their supporters. And it is a system that was made to make sure that no matter how hard you work, you will never feel like you have power. Powers for these people, and they’re up there. They’re qualified. They have the pedigree. They have the background. They’re the ones that are allowed to make decisions for us. Don’t worry ourselves. Let them take care of it. I’m going to tell you right now that story is bullshit. And you can look across a lot of the candidates who are succeeding right now. Here I do think Mamdani is a fits in. We’ll talk about Abdul Sayed. Donald Trump was obviously like this. A large number of the candidates who have broken through are breaking through with a message more even than an agenda of like, genuine disillusionment and anger Yeah I mean, I think there’s a few related questions. So one, I think people use the term populism, which I think gets probably as close as any to what we’re describing as a tendency disillusionment, frustration with a failed status quo, elite failure particularly. So there’s a few interesting questions that flow out of that. One is does that have a specific ideological valence. Can you be a moderate populist. Can you be a centrist populist as one interesting question. Another is can you channel the attentional politics when you are suddenly in the incumbent position. I want to pick up on something you said about being a moderate populist. You can be a moderate populist. And how we know that because there was one in Maine. The Democrat in the House representing the reddest district in the country is Jared Golden. He’s a Maine member of Congress. He’s a populist. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter. He is also a moderate. He kind of famously wrote this op Ed about how Donald Trump wouldn’t be the end of the world. He supported Donald Trump on tariffs, but he is also very, very pro-labor. He’s very disgusted with politics. And he has existed in a kind of politically miserable existence. Yes, he’s been holding a seat probably no other Democrat could hold. And in fact, he’s leaving now, and he is this year getting primaried from the left. And he decided, I’m done. I’m retiring. You could have imagined a world where the Democratic Party fell in love with this guy, embraced him and elevated him to run against Susan Collins. And in that world, I’d be like, Susan Collins is gone. Like she is gone. But I think the issue you see with Jared Golden and moderate populism is that you become very vulnerable in primaries. Yes because on both the right but now on the left, I mean, the polling on this is really fascinating. If look at the number of Democrats who said they were very liberal and say, 1995. Most Democrats were not liberal or very liberal in 1995 like they self-described as moderate. And now it’s very liberal. It’s very hard to survive and it’s also just very unpleasant. Yes, that part of it is a big part of it. Even if you can survive the day to day of being yelled at by the advocacy groups, on your side, by your own friends. The thing that you cannot seem to do right now is hold that together with being a successful candidate in primaries, where you are having to appeal to a high attention electorate with very, very, very sordid political opinions. And you have. Particularly in this nationalized attentional atmosphere. I mean, that’s part of it too. Like in another universe, people no one online is paying attention to what Jared Golden’s doing. Can be Jared Golden for your district and the local news would cover you and the local TV news, the newspapers, maybe some nerds would read about you in roll call because we’re all operating in one attentional sphere. There’s little there’s less and less room for that variation that used to just come about because people just didn’t pay attention to what the main two congressional candidate was doing. I think this brings up some of the flip side of platinum. And one reason I think platinum is such an interesting figure to start with here is he represents both sides of the gamble being made. The high risk, high attention, charisma on the one hand. On the other hand, the point of getting this high risk candidate with of anti-institutional life story is you’re not getting somebody who has been watching his step for a long time, and you’re getting somebody who’s maybe misstepped quite a lot. So you’ve got the Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on the chest, and this kind of pulsing question about whether or not he knew about that, of I’m honestly a little skeptical that he did not know about it for as long as he says he didn’t. I share that skepticism. You have him. Sexting seems like about a half dozen women during his marriage, or at least texting with them. And in an effort to. Set up some kind of relationship. Also, the recent claims from an ex-girlfriend, the one who works in Republican politics that he was, borderline abusive when they fought. I’ve had this trouble with Plattner because on the one hand, I’m very charismatic. Much of what he says, I like, no particular thing that has come out about him has been. I mean, he’s also he’s very politically incorrect. Reddit posts is maybe the best way to put it. Nothing that’s come out about him on its own has been disqualifying for me. I don’t think he’s an anti-Semite. He was so politically incorrect on Reddit that if he weren’t anti-Semite, I think we would know. That’s a good point. I think that one would have come out pretty clearly. That’s a good point. I think that’s well, I think he knew what the tattoo was earlier Yeah and I think the spirit in which this is my view of him. This is not based on anything but my read of the situation, the spirit in which he and his friends got it was edge. Lordy, it was about it as a signal of a kind of vicious badassery, not a signal about Jews or Nazis. That’s my view. I cannot prove it. But I’m telling you what I think the thing that worries me about Plattner is in any one thing, it is the sense that there is just bad judgment in the guy. I mean, the sexting with the women is like, it’s early in a marriage and that’s pretty recent Yeah, right. The thing that worries me about Plattner isn’t any one of these things individually. It’s that one thing about a guy who’s failed out of a bunch of institutions and has kind of been downwardly mobile and has made a bunch of weird decisions and had a kind of Nazi tattoo, is you might think, yeah, I want the best for him. I hope for all the best for him. Should he be a US Senator. Should he be a US Senator is a very different question than that. Yes I mean, what if I were appointing people from Maine, would I appoint Graham platner? I would not, but that’s also not how elections work Yeah we have the 17th Amendment, right. Yes but so that I think is. But here’s the thing. He’s not running a general election yet. Susan Collins overperforms in polls. He has been totally generating attention and energy among Democrats and among particularly the online left. And whether or not it creates an attack surface that you can attack this guy as fundamentally unreliable, which is what they will do, which is what they are doing, are doing with a lot of money Yeah if Democrats win that seat, maybe this all looks genius if they lose that seat. I think there’s going to be a level of factional hell to pay. So let me say that I basically share. Essentially share everything you said like could and have made those arguments. Just for the sake of this conversation, take the other side for a second. One is they did run someone in 2020 who was the most standard possible state legislator. No scandals to speak of raised a ton of money. A woman and she got her butt kicked Yeah in fact, she lost by, I think 9 points right when she was up in all the polls, she was up on all the part of why people are so nervous about this race. They’re nervous about the race. But the other thing is, it’s not like that was not tried against Susan Collins. It was tried. It didn’t work. The second thing I would say and this goes back to our risk thing, is there were like five people in that gubernatorial primary. They could have run for Senate the big names of Maine all ran for governor. So part of this is a little like everyone’s wringing their hands. It’s like, well, you have to have people running. Totally they didn’t run. He ran Yeah what do you want. Like, what is the magic wand that makes them run. And they didn’t run because that was a harder race. The third thing I would say is I think there’s a theory of the case here. And I’m not saying this is true. I’m just presenting it as a possibility. Is that part of the brand problem for the Democrats has been excessive conscientiousness. Yes that this is the party of essentially kind of like schoolmarm. Tisk, tisk. Now that’s extremely gendered. I want to be very clear about that. And I think a lot of the conversation about Plattner on both sides of the very intense, polarized debate within the Democratic coalition is very gendered. That said, I think there is a kind of post-covid hangover of the idea that the Democrats are just this again, this kind of quick to cancel. Tell you what you can and can’t do. Kicking people out who talk a little salty, et cetera I think there’s something to that. I think there’s particularly something to that with a certain subset of cross-pressured swing voters, and maybe this is a kind of antidote to it Yeah, maybe none of this is negative for him, right. I definitely like the Reddit post people have joined. The Reddit posts are the median voter, right. That’s the joke people have made. When I saw the Reddit post, I was like, that’s an asset. I don’t have to agree with them or them to be like, that’s a political asset. I mean, this is a line I say all the time, but at some point, you need to spin out into an essay. But the personality type of the left is bureaucratic, and the personality type of the right is autocratic. And those are failures that the left is. Another version of it that I use is the left is over formed by institutions and the right is under formed by institutions. Well said. Now, you can imagine a world where Plattner loses or doesn’t win by as much as he could have. And the answer is simply you kind of almost got it right with him Yeah, you just pick somebody a little too undeformed. You don’t want the straight A student, and you don’t want the kid smoking pot in the parking lot. You need something. You need something in between there. But the question is really we’re going to see a test of whether or not this works in or whether or not this works in Maine. And it’s going to be very, very interesting to see how that plays out, because two more things about them. So one is, I think the way that I also think there’s something interesting in how he has handled the last few weeks. He has been doing a lot of press, and I think this is another thing where if you’re going to do it, you got to be all in, which is you’re going to go and your face questions and you’re going to talk to people. And that is, I think, one of the lessons of our New era, of the dynamics of scandal, whatever they are is that attention moves very quickly. And if you embrace that and you can move through things in a way that used to be very difficult. And then the last thing I’ll say about platinum, I think this is a really important aspect of his appeal. People have talked about the fact, oh, he went to a private school and his grandfather was this famous architect, and his mom has this restaurant. Dad bought his house. Dad bought his house. This is a guy who was enlisted and enlisted Marine during the global war on terror in multiple tours, fighting in really brutal circumstances. And here’s why I think that’s politically salient. He has an ability for lack of a better word, code switch. I think code switching is actually one of the superpowers of a successful Democratic politician. Because the Democratic Party is so varied and diverse and pluralistic, you have to move between different groups, and it’s hard to learn how to do that without some organic experience in different worlds. Graham platner really, genuinely has that. It gives him that thing where he’s able to talk to different audiences. Barack Obama really had it. Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Alexandria ocasio-cortez, all of these people, Bill Clinton was like, that’s interesting. Does ocasio-cortez have code switching at that level. I think she does, actually. And I think one of the things that you see also saw this with Obama, you saw it they used to call Barack Obama in the right wing press, Barry, because he was Barry in high school. At a certain point, the idea being this guy’s inauthentic. He’s not really who you think he is. He’s pretending to be this thing. The flip side of that this is a person who’s had many different experiences in radically different life worlds that has given this person an organic ability to connect across difference that proves to be the superpower in Democratic politics. Take a beat on ocasio-cortez here, because it’s something I’m really interested to see with her. I think nobody knows if she’s going to run for president. I’m not sure she knows if she’s going to run for president. She is a tremendous political talent by any measure. But unlike, say, a Bernie Sanders or as weird as saying a Graham Plattner, she stays away from disagreement. You do not see her doing what Bernie does. What Khanna does, she’s not on flagrant. No, she’s not out there with Lex Fridman. No, I mean, she just did a thing with more perfect union, which is like a lefty content producer talking to Trump voters, but in a very controlled environment. Controlled environment. She’s not on Jubilee, which Khanna and for that matter, James Talarico went on. And I think one of the biggest questions for her is actually whether she is comfortable Yeah that’s interesting. Either switching into places that are not natural alliances for her or being herself in those places. Gavin Newsom is doing this everywhere right now, right. He will go anywhere he is asked. And he particularly wants to go to places where it’s going to be unusual to see him there. She runs a very, very, very, very careful operation. And often when she is in spaces where she’s not comfortable the Munich Munich Security Conference, it can get hairy for her. She can fumble. And, Congressman, I’ll start with you. Would and should the US actually commit US troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move. I think that this is such I think that this is a. This is, of course, a very long standing policy. I mean, if I were her advisor and I’m not I think the problem is she’s not doing enough. So she’s not getting the sea legs. That’s not getting comfortable with things going wrong, and also not getting the swiftness to rescue them when they do. You remember the Gavin Newsom thing a couple of months ago where he’s doing a book talk and he’s like, I’m just like you to a mostly Black audience. I’m like. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 Saturday guy. It’s like my Saturday sucked and I can barely I could barely read Yeah and it looked really bad. It was everywhere for a couple days. But then you just go do something else. Just keeps moving forward. Partly, though, I think all of these calculations about risk, reward control, lack of control, how much you’re going in is what your own personal position is with respect to attention because she is so commanding of it. She has the luxury to take much more conservative stances about what press she does. And I think that’s a trade off. I agree with you that there’s probably a degree to which more would be better. Taylor Swift doesn’t need to do a lot of interviews. Exactly that’s exactly it that she just doesn’t have to go. Whereas chasing around Jubilee yeah, rhokana is everywhere because he is trying to build exactly attentional strength. I want to move to Michigan. Well, let’s start here. Do you want to just give an overview of the Michigan Senate Democratic primary. I mean, you have a situation in which you have a departing incumbent, Democratic Senator Gary Peters, who’s retiring. So you have an open seat. You have a very I would say from the Republican perspective, high quality recruit for the Republican side, who is Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who is truly out of Normie Republican kind of central casting, if you’re trying to win a swing state, he’s not some Peter Thiel weirdo who’s going to do an ad with his gun silencer. This is designed to kill people. I’m Blake Masters. I’m running for the US Senate in Arizona. And then on the Democratic side, you’ve got Abdul el-sayed, who is a really fascinating dude who was a public health official in Detroit. He’s a Rhodes scholar. Md-phd, M.D. PhD, incredibly credentialed, has run statewide and lost for governor. Exactly and but it’s very, very charismatic, extremely bright. Who had a Crooked Media Podcast, had a Crooked Media Podcast. I don’t know if I’ve spoken to him at length. He’s an incredibly impressive dude, just incredibly, he’s a really smart guy who knows a lot of stuff. You have a state Senator, Mallory McMorrow, who has been kind of like AI would say a charismatic up and comer in national politics, even when she was a relatively obscure state rep, starting with this big speech she gave after being accused of being a groomer. Yes so I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win. But she also is good. Like good video content Yeah, she’s very charismatic. Like a year ago, if I were doing this, I’d be like Mallory McMorrow. Like one of the big, intentional emergent, intentional stars. And then you have the person who I think there’s reporting to indicate that. I think and it’s probably true that Haley Stevens, who’s a sitting Congresswoman, who is, I think probably the establishment choice to the IT seems like was recruited by the establishment in part. And what’s happened is she has not taken off and she’s not of the three candidates. Whatever you think about Haley Stevens issue positions, her qualifications, whether she be a good Senator, I think she’s the least attentionally gifted of the three. And I think the polling indicates that right now, Abdul el-sayed is probably in the lead. He’s gotten a huge amount of benefit from the Bernie faction of the party streamer Hasan Piker, who did it, came and did a rally with him, which was both controversial but got a ton of attention. And in a first past the post, again, first past the post primary split field. What do you have to get. You got to get 30 percent 35 percent of the vote, 38 percent of the vote. So I want to talk about this primary because first, in one way, Abdullah Saad is like the opposite candidate from Graham Plattner, right. He is intentionally capable, but he is not a outside the institution. He’s a guy who taught at Columbia, the Rhodes scholar, Rhodes scholar. He’s like the ultimate brass ring of credentialing in the American meritocracy is worn on his hand. Yes, he has run before and lost. When people talk about candidates who have wanted to be in public office for a very long time, he is one of those candidates. And if you look at the polling in this race, you look at Polymarket or calci in this race. You can see that he did not walk in and start dominating it. What happened was that he started centering Israel and Gaza. Hasan Piker coming was part of this and the role piker played in this. To me, when the way at least I observed it happening is not that it was pikers endorsement or something that mattered, it’s that piker himself was so controversial that outside groups like third way and then the other two candidates attacked, and in attacking, they centered Israel and Gaza, which turned the Israel and Gaza is like an intentional superconductor. Yes it is. It is like no other issue, with the exception, maybe, of Donald Trump himself in American life and for an engaged Democratic primary electorate. Abdullah el-sayed is more on the right side of that issue. And so I think you’re saying something that’s going to be very important about attention. There are certain issues in any moment his background, the way I came to know him as a political figure is Medicare for all Yeah right. He emerges in politics. Bernie Sanders guy. And his whole thing is Medicare for all. And, he still believes in that. And from and from a health care a public health care from a public health perspective. But what has happened here is that there like a lot of attention on Israel and Gaza, and it has become like the defining issue. And Michigan, obviously very big Arab population. And also the Haley Stevens component of this. Because I mean, we should give the backstory here, which is that Haley Stevens primaried Andy Levin. Andy Levin was this labor organizer and very kind of. Two state solution Israel critical Jewish lefty synagogue president. Synagogue president who had a ton of AIPAC money dumped on his head Yeah, because he was insufficiently loyal to essentially the Netanyahu line. And Stevens knocked him off as part of that effort. And the other thing I would say is and I think this is incredibly dangerous for the folks who spend their time worrying about America’s relationship to Israel and defense of Israel. You have a situation in which you have stacked these different things atop each other, where it’s like money in politics, the establishment, the failed status quo, the pro-Israel lobby are all stacked atop each other and very hard to disentangle. And so, being the populist insurgent against the status quo, your criticism of Israel, your criticism of the war on Gaza, your views on that puts you across these incredibly salient divides that reach up and down from the actual issue of Gaza. And I read a piece on this when all the attacks were centering on piker. And one of the points of that piece was that it is going to be very, very, very important to break the effort to conflate yes, anti-Semitism, anti-zionism. And it is going to only become more important as Israel’s actual actions make anti-zionism a more popular and morally compelling position among progressively minded people. I mean, look, you can look at polling of young Jews Yeah right. How many of them want a one state solution. It’s pretty high now. So I will say also, and it’s worth playing this. I thought Abdul el-sayed himself had a very, very good answer disentangling this. What do you say to the Jewish community who you’re going to want to vote for you about your positions trends on Israel, on AIPAC funding, et cetera and how they shouldn’t feel alienated by a candidate like you. Well, Catie, I’ll tell you this. Nobody understands what it’s like to be discriminated against for how you pray. Like someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. And most of the time we don’t ask how we pray. Most people are asking, what do you pray for. And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they’re Jewish kids who are neighboring a couple houses down from me, or my kids who are Muslim. And I’ll tell you that it’s really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, and Jewish contributions to this country, which are vast. And AIPAC and Israel, those are two different things. When I’m elected, will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. Now, my family immigrated from Egypt. That doesn’t make me anti-egyptian. That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here, rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people, and I apply the same exact principles to Israel. I don’t want my tax dollars being spent to backstop backstop apartheid and genocide when they could be used to provide things like glasses or health care or schools for our own kids. And I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word anti-Semitism to spread to defend a foreign government. And I think it’s really important for us to differentiate between those two, because I don’t want to be held accountable to what another government does, simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there. And I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers. I remember a sign that was put up in Los Angeles I saw a picture of in 2008. It was on a lamppost, and it was during the Hillary Barack primary, and the sign was a campaign sign, and it had one sentence and it said she voted for the war. And it was like, that’s all you need to know. Like that. Vote for the Iraq war. That was the thing. That was the reason Hillary Clinton lost that primary. Ultimately, there’s a million reasons and she came very close and talk relitigate it. But that was the thing. I know a lot of particularly older Jews who will say to me, I don’t understand why Israel gets so much attention. You look at what China is doing to the Uyghurs and one of the things I say is that they are making themselves the center of attention. They really pushed hard to have America join them in a war. They’ve expanded the scope of that war. They have allowed just constant in addition to Netanyahu saying he wants to now percent of Gaza. They have allowed and enabled and protected and caused a constant stream of atrocities out of the West Bank. You can support what Israel is doing. But I don’t think you can deny that it’s going to come with a tremendous cost. And if you are not willing to have Israel pay the cost of goods actual actions. I don’t think you should be supporting its actions. I mean, let’s talk about what happened in the Israel Day Parade here in New York in terms of attention. So you’ve got this. You’ve got the Israel Day Parade. It’s happened every year. And in the context of New York, it has been a kind of cross-ideological day of Jewish unity and solidarity. Now, this year, it’s controversial for reasons the mayor is not going to attend for the first time in a long time. Other politicians will be there. What happens in that parade. Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most far right ministers. Who’s in the Israeli government, who is pushed for, along with ben-gvir, the law to execute people by hanging, who has been a proponent of the settlers and more than that, has put out a functional plan for the expulsion of Palestinians. What I think it is reasonable to call the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Yes he shows up at the Israel parade with a bunch of also hardcore extremist right wingers and his intentional politics, his intentional politics. And they do a bunch of interviews. And he even says to one of the interviewers, I love this parade. It reminds me of Jerusalem Day, which of course, is like the far right parade that happens every year in Jerusalem, where a very extremist right wing Israelis marched through Jerusalem in an act of very clear provocation. Yes like chanting horrifying things. Death to Arabs Day Parade is a. But Smotrich says this because he’s playing his own politics. But you can’t. It’s like. So then after that, it’s like, well, whose fault is it that people are paying attention to the parade Yeah, and you could say, well, he’s an extremist. He doesn’t represent. He’s in the Israeli government. He’s got authority over the West Bank Yeah it actually drives me completely insane. And it happens all the time in conversations I’m in. But it drives me insane. The effort to say that what the sitting cabinet ministers in Israel are doing is irrelevant, or they’re controversial, or it is what it is. They’re in power. They’re in power. There’s a Southern expression I love. It’s throwing rocks and hiding hands, which I love. And there’s just also I feel like this isn’t the Israeli government, but AIPAC and groups around them and associated super. There’s a lot of throwing rocks and hiding hands. You’ve just played in a succession of the most expensive congressional races in history a set of record setting ones where you have spent the money that have made them the most expensive. That’s fine. It’s America in the post-citizens United era. People get to do that. What you can’t do is be like, why is everyone focused on us. It’s like you spent tens of millions of dollars to knock people out. Like you could do one or the other. You play in these races, you play in these races, but then you get to be criticized for it. I want to move to Texas and I want to move to Texas is so interesting right now. James Talarico, because I think he reflects, maybe something different than what we’ve been talking about. He is the one case in which I think you can really see an intentional superstar who rose during this cycle but did not rise because he was so far left or so far right. He has. I mean, I had him here on the show. It’s a great interview. People should go check it out. He has bog standard progressive politics now. It is connected to a beautifully articulated Christian moral framework. But he’s somebody who has broken through intentionally, not by being very far left or very far right, not by choosing a highly controversial issue. But actually by. Front loading. A religiously rooted decency that, in part got him on Joe Rogan’s podcast and became this signal that maybe he could do something other Democrats couldn’t. And when Texas. So I’m curious what you’ve made of him. Again, I would start with the thing that we’ve been saying about a number of these people, including Plattner and I think Abdul said, is that he’s charismatic in, again, in the ancient Greek sense. And I think, obviously, the pastoral tradition that he’s coming out of means that he’s both naturally charismatic and also has access to a set of rhetorical tools that have been developed literally over thousands of years to grab and hold people’s attention. So I think that’s a huge part of what’s going on. And again, I think that connects to this back to the future theme that we keep coming back to which is like can’t just raise money and run ads. If you want to be successful, you got to have something going on about how you grab people, and he clearly has that. I think you’re totally right that he’s a unicorn, in that it’s not connected to that kind of populist message in the same way he is, I think, a populist. And I think he’s very much framing himself as of insurgent outside the status quo. But he’s really not relying on any kind of us versus them framework. I mean, he does a little bit of billionaire billionaires, but it’s rhetorical flourishing. It’s not the core in the way Plattner and Plattner is like, that is Plattner’s thing. It’s what becomes this guy is a former president of his college Democrats Yeah, exactly. Like he is a different type. He is a person who has wanted to run for. He’s a teach for America kid Yeah, right. He’s not a great yes person who has been failed by American institutions. He is not a person who you feel harbors a great anger at the Democratic establishment. He’s a state representative. And I think that’s an interesting dimension of him. But he also has a quality that Plattner does in a different way, which is that well, I’m not saying he was cast in the sense that somebody came out and found him the way they came out and found Plattner. He does look like what he is in the same way that Plattner looks like what he is. I mean, a lot of people are oyster farmers or lobstermen, but they don’t like you wouldn’t see them on the street and think, well, you definitely spend all your time on the water. And Plattner looks like a Seaman. And Talarico you would cast him as a pastor to play the idealistic young pastor Yeah like rooting out corruption. Yes in a complicated church Yes, exactly. He just has the whole. You could put him in a scene and there will be blood. And he. Exactly And he rises by running his social media strategy, which eventually gets him on Rogan. And I think that he also reflects this yearning people that I think is really powerful and it is underplayed, which is not just for populism or radicalism or even inspiration, but in the Trump era for decency. Totally and there’s a yearning for public virtue, which I think is of funny inversion of some of the politics of our youth. I’m starting to talk a lot about virtue on this show Yeah and I’m thinking a lot about virtue. I think that’s partly the experience of Trump. It’s partly that I’m a middle aged dad with three kids, and I think a lot about moral instruction, and particularly in moral instruction, in a world in which the most powerful and famous figure in the country, is a moral degenerate. The other thing I would say is there’s these different. There’s different kind of vibratory levels that different coalitions play on. And I do think that the appeal for connection, brother and Sistahood, solidarity, unity. That was the thing that Barack Obama was able to Marshal. And that’s still deep in the progressive soul, I think. I think it’s deep in the American soul. It’s the not what Donald Trump, Donald Trump is totally incapable of playing in that register. I think the Republican Party, increasingly in his era, is incapable of playing that register. And then the last thing I’ll say and I think this applies to Jon Ossoff as well, where we’re going next. Oh, good. When you think about what’s the opposite of Trump. One typology of the opposite of Trump is a nice young man. Like, what’s the opposite of Trump is like a nice young man. Well let me and James Talarico is a nice young man. Let me hold before we go to Jon Ossoff and the different Obama registers, the nice young man, what it means to be nice. The weakness of being nice has been the main form of attack the Paxton campaign has decided to unleash, crazy like T Talarico tofu Talarico Talarico which now Talarico campaign has Talarico shirts. I think that one was a Paxton mistake. But the weakness they think they have sensed is that people want strength Yeah and a nice young man who wants you to him and speaks often of his own humility and has a vegan girlfriend, is not strong enough for Texas. I mean, that’s a charitable version they’re calling him the F slur is what they’re doing. I mean, you’re giving a charitable version of what the actual. Well, and actually quite literally like you have Stephen Miller saying the first transgender candidate, right. He’s a queer. Yes it’s very schoolyard. All of it. Yes when we take a step back, it’s just like cruelty versus kindness. Yes they’re really playing into the campaign Talarico wanted to set up. I once heard somebody around the Mamdani Cuomo campaign be like, they both got the exact antagonist they wanted Yeah, that’s a great point. And it just turned out Mamdani was right about which antagonist he wanted and Cuomo wasn’t. In terms of that race and who’s making the right tactical calls, we should just take a step back and say, Texas is Texas for a reason. And if you run a moderately competent campaign with a moderately competent candidate, you will win by 5 points. As a Republican, as a Republican, it’s just structurally there. So you really got to screw things up, if not more than 5 points. Yes I mean 10 to 5:00. You run a bad campaign. It’s five. You run a miserable campaign like Ted Cruz did in 2018. In a really, really good year for Democrats, you win by 2. What I would say is about Paxton is that he’s the worst of all worlds in this way, which is that Ken Paxton is someone with a lot of baggage. He was impeached by a supermajority Republican state legislature for corruption. He was indicted for securities crimes. Although not convicted, he was also not convicted on his impeachment. His wife recently divorced him for what she called more biblical reasons. There were a number of his ex-staffers who came out with a statement where they talked about just how awful he was as a boss and in his public positions. I’ve covered Ken Paxton a ton in my journalism career. You don’t hear him talk that much. This is not a super charismatic guy Yeah, he’s got all the baggage and none of the charisma. It’s a weird combination of things, but it’s not like there’s some amazing magnetism on the other side of it. So if you were setting up the worst kind of candidate in this era, who’s got all the negatives of high risk attentional strategies and none of the positives, it kind of is. Ken Paxton. Yes, but this is where I think there’s just something genuinely interesting about Talarico, because he to me shows there’s actually a lot of pathways in to breaking out intentionally. It’s generally interesting that Talarico was able to beat Jasmine Crockett, who was also like big MSNBC figure Jasmine Crockett is big on it, big on viral video, and is not super guarded and talky poincy that. And I think that’s a good attribute. And, he beat her in that primary. But it goes to show, I think, that there’s probably a lot of different angles that you can play here. I think one thing that these platforms sniff out and I don’t know why, but podcasting, video, et cetera, I think they sniff out inauthenticity that in a way that was not true. When you were giving quotes in newspapers or going on Meet the press or being on the nightly news, I think actually inauthentic figures could do perfectly well. They’re somehow institutions to go back to what we were talking about. Institutions don’t care about authenticity. They actually want you to change who you are, to conform to what they need. Yes, but these anti-institutional spaces, they do Yeah there’s something about them where people. I always feel when people are on the show, the first thing the audience can sense is inauthenticity. The first thing they can sense is you not telling them what you really think Yeah and you got to be. I think that’s such a good point that you have to be some version of your actual self to figure it out and to do and to do it right. Rahm Emanuel is not, in my view, likely to be the Democrats 2020 nominee, but his somewhat unlikely presidential campaign is going to do better than I think people realize it’s going to do in being of force in the primary Yeah, because he is fundamentally himself. Totally, yes. In all places. And so that allows him to just attack and run plays and be compelling. And also he’s got to go back to the risk calculation. He’s got nothing to lose. He can say yes to everything. And he’s a high risk personality Yeah he’s got a high risk personality. An unusual highly institutional figure. Who’s very high risk has very, very, very high risk appetites. Speaking of 2028 we talked about AOC a little bit ago, and I think she’s one of the big figures here. But what have you made of Jon ossoff’s emergence as a cross ideological 2028 dark horse. A person who I’ve been talking about for a while but has on piker is talking about, the Matt Yglesias talking. Michelle Goldberg just did a great piece on him. There’s something interesting in what people are projecting on to Jon Ossoff. I have been jokingly calling him in our team Slack, the lisan al-gaib, which is a dune reference to the Shalom figure who is essentially the kind of chosen one. The foretold prophet. This is a joke, just to be clear. And the reason that I use that is Jewish Kennedy man, there is something about the way that he is performing forming his candidacy. The social media videos putting out the fact that he is very conventionally handsome and young and could be in a movie like AOC. He’s very controlled in his media Yeah, he’s not playing a volume game. Not playing. You don’t see him on podcast interviews right now. No, not playing a volume game. I think that he has figured out a way in a broadly palatable ideological fashion, to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different Democratic factions, which is important. But also, he’s running for reelection in a swing state and is right now polling very well. We’ll see what happens. But if you back up a couple of years, if I said to you in 2024, which of the or 2022 or whatever. Which of Georgia’s Democratic senators is everybody going to be talking about in 2026 as a 2028 Savior. I think the answer would be Ralph Warnock percent. And instead, Ossoff is the one people are talking about. And I was looking at Raphael Warnock’s YouTube page because he’s doing content, but it doesn’t have any of the visual grammar. One thing that you see in a Mamdani, you see in a Jon Ossoff, you see in a James Talarico this is not just an age of algorithms. It’s visual, very visual. And you’ll see Warnock and he’s like talking in the Senate press conference setups. And he’s just like in front of American flags. And Ossoff, they have figured out, the clip immediately when you see it. And also it used to be a documentarian who did documentaries on international corruption. So there’s a background here. This guy actually knows how to create TV about corruption. But there’s something really interesting to me about yeah. First the scarcity, the creating I want this. Who is Jon Ossoff. This building anticipation plus this figuring out of a visual grammar that’s distinct and wholly your own and looks like Obama. Yes, it does look like Obama. It looks like also the hero shot. It’s always a hero shot, which was a constant. You remember there was gotta be skinny for that to work. I just want it for anyone else who’s taking notes out there in production. You got to be pretty thin for that hero shot. There was a great the hero shot being this 3/4 upwards angle Yeah and otherwise you get a lot of chins Yeah you get a lot of chin. And there was this great article on Obama, something like Obama accidentally stares too far into future Yeah, yeah. Because he was very good at this. And the shot is it’s always like this. Like he doesn’t seem like he’s looking at a crowd Yeah, he’s looking into the crowd. No, you’re right. And I do think it’s true that kind of visual branding is so interesting. There’s one other dimension of Ossoff that I think is really worth mentioning in terms of 2028, which is that he’s Jewish. And a genuine Israel critic. See, this is so, I think, to go back to what we were saying about that Michigan race, there’s no way of getting around the fractures in the party on Gaza, Israel, perceptions of anti-Semitism, perceptions of undue influence by the Israel lobby the coalition, contains both elements. And someone’s going to have to figure out how to thread that needle. And if you were asking me what that person might look like, I would say, the first Jewish nominee in history who is also a critic of Israel, would be one recipe to thread a very difficult needle for the coalition. And the point here is that Assaf has substance on this. So he early on signed on to a Bernie Sanders letter that I think only had 19. Yes with a small group. It was a small group that was against sending more arms to Israel, given the level of humanitarian devastation that was currently being inflicted by Israel upon Gaza. My colleague Michelle Goldberg had a great profile of him. And she mentions like a Haaretz piece, which is like the liberal Israeli newspaper saying, well, this position is going to make it much harder for us to win in Georgia. And no, it put Ossoff in position to actually navigate this in a way the others are going to have a lot of trouble with. Josh Shapiro is going to have a lot of trouble here, is already having a lot of trouble here. And But if you go too far to the other side, you’re going to have. You’re going to need somebody who can represent both sides of the divide at once. And Ossoff, who is one centering on a corruption story, who is too centering on a he moves a corruption critique into an argument for liberal pluralism. Yes right. It’s a populist critique with a liberal, pluralist answer. It talks a lot about values. Talks a lot about being rooted in the Civil Rights movement. And then is able to navigate this dimension of the party’s schism. He’s also done something on corruption that I have struggled to do. And I don’t know if you’ve felt the same way. The corruption is so overwhelming and you can hear it in my voice right now. Like so. It leaves me speechless. It’s so brazen. It’s so insane. Every single day I discover some New story that is like would have been the end of any other politician I’ve covered. Ossoff has figured out how to tell that story very, very well. But one reason is that he often he moves it to be as about Donald Trump and also about the Democratic Party, also about the existing institutions. See, I get why people voted for him, because even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world. It’s been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money, both sides. And it’s worse than ever now. Citizens United was the worst court decision in modern American history. And when members of Congress aren’t begging for money from lobbyists, they’re trying to dodge getting carpet bombed by these super PACs. And see, this is why nothing works for ordinary people. It’s not because of woke college kids or trans students, or because there are interracial couples in cereal commercials. It’s because the people’s elected representatives don’t represent the people. They represent the donors. There’s a credibility. He’s very careful always to do this, which, again, is another Obama move. Obama would always include an argument from the other side in the argument he was making. Always, always People say, yeah, right. And he does that. Both sides. And he’s very, very careful to make this a critique of the system itself, of which Donald Trump is taking advantage of it, but is not its originating cause Yeah and I think that’s also part of again, it does help to it helps to be getting your reps before the Georgia electorate. It’s like comedians. Politicians are like comedians. You work the room. You see where your laugh lines are. You work different rooms. You work larger and larger rooms. And the room matters a lot. And the feedback you get from the room, it matters a lot. It helps to be in a context where the room that you’re working is a Georgia electorate. I think this was true of Bernie Sanders in Vermont, where he only got to where he was after many failures, many electoral failures, many years in the electoral wilderness by figuring out how to talk to the median Vermont voter who was not a committed ideological socialist. It’s why Barack Obama was as good as he was, because he was a Black politician who had to work white rooms Yeah, and he’s talked about that, how much he had to do in to win statewide in Illinois to win in these rural areas where people were very skeptical of a person named Barack Hussein Obama in 2004. The other thing that I think is worth touching here, one thing I see among the Democrats right now is they’re all competing to prove they’re the fighter, and relatively few are working in the more inspirational side of the tradition that you look at Newsome, you look at AOC, you look at Pritzker. They’re all like, I am your brawler. I will rip their throats out for you. And Ossoff, even though he’s attacking corruption, he is not in that mode at all. It’s a different register. There’s a type of Democrat who, even if they have learned to suppress it, their fundamental feeling at all levels is a disbelief. I can’t believe this is happening. I literally can’t believe that anybody could this guy that these things aren’t sinking him. And that’s formed in races exactly where that is not a register that works. And you cannot a lot of Democrats have to abstractly come to the view that there are people in this world who like Donald Trump, but they don’t know any of them. And if they do, they maybe cut them out of their lives. And that is not Jon ossoff’s world. That’s what I mean. So he’s formed fully. He’s formed fully in an environment in which the appeal of Trump and Trump’s power over the electorate and Trump’s power over specific people that he has to win over, or whose family members he has to win over, is present from the beginning. And I think there’s something really useful and powerful about that for just again, how you train. But if you look at polling and if you particularly now look at the prediction markets polling, Kamala Harris has a lead. I think people are skeptical that lead will lead to primary dominance, but I guess we’ll see if she runs. But if you look at prediction markets, the lead is Gavin Newsom. And we all knew Gavin Newsom wanted to run for president I would say six years ago Yeah, I was pretty dismissive of how that was likely to go. Handsome white guy with a bunch of scandals from California was like, not what the Democratic Party seemed to be looking for. Who he is in some ways has changed, or actually in some ways, maybe come closer to a core of him. What do you think about the way Newsom has maneuvered himself into one attentionally capable in a way he wasn’t always but two into. I think it is a fairly wide consensus right now that he is a Democratic runner for 2028. I think I have complicated feelings. I mean, I think that there’s some part of me that just thinks, Governor, California’s a tough thing to do to win national to be the president. Of course, New York real estate developer is also pretty tough too. So what do I know. Yes, I think the choice he’s made intentionally is one of the most interesting, which is he was always a charismatic guy, but he was not. He has chosen omnipresence. He’s chosen to say yes to everything. He’s chosen to go everywhere. He’s chosen to host his own podcast. He chose his own podcast. He just had Ashley Sinclair on it Yeah he had Ben Shapiro on not long ago. He’s doing things you would not expect. Exactly and I think it has produced a comfort that is really, really useful in the world that we live in. I think there’s a question of both what the Democratic primary electorate wants and what the general electorate wants in relation to Donald Trump. And here’s what I mean by this. You were talking about being a fighter. And I think there’s a little bit of Freddie Hampton said, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. And there’s a little bit of a question between, do you want to fight fire with fire. Or do you want to fight fire with water. And our fighter version our brawler, our Trump essentially, which I think is appealing to some people in the Democratic electorate, is the mode that some Democratic politicians have gone and in some almost pair ways that Newsome has gone by doing the whole Trump shtick online. O.K, but let me complicate this in one way, because it’s why I find Newsome really interesting, because he is doing more than that, I agree. Yes, there are two things. So one is the number of reps he’s getting places he’s going. I mean, you and I just saw him at the cap ideas conference. He’s just gotten better Yeah, he’s gotten better faster than the others have. But the other thing I think a really big problem Democrats have faced since Obama is about describing a kind of unity that we can find as a country, a way of living here together despite our disagreements, despite our history, despite our differences. And Bill Clinton did a lot in this register. Rhodes scholar, but poor Arkansas boy, New South Yeah Obama. I mean, the master register. Yes but because he was a master of this register, he somewhat destroyed the ability of anybody else to use it because if he couldn’t achieve it. That’s a good point. If what the Obama era cashed out into was Donald Trump and the division and dissolution of the shared moral and Democratic framework, we had then to speak like Obama did in 04 to speak like he did in 08 becomes naive. Nobody’s going to believe you. But the weird thing Newsom is doing is containing this. These two opposite ideas in himself, which is one like, I’ll be your brawler. But two, we will just disagree honestly and in public Yeah and continue the relationship with each other under those terms. He’ll talk to Charlie Kirk. Before Charlie Kirk was killed, he’ll talk to Michael savage, he’ll talk to Ben Shapiro, he’ll go to the left. And Newsom is it almost seems to be making this argument. That is not that we can live here together in some way where our differences dissolve. It’s that our fights with each other can be productive Yeah I mean, I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. It’s a very Ezra Klein approach. I do wonder whether there’s also a kind of incoherence in that, narratively, that makes it a little difficult to pull off. I don’t think he’s been able to synthesize them yet Yeah, I’m not sure you can. It’s why I find his campaign very interesting. He’ll often talk about the place right now. And his rhetoric that falls most flat for me is he’ll start talking about they need to be a repairer of the breach. Or repair of the breach. It’s biblical line. And you don’t feel it. You don’t feel how he’s going to repair the breach. I want to end here on the big intentional campaign that ended in failure, which was Spencer Pratt. So, Angeles, because if you were online, it was like this former reality star is coming out of nowhere. He’s got the greatest ads. You can’t be on X for five minutes without seeing something from him. He’s going to maybe win percent in the runoff. Maybe at least make the runoff. But then it didn’t pan out to anything. He underperformed Donald Trump, I think. And I think it’s a great counterpoint to many of the theories I’ve been espousing. So I’m glad we’re talking about it because I mean, it was a very successful campaign, intentionally. I do think there’s something going on. We should just say there’s something going on with X right now under Elon Musk that is a little distinct to that platform, which is that it’s become a kind of hermetically sealed hothouse of insanity that when you enter it, when you’re not in it all the time you enter it, you’re like guys are nuts Yeah and that’s exactly the way many people felt about what we might call kind of peak woke Twitter. So part of it, I think is a product of how much that was an X candidacy Yeah there’s also a question of what’s real there. What’s being clipped farm. What has a lot of bots pushing it. But the other lesson I think here it is never going to be the case that attention is the entire story. There has to be something else happening. And I think with Pratt, there was nothing else happening, really. There was no reason for that man to be mayor. First of all, why that guy. I do think the Pratt campaign, to me really is an object lesson in what x is at this point that I think would be very useful for everyone to internalize, because you and I both remember back in the day when people would say, Twitter is not real life. And weirdly, I think that’s even more the case now under the algorithmic empire of one Elon Musk. I think one of the greatest advantages Democrats have going into 2028 is not being there. Is it. Elon Musk has control of Twitter. I think people think of this as a problem. For Democrats, it’s the opposite because Musk is to that warping Twitter towards a hard right, conspiratorial, hermetic nature. And in the way that when Democrats had dominance over Twitter, when liberals and progressives and leftists had dominance and we’re talking to each other, they convince themselves of a bunch of ideas that were politically lethal. But they didn’t understand that because where they were, it’s like to have Normie opinions was politically lethal. That’s how it is for the right now on Twitter. And JD Vance is there and all of their staffers are there. Whereas the liberals and Democrats and leftists are split and broken across different platforms, and that is genuinely an advantage. I have come to this exact same conclusion Yeah Twitter. It’s like it’s a kind of a curse. It makes you feel very powerful and you pay for it. Let’s end there. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience. So I’m going to spare you all my reading on Italian history, which I think is probably not particularly relevant. I read and loved Ben Lerner’s newest transcription. I will say, as someone who went to Brown and he was in my class there, and I just went to my 25th reunion with Kate, who I met there. It had a particular potency for me that I may not have to the general audience. I recently read and I can’t believe I had never read this book, but I read the godfather, the original novel by Mario Puzo. It’s a combination of some really weird and truly awfully misogynistic stuff, but it is incredible how good that book is in some ways. And also, it kind of makes you understand why the movie is a masterpiece. Like, I didn’t quite realize how faithful the movie was to the original source material. And the last one is a New novel that I just am about halfway through someone else that I know. Courtney mom called Allen ops out, which is a great kind of really insightful, searing, comedic look at a Greenwich advertising executive who goes to live in the Playhouse in his backyard. Chris Hayes, thank you very much. Thank you.
