Podcast Host/Announcer

This podcast is supported by BetterHelp. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it. Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit. More. Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer, thrive. Visit betterhelp.com New York Times.

Ezra Klein

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 Platinum was rocked by even more scandals.

Graham Platner

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.

Ezra Klein

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?

Chris Hayes

And who believes in time to abolish ice? And who believes we gotta get money out of politics and in your pocket?

Ezra Klein

In Texas, where James Talarico, another person people hadn't really heard of a couple years ago, is now the Democratic nominee for Senate.

Chris Hayes

One thing is clear today we're about to take back Texas.

Ezra Klein

In Los Angeles, where we actually saw it fail in the mayoral candidacy of

Ad/Promo Voice

Spencer Pratt, reality TV star Spencer Pratt's

Chris Hayes

insurgent campaign for LA mayor has officially

Ad/Promo Voice

actually run its course.

Chris Hayes

These corrupt crooks really do look out for each other, don't they?

Ezra Klein

What's happening with Jon Ossif and the sudden rise in interest in what he's doing, 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, host of all in with Chris Hayes and author of the great book on attention in the Modern Moment, the Sirens Call how attention became the World's most endangered resource. As always, my email if you need our attention. Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show.

Chris Hayes

Always great to be back.

Ezra Klein

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 wanted to start with a Wall Street Journal interview that was with the people who recruited Graham Platner.

Chris Hayes

How did you find Graham Platner? Well, so, I mean, we went through thousands and thousands of prospects. We, you know, through a number of means, you know, assessed just a huge amount of people. Then, you know, Liam pulled up this video of this guy with an oyster farm.

Graham Platner

My name is Graham Platner and I live in Sullivan, Maine. The owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company.

Chris Hayes

And then she pulled up his FEC history and saw know the money he'd given to Bernie Sanders and you know, some other people. That was enough information to know that we had the best prospect that we'd maybe ever seen.

Ezra Klein

Okay, I want to flesh this out because I've been told this story by multiple people how this played out, this group, like they were like, who could run in Maine, right? Like lobster farmer, oyster farmer, some kind of fisherman.

Chris Hayes

Yeah.

Ezra Klein

And so when he says, we looked at thousands of people, like the computer looked through occupational and other forms of records, it was like, which lobster farmers? Like, who has donated to a populist candidate? Which is to say that, you know, we normally think of candidates as being, you know, recruited because they're important in their communities, or a lawyer, they run a hospital, something like that. A lot of people grow up wanting to run for office, but Graham Platner was cast. Right. It was like, like Hollywood looking for somebody to fill a role.

Chris Hayes

There's a long history there. I mean, the Democrats are running someone in a, in Tom Keene's district who's a, like helicopter pilot. Mikey Sherrill was a helicopter pilot. They like, you know, that's that, that's a bio.

Ezra Klein

That's Abigail Spanberger, a former. Ciao. Exactly.

Chris Hayes

So, like that part of it is an interesting version of a sort of grassroots lefty populist group doing what the D trip will do or the dscc. 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.

Ezra Klein

Yes.

Chris Hayes

It was like bio, social capital, connections, ability to raise money, all that stuff. And then like, 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.

Ezra Klein

So I want to hold on what you just said about the D triple C, 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. Yep, six hours a day. And they will punish you if you don't. Right. You want to be on things like their red to blue lists. And so I know candidates who are just brow beaten into being on the phone raising money for hours and hours and hours a day. And the dccc, which is the sort of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, isn't doing that because they're cynics.

Abdul El-Sayed

Right.

Chris Hayes

Or they have a fetish for it

Ezra Klein

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 other things, but that buys attention

Chris Hayes

is it buys tv.

Ezra Klein

And so what this group is doing when they cast Platner, 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?

Chris Hayes

Yes, exactly.

Ezra Klein

Which then will bring in money. Yes, but even if it doesn't attention,

Chris Hayes

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 kind of, you know, high point of broadcast TV ads, right. Like raise as much money as possible, hit the airwaves with a ton of broadcast TV. And that's the, that's the recipe. That's 90% of a campaign as broadcast TV particularly, and as broadcast TV ads decline in their salience. Right. You have to have some alternate theory of how you're going to get to people in some places, like in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, like everyone in the state knows who Roy Cooper is. Right. He doesn't have the same problem. The guy's 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.

Ezra Klein

Okay. But we're underselling here the accomplishment of Platner because they are running in that race ultimately against a Roy Cooper like figure. Yes. In Janet Mills.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

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 Osborne, the independent who ran a cycle go 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 that Platner squeezes Mills out attentionally. She just. The charisma gap between them.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And the ability that he has to command attention, particularly online. But that then translates into all other forms of attention because like the newspapers follow it, the cable news follows it. He's on your show.

Abdul El-Sayed

He also.

Ezra Klein

He knocks out a sitting governor.

Chris Hayes

Right. But he also, I mean, this is the other part of it is he out campaigns her in that state on the ground. Like it's not just the online part of it. I mean, and again, this is part of attention too. Maine is a small state.

Audience Member/Caller

Right.

Chris Hayes

I mean, Maine is a state where, you know, Susan Collins at this point knows, like literally knows a shockingly high percentage of Mainers. Right. 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.

Ezra Klein

But I think that much younger than she is. I mean, mills is a 78 year old candidate.

Chris Hayes

Yes. 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. Okay. Other people could have run that primary. They knew that Schumer was trying to recruit Mills. She actually got in after Platner. Officially. Almost all of the big name politicians in the state of Maine went for the governor's race, right, 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. Platner 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 is there is a kind of institutional, low risk appetite.

Ezra Klein

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, right. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, in a different way, Kamala Harris, right? They're all people. They were not electoral juggernauts. Right. 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 attentionally.

Chris Hayes

That's often true.

Ezra Klein

I think it is related to what you're talking about with risk. But I think it has 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, social capital, ability to raise money, jobs that tend to have risen through the institutions. I mean, Platner is a downwardly mobile oyster farmer whose oyster farm doesn't really make money and sells to his mom's fancy restaurant, Right? He is not. You wouldn't just look at it and think, that guy is the most impressive person in Maine.

Chris Hayes

Right?

Ezra Klein

Right. It's not like Mikey Sherrill as a Navy pilot, you know, but the people who succeed in institutions are often do not have personalities that are spiky in the way the attentional moment currently rewards.

Chris Hayes

So I think that's true. I think there's a few things going on. One is we should talk about success in institutions and credentialing, which are sort of two different things, Right. You know, it means a lot in the world of democratic progressive politics if someone 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 a 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, right? And like a company man is someone that gets along well with others in an organizational setting, doesn't make ways, doesn't upset people. And I think the idea of a company man is kind of what has been the template again, almost necessarily. Right. I mean, if you like, as you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, the Democratic Party is an institution.

Ezra Klein

One thing that Platner is able to carry in a way that feels authentic is a genuine feeling that the system is hollow at its core. You know, people talk about which is

Chris Hayes

not a put on with him. I mean, which is the key part of this.

Ezra Klein

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. Right. The hostility is authentic.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And when you listen to him on the stump, more than he is carrying a message about single payer healthcare or a Green New Deal, he is carrying a message about, you know, in a very different way, I think, than Bernie did, but using similar language about an unspecified political revolution. He's carrying a message about this is all wrong somehow.

Abdul El-Sayed

Yeah.

Ezra Klein

And what you need is somebody who fundamentally believes it is all wrong somehow.

Graham Platner

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 D.C. 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. Power's 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. Well, I'm going to tell you right now that story is bullshit.

Ezra Klein

And you can look across a lot of the candidates who are succeeding right now. You know, here I do think Mamdani, you know, is a, you know, 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, with a message more even than an agenda of like genuine disillusionment.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And anger.

Chris Hayes

Yeah. I mean, I think there's, 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, you know, 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? Right. Can you be a centrist populist is one interesting question. Another is can you channel the attentional politics when you are suddenly in the incumbent position?

Ezra Klein

I want to pick up on something you said about being a moderate populist. You can be a moderate populist. And you know how we know that? Because there was one in Maine, right. 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. You know, 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, you know, 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.

Chris Hayes

And in fact he's leaving now and

Ezra Klein

he is this year getting primaried from the left. And he decided, I'm done, I'm retiring. You know, you could have imagined a world where 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 Goldin in moderate populism is that you become very vulnerable in primaries.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

Because on both the right, but now on the left, I mean the polling on this is really fascinating. If you look at the number of Democrats who said they were very Liberal in say 1995. Right. Most Democrats were not liberal or very liberal in 1995. They self described as moderate and now it's like very liberal. It's very hard to survive. And it's also just very unpleasant.

Chris Hayes

Yes. That part of it is a big part of it.

Ezra Klein

Even if you can survive the day to day of being like 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.

Chris Hayes

And you have, right? Particularly in this sort of 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.

Graham Platner

Right?

Chris Hayes

Like you could be Jared golden for your district and like the local news would cover you and the, you know, the local TV news, the newspapers, maybe some, you know, some nerds would read about you in Roll Call because we're all operating in one attentional sphere. There's, there's little, there's less and less room for that sort of variation that used to just come about because like, people just didn't pay attention to what the main two congressional candidate was doing.

Podcast Host/Announcer

This podcast is supported by Better Help. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it. Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit more. Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer thrive. Visit betterhelp.com newyorktimes keep your wellness routine

Ad/Promo Voice

going strong all summer. Kachava's new travel packs help you stick to your daily ritual even when you're on the go. Just one packet of Cachava's all in One Nutrition Shake provides complete nutrition wherever you are with 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber. Greens, adaptogens and more. Simplify your daily ritual. Go to kachava.com and use code news for 15% off. That's K A C H-A-V A.com code news.

Ezra Klein

I think this like brings up some of the flip side of Platner. And one reason I think Platner is such an interesting figure to start with here is he represents both sides of the gamble being made, right? The high risk, high attention, charisma on the one hand. On the other hand, the point of getting this high risk candidate with a sort 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 Tonkopf tattoo on the chest and this kind of pulsing question about whether or not he knew about that. I'm honestly a little skeptical that he did not know about it for as long as he says he didn't.

Chris Hayes

I share that skepticism.

Ezra Klein

You have him sexting. Seems like about a half dozen women during his marriage or at least, you know, texting with them 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, you know, borderline abusive when they fought. I've had this trouble with Platner 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 these very politically incorrect Reddit posts. 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 were an anti Semite, I think we would know. I think that one would have come out pretty clearly.

Chris Hayes

That's a good point. That's well said.

Ezra Klein

I think he knew what the tattoo was earlier.

Podcast Host/Announcer

Earlier.

Ezra Klein

And I think the spirit in which he. This is my view of him. Right. This is not based on anything but my Rita's situation. The spirit in which he and his friends got it was edgelordy. 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 don't have. I cannot prove it. But I'm telling you what I think. The thing that worries me about Platner isn't any one thing. It is the sense that there is just bad judgment in the guy. I mean, the sexting with the women, it's early in a marriage and that's pretty recent. Right. The thing that worries me about Platner isn't kind of 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.

Chris Hayes

Should he be a U.S. senator?

Ezra Klein

Should he be a U.S. senator is a very different question than that. Right?

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

I mean, if I were appointing people from Maine, would I appoint Graham Platner? Like I would not. But that's also not how elections work.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, we have the 17th amendment, right?

Ezra Klein

Yes, but, but so that I think is. But here's like the thing. He's not runnin a general election yet. Susan Collins overperforms in polls. He has been generating Attention and energy among Democrats and among particularly like the online left. And whether or not it creates an attack surface that, you know, you can attack this guy as fundamentally unreliable, which

Chris Hayes

is what they will do, which is

Ezra Klein

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 like a level of factional hell to pay.

Chris Hayes

So let me say that I basically share, essentially share everything you said, like, could and have made those arguments. Let me 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 scandal to speak of, raised a ton of money. A woman. And she got her butt kicked. In fact, she lost by like, I think, nine points.

Graham Platner

Right.

Ezra Klein

When she was up in all the polls.

Chris Hayes

She was up in all the polls.

Ezra Klein

That's part of why people are so nervous about this race.

Chris Hayes

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. Like the big names of Maine all ran for governor. So part of this is a little like everyone sort of bringing their hands, like, well, you have to have people running.

Ezra Klein

Totally.

Chris Hayes

They didn't run. He ran.

Ezra Klein

Yeah.

Chris Hayes

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.

Ezra Klein

Yes.

Chris Hayes

That this is the party of essentially kind of like school marm Tisk Tisking. Now, that's extremely gendered. I want to be very clear about that. And I think a lot of the conversation about Platner on both sides of the very intense polarized debate within the Democratic coalition is very gendered. That said, I think it's, you know, there is a kind of post Covid hangover of the sort of idea that the Democrats are just this, like, again, this kind of like, 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.

Ezra Klein

Yeah, maybe, maybe none of this is negative for him.

Chris Hayes

Right. That's like the Reddit post people have joined me this joke. The Reddit posts are the median voter.

Graham Platner

Right.

Chris Hayes

That's the joke people have made.

Ezra Klein

When I saw the Reddit post, I was like, that's a asset. Right. I don't have to agree with them or like them to be like, that's a political asset. I mean, this is a line I say all the time, but. And at some point need to like 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. Right. The left is another version of it that I use is the left is overformed by institutions and the right is under formed by institutions.

Chris Hayes

I think it's well said. Yeah.

Ezra Klein

But you can imagine a world where Platner 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.

Abdul El-Sayed

Yeah.

Ezra Klein

You know, you just pick somebody like a little too under formed. Right. You don't want the straight A student and you don't want the kid smoking pot in the parking lot. You need something sort of.

Graham Platner

Right.

Ezra Klein

You need something sort of in between there. But, but, but, but the question is really we're going to see a test of whether or not this works in, of whether or not this works in Maine. And it's going to be very, very interesting totally to see how that plays out.

Chris Hayes

Can I say two more things about him? 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, I think this is another thing where you have to, if you're going to do it, you got to be all in, which is you're going to go in 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're like, talk to people, you can move through things in a way that used to be very difficult. And then the last thing I'll say about Platner, 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.

Ezra Klein

Dad bought his house.

Chris Hayes

Dad bought his house. This is a guy who was enlisted, an enlisted Marine during the global War on terror, in multiple tours, fighting in really brutal circumstances. And here's what, why I think that's politically salient. He has an ability to, for lack of a better word, code switch. I think code switching is actually like 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.

Ezra Klein

Bill Clinton.

Chris Hayes

Bill Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, all of these people. You know, Bill Clinton was like, that's interesting.

Ezra Klein

Does Ocasio Cortez have code switching at that level?

Chris Hayes

I think she does, actually. And I think one of the things that you see also, you saw this with Obama. You saw it with, you know, 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 is 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 this superpower in Democratic politics.

Ezra Klein

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 Platner, she stays away from disagreement. You do not see her doing what Bernie does, what Ro Khanna does. Yes. She's not on flagrant. No, she's not out there with Lex Friedman.

Abdul El-Sayed

No. She.

Ezra Klein

I mean, she just did a thing with more Perfect Union, which is like a lefty content producer, you know, talking to Trump voters, but in a very controlled environment. Controlled environment, right. She's not on Jubilee, which Ro Khanna and for that matter, James Tallarica went on. And I think one of the biggest questions for her is actually whether she is comfortable.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, that's interesting.

Ezra Klein

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 has asked and he particularly wants to go to places where it's gonna be unusual to see him there. She runs a very, very, very, very careful operation.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And often when she is in spaces where she's not comfortable, like the Munich security conference, it can get hairy for her. She can sort of fumble.

Chris Hayes

And Congressman, I'll start with you would

Ezra Klein

and should the US actually commit US

Chris Hayes

troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move? You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that,

Ezra Klein

that this is a,

Audience Member/Caller

this is of

Podcast Host/Announcer

course a very long standing

Audience Member/Caller

policy.

Ezra Klein

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 and not getting comfortable with things going wrong and also not getting the sort of like swiftness to sort of rescue them when they do. Right. You remember the Gavin Newsom thing a couple 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 you. I'm no better than you.

Chris Hayes

You know, I'm a 960 SAT guy.

Ezra Klein

It's like my SAT sucked and I can barely read.

Chris Hayes

I could barely read.

Ezra Klein

Yeah. Like it looked really bad. It was everywhere for a couple days.

Chris Hayes

But then you just go do something else.

Ezra Klein

He just keeps moving forward.

Chris Hayes

Partly though, I think all of these calculations about risk, reward, control, lack of control, how much you're going in is, is what your own personal position is with respect to attention. Right. Because she is so commanding of it. She has the luxury to take much more sort of conservative stances about what press she does. And I think that's a trade off. I agree with you that like, there's probably a degree to which more would be better.

Ezra Klein

Taylor Swift doesn't need to do a lot of interviews. Exactly.

Chris Hayes

That's exactly it. That she just doesn't have to go.

Abdul El-Sayed

Yeah.

Ezra Klein

Whereas Rohan chasing around Jubilee like, yeah, Ro Khan is everywhere because he is trying to build attentional strength. I want to move to Michigan. Let's start here. Do you want to just give a overview of the Michigan Senate Democratic primary?

Chris Hayes

I mean, you have a situation which you have a departing incumbent Democratic Senator Gary Peters, who's retiring. So you have an open seat. You have a, 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, like, normie Republican kind of central casting. Like, if you're trying to win a swing state. He is not, you know, he. He's not some Peter Thiel weirdo who's gonna do an ad with his gun silencer. This is designed to kill people. I'm Blake Masters. I'm running to the US Senate in Arizona. And then on the Democratic side, you've got Abdul Said, who is a really fascinating dude who was a public health official in Detroit. He's a. He's A Rhodes Scholar, MD PhD. MD PhD. Incredibly credential.

Ezra Klein

Has run statewide and lost for governor.

Chris Hayes

Exactly. And. But it's very, very charismatic. Extremely bright, too.

Ezra Klein

How to Crooked Media Podcast.

Chris Hayes

Had a crooked media podcast. I don't know if you've, you know, I've spoken to him at length. He's an incredibly impressive dude.

Ezra Klein

Just incredibly.

Chris Hayes

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, I would say, like a charismatic up and comer in national politics even when she was a relatively obscure state rep, starting

Ezra Klein

with this big speech she gave after being accused of being a groomer.

Chris Hayes

Yes. So I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want.

Ezra Klein

I hope you brought in a few dollars.

Chris Hayes

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.

Ezra Klein

But she also has good, like, good video content.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, she's very charismatic.

Ezra Klein

You know, like a year ago, if I were doing this, I'd be like Mallory McMorrow, like one of the big attentional, like, emergent attentional stars.

Chris Hayes

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 just sitting congresswoman, who is, I think, probably the establishment choice to the.

Ezra Klein

Yeah, it seems like was recruited by the establishment in part.

Chris Hayes

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'd be a good senator. Like, I think she's the least attentionally gifted of the three. And I think the polling indicates that right now Abdul El Said is probably in the lead. He's gotten a huge amount of benefit from sort of the Bernie faction of the party. Streamer Hasan Piker, who did. Came and did a rally with him, which was both controversial but got a ton of attention and In a first past to post again, first past the post primary split field. What do you have to get? You got to get 30%, 35% of the vote, 38% of the vote.

Ezra Klein

So I want to talk about this primary because first, in one way, Abel said is like the opposite candidate from Graham Platner.

Abdul El-Sayed

Right.

Ezra Klein

He, he is intentionally capable, but he is not a outside the institution. Right. Like he's a guy who, he taught at Columbia, the Rhodes scholar. Rhodes scholar.

Chris Hayes

He's like the ultimate brass ring of credentialing in the American meritocracy is worn on his hand.

Ezra Klein

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 Kelshi 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, the way at least I observed it happening. It's not that it was Piker's 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 the centered Israel and Gaza, which turned the like Israel and Gaza is like an intentional superconductor.

Chris Hayes

Yes, it is.

Ezra Klein

Right. It is like no other issue, with the exception maybe Donald Trump himself in American life and for an engaged Democratic primary electorate, Abdul Al Sayed is more on the right side of that issue.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And so I think you're seeing something that's going to be very important about attentions. Like there are certain issues at any moment. Totally. Like his background, the way I came to know him as a political figure, ismatic for all.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, right.

Ezra Klein

He emerges in politics, you know, Bernie Sanders guy and like, like his whole thing is Medicare for all and like he still believes in that. And like.

Chris Hayes

And from a healthcare, a public health perspective.

Ezra Klein

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. Right.

Chris Hayes

So and also the Haley Stevens component of this. Right. Because I mean we should, we should give the backstory here, which is that, you know, Haley Stevens primaried and 11 and 11 was, was this, you know, labor organizer and very kind of two state solution Israel critical Jewish lefty, synagogue president. Synagogue president who was, who had Like a ton of APAC money dumped on his head. Yeah, because he was insufficiently loyal to the, 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 kind of 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 as Israel, your criticism of the war on Gaza, your views on that put you across these incredibly salient divides that sort of reach up and down from the actual issue of Gaza.

Ezra Klein

And I wrote 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 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.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, right, right.

Ezra Klein

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 Said himself had a very, very good answer.

Chris Hayes

Disentangling this, what do you say to the Jewish community who you're going to want to vote for you, about your positions on Israel, on AIPAC funding, et cetera, and how they shouldn't feel alienated by a candidate like you.

Abdul El-Sayed

Well, Katie, 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 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 and the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this country, which are vast. And AIPAC and Israel, those are two different things. I, 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 apartheid and genocide when they could be used to provide things like glasses or healthcare 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 just 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.

Chris Hayes

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 re litigate it, but that was the thing.

Ezra Klein

I know a lot of older Jews who will say to me, I don't understand why Israel gets so much attention. Look at what China's doing to the Uyghurs. And one of the things I say is that they are making themselves a 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, you know, in addition to Netanyahu saying he wants now 70% of Gaza, they have like allowed and enabled and protected and caused like a constant stream of atrocities out of the West Bank. You can, it is, 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 its actual actions, I don't think you should be supporting its actions.

Chris Hayes

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 got the Israel Day Parade. It's happened every year. And in, in the context of New York, it has been a kind of, you know, cross ideological day of Jewish unity and solidarity. Now this year it's controversial for reasons the mayor's not going to attend. For the first time in a long time, other politicians will be there. What happens in that parade? Bezel Smallch, the most, one of the most far right ministers who's in the Israeli government, who is, you know, pushed for, along with Ben gvir, the law to execute people by hanging, who has been, you know, a proponent of the settlers and more than that has put

Ezra Klein

out a functional plan for the expulsion of Palestinians. What I think it is reasonable to call the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Chris Hayes

Yes. He shows up at the Israel parade with a bunch of like, also hardcore extremist right wingers and they do his intentional politics, his attentional 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 like very extremist right wing Israelis march through Jerusalem in an act of like, like very clear provocation.

Ezra Klein

Yes. Like chanting horrifying things. Death to arrow Parade is a.

Chris Hayes

But Smotrich says this because he's playing his own attentional 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?

Audience Member/Caller

Yeah.

Chris Hayes

You know, and you could say, well, he's an extremist. He doesn't represent. He's in the Israeli government, he's got

Ezra Klein

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 these sitting cabinet ministers in Israel are doing is irrelevant or they're controversial or it is what it is.

Chris Hayes

There is.

Ezra Klein

They're in power.

Chris Hayes

They're in power. There's also, 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, this isn't the Israeli government, but AIPAC and sort of groups around them and associated super PACs. 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. Like 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 know, you play in these races, you play in these races, but then you get to be criticized for it.

Audience Member/Caller

Foreign.

Podcast Host/Announcer

This podcast is supported by Better Help. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it. Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit more. Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer thrive. Visit betterhelp.com New York Times when maintaining

Ad/Promo Voice

your daily wellness rituals is important to you, the change in routine during the summer can feel daunting. Kachava's new travel packs help you stick to your daily ritual even when you're on the go. Just one packet of Cachava's all in One Nutrition Shake provides complete nutrition with 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, adaptogens and much more. So you'll be fueled and ready for wherever life or your summer adventures take you. No fillers, no nonsense, just the good stuff your body craves. Plus, it actually tastes delicious, but you can try it for yourself because the variety pack includes all six delicious fan favorites Chocolate, vanilla, chai, matcha, coconut, acai and strawberry. So instead of worrying about sticking to your daily ritual, simplify it with Kachava. Go to kachava.com and use code NEWS for 15 off. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A.com code NEWS

Graham Platner

all right, I

Ezra Klein

want to move to Texas and I

Chris Hayes

want to move Texas is so interesting right now.

Ezra Klein

James Talarico, because I think he

Ad/Promo Voice

he

Ezra Klein

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 attentional 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 attentionally 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 win Texas. So I'm curious what you've made of him.

Chris Hayes

Again, I would start with the thing that we've been saying about a number of these people, including Platner, and I think Abdul said, is that he's charismatic, again, in the ancient Greek sense. And I think, obviously, the sort of 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. Right. 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, you can't just raise money and run ads, Right. 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 a. I think, a populist, and I think he's very much framing himself as a sort of insurgent outside the status quo, but he's not. He's really not relying on any kind of us versus them framework. I mean, he does a little bit of billionaires, but.

Ezra Klein

But it's rhetorical flourishing.

Chris Hayes

It's. It's not the core in the way Platner. And Platner is like, that is Platner's thing. It's what becomes.

Ezra Klein

This guy is a former president of his College Democrats.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, exactly.

Ezra Klein

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 person who has been failed by American institutions. He is not a person who you feel harbors a great anger at the Democratic establishment. You know, he's a state representative, and I think that's an interesting dimension of him. But he also has a quality that Platner does in a different way, which is that while I'm not saying he was cast in the sense that somebody came out and found him the way they came out and found Platner, he does look like what he is in the same way that Platner 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, Right?

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And like, you know, platinum looks like a seaman.

Audience Member/Caller

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And Talarico, like you would cast him as a pastor to play the idealistic young pastor. Like rooting out corruption.

Chris Hayes

Yes.

Ezra Klein

In a complicated church.

Chris Hayes

Yes, exactly.

Ezra Klein

He just has the whole.

Chris Hayes

You could put him in a scene and there will be blood.

Ezra Klein

And he. Right, exactly. And he rises, you know, by running his social media strategy, which, you know, eventually gets him on Rogan. And. And I think that he also reflects this yearning, people, that I think is really powerful right now is underplayed, which is not just for populism or radicalism or even inspiration, but in the Trump era for decency.

Chris Hayes

Totally. And there's a yearning for public virtue, which I think is a sort of funny inversion of some of the politics of our, you know, our youth.

Ezra Klein

I'm starting to talk a lot about virtue on this show.

Chris Hayes

Yeah. And I'm thinking a lot about virtue to. 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 a moral instruction in a world in which like 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, that different coalitions play on. And I do think that, like the appeal for connection, brother and sisterhood, solidarity, unity, you know, 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 not what Donald Trump, Donald Trump is totally incapable of, of playing in that register. I think the Republican Party increasingly in his era is incapable of playing that register. And the last thing I'll say, and I think this, this applies to John Ossoff as well.

Ezra Klein

Where we're going next.

Audience Member/Caller

Oh, good.

Chris Hayes

In when you think about, like, what's the opposite of Trump? One typology of the opposite of Trump is a nice young man. Like, what's the opposite? Trump's like a nice young man.

Ezra Klein

Well, let me hold.

Chris Hayes

Rico's a nice young man.

Ezra Klein

Let me hold. Before we go to John Ossif and the different Obama registrars, the nice young man, the. 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, like low Tailorico, Tofu, Talarico, Talafrico, which now the Talarico campaign has Talafrico shirts. I think that one was a Paxton mistake. But the weakness they think they have sensed is that. That people want strength. And a nice young man who wants you to like him and speaks often of his own humility and has a vegan girlfriend is not strong enough for Texas.

Chris Hayes

I mean, that's a charitable version they're calling him. The F slur is what they're doing. You're giving a charitable version of what the actual.

Ezra Klein

Well, and actually, quite literally, you have Stephen Miller saying the first transgender candidate. Right. You know he's a queer.

Audience Member/Caller

Yes.

Ezra Klein

It's very schoolyard, all of it.

Chris Hayes

Yes. When we take a step back and

Ezra Klein

we're just like, cruelty versus kindness.

Audience Member/Caller

Yes, exactly.

Ezra Klein

They're really playing into the campaign Talarika wanted to set up. I once heard somebody around the Mamdani Cuomo campaign be like, they both got the exact antagonist they wanted.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, that's a great point.

Ezra Klein

Right. And it just turned out Mamdani was right about which antagonist he wanted and Cuomo wasn't.

Chris Hayes

In terms of that race and who's making the right tactical calls, we should just take a step back and say, you know, Texas is Texas for a reason, and if you run a moderately competent campaign with a moderately competent candidate, you will win by five points.

Ezra Klein

As a Republican.

Chris Hayes

As a Republican. It's just structurally there. So you really got to screw things

Ezra Klein

up, if not more than five points.

Chris Hayes

Yes. I mean, 10. 10 to five. Right. 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 two. What I would say is about Paxton is that he's kind of 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 super majority 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 were biblical reasons. There were a number of his ex staffers who came out with a. 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 he's. There's. 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 the kind of all the negatives of sort of high risk attentional strategies and none of the positives. It kind of is Ken Paxton.

Ezra Klein

Yes. But this is where I think there's like just something genuinely interesting about Talarico because he to me shows that there's actually a lot of pathways in to breaking out attentionally. It's generally interesting that Talarika was able to beat Jasmine Crockett, who is also like big MSNBC figure. Jasmine Crockett is a good way to

Chris Hayes

put it big on viral video and is not super guarded and talky pointsy. You know, that, that. And I think that's a good attribute. And it, you know, he beat her in that primary.

Ezra Klein

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 there 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 sort of anti institutional spaces.

Chris Hayes

They do. Yeah.

Ezra Klein

There's something about them where people. I always feel this. 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.

Chris Hayes

Yeah. And you gotta be that. I think that's such a good point that you have to be. You have to be some version of your actual self to figure it out and to do. And to do it right.

Ezra Klein

Rahm Emanuel is not, in my view, likely to be the Democrats 2028 nominee. But his somewhat unlikely presidential campaign is going to do better than I think people realize it's gonna do in being a sort of force in the primary.

Chris Hayes

Yeah. Because he's.

Ezra Klein

Because he is fundamentally himself.

Chris Hayes

Totally. Yes.

Ezra Klein

In all places.

Podcast Host/Announcer

Yes.

Ezra Klein

And so that allows him to just sort of attack and run plays and be compelling.

Chris Hayes

And also he's got the. To go back to the risk calculation. He's got nothing to lose. He can say yes to everything.

Ezra Klein

And he's a high risk personality.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, he's got a high risk personality.

Ezra Klein

He's 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 like a cross ideological 2028 dark horse? A person who I've been talking about for a while, but Hassan Piker is talking about. Matt Iglesia is talking. Right. Like. Like Michelle Goldberg just did a great piece on him. There's something interesting in what people are projecting onto Jon Ossoff.

Chris Hayes

I have been jokingly calling him in our Team Slack, the Lisan Al Gaib, which is just a dune reference to the Chalamet figure who is essentially the kind of chosen one. Right. The foretold prophet. This is a joke, just to be clear. And the reason that I use that

Ezra Klein

is Jewish Kennedy man.

Chris Hayes

There is something about the, the way that he is performing his candidacy, the social media videos they're 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.

Ezra Klein

He's not playing a volume game.

Chris Hayes

Not playing a volume game.

Ezra Klein

You don't see him on podcast interviews right now.

Chris Hayes

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. Well, we'll see what happens.

Ezra Klein

But if you back up a couple 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 have been Raphael Warnock.

Chris Hayes

100%. Yeah.

Ezra Klein

And instead OSSOF 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 Mom Donna, you see in a John Ossif, you see in a James Tall Rico is this is not just an age of algorithms.

Chris Hayes

It's visual, very visual.

Ezra Klein

And you'll see Warnock and he's talking and the Senate press conference setups, and he's just like in front of American flags. And Ossif, they figured out, you know, the Clip like immediately when you see it. And Ossif 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. Want this. Who is John Ossip? This building anticipation. Plus this figuring out of a visual

Chris Hayes

grammar that's distinct and wholly your own.

Ezra Klein

And looks like Obama.

Chris Hayes

Yes, it does look like Obama. It's also the hero shot.

Ezra Klein

It's always the hero shot, which was a constant. You remember there was an.

Chris Hayes

You gotta be skinny for that to work. I just want it for anyone else who's taking notes out there in production. You gotta be pretty thin for that hero shot.

Ezra Klein

There was a great. The hero shot being this sort of. Of 3/4 upwards angle.

Graham Platner

Yeah.

Ezra Klein

And otherwise you get a lot of chips.

Chris Hayes

Yeah. You get a lot of chin.

Ezra Klein

And there was this great. The end article on Obama. Something like Obama accidentally stares too far into future because he, he was very good at this.

Chris Hayes

And the Ossoff shot is always.

Ezra Klein

It's always like this. Like he doesn't seem like he's looking at a crowd.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, he's looking out past the crowd.

Graham Platner

No, you're right.

Chris Hayes

And I do think it's true. That kind of visual branding is so interesting. There's one other dimension of OSOF that I think is really worth mentioning in terms of 2028 and. Which is that he's Jewish.

Ezra Klein

Yes.

Chris Hayes

And.

Ezra Klein

And a genuine Israel critic.

Chris Hayes

This. 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. Like the coalition contains both elements. And someone's going to have to figure out how to thread that needle. And if I were. 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.

Ezra Klein

Yeah. And the point here is that Ossef has substance on this. So he early on signed onto a Bernie Sanders letter that I think only had 19.

Chris Hayes

Yes, very like With a small group.

Ezra Klein

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 a Haaretz piece, which is the liberal Israeli newspaper, saying, well, this position is going to make it much harder for Ossoff 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, you know, but if you go too far to the other side, you're going to have. Right. You're going to need somebody who can represent both sides of the divide at once. And Ossif, who is one, centering on a corruption story, who is two, centering on a. He moves a corruption critique into an argument for liberal pluralism. Yes, right. It's sort of a populist critique with a liberal pluralist answer. Right. 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.

Chris Hayes

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.

Ezra Klein

And

Chris Hayes

you can hear 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.

Ezra Klein

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. Right.

Audience Member/Caller

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 people. It's not because of woke college kids or trans students or because there are interracial couples in serial commercials. It's because the people's elected representatives don't represent the people. They represent the donors.

Ezra Klein

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.

Chris Hayes

Always, always people say, yeah, right.

Ezra Klein

And he does that.

Abdul El-Sayed

Right.

Ezra Klein

You know, 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 costs.

Chris Hayes

Yeah.

Ezra Klein

Yeah.

Chris Hayes

And I think that's also part of. Again, it does help to. It helps to be getting your reps before the Georgia electorate.

Ezra Klein

Yeah.

Chris Hayes

You know, 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 what you. The feedback you get from the room is. It matters a lot. It helps to be in a context where the room that you're working is a Georgia electron. 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, social.

Ezra Klein

It's why Barack Obama was as good as he was, because he was a black politician who had to work white rooms. And he's talked about that, how much he had to do 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 Newsom, you look at aoc, you look at Pritzker, Right. Like, they're all like, I am your brawler.

Audience Member/Caller

Right.

Ezra Klein

I will rip their throats out for you. And Ossoff, even though he's sort of 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've learned to suppress it, their fundamental feeling at all levels is a disbelief.

Chris Hayes

I can't believe this is happening.

Ezra Klein

I literally can't believe it's happening, that anybody could like this guy, that these things aren't sinking him. And he formed in races exactly where that. Where that is not a register that works. And you cannot. A lot of Democrats have to kind of abstractly come to the view that there are people in this world who like Donald Trump, but they don't know any of them. Yeah. And if they do, they maybe cut them out of their lives.

Chris Hayes

Right.

Ezra Klein

And that is not John osa's world.

Chris Hayes

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 are. 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.

Ezra Klein

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, I was pretty dismissive of how that was likely to go. Handsome white guy with a bunch of scandals from California was not The. 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 the fairly wide consensus right now that he is a Democratic front runner for 2028.

Chris Hayes

I think I have complicated feelings. I mean, I think that there's some part of me that just thinks governor of California is tough, a tough thing to do to, to win national, to be the president. Of course, New York real estate developers also pretty tough, too. So what do I know? Yes, I think that. I think the. The choice he's made attentionally is the mo. 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's chosen to host his own podcast.

Ezra Klein

You just had Ashley Sinclair on it.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, he did.

Ezra Klein

Ben Shapiro on not long ago. He's doing things you would not expect.

Chris Hayes

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, like, 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 the. Our Fighter version, like our brawler, our Trump, essentially, which I think is appealing to some people in the Democratic electorate, is sort of the mode that some Democratic politicians have gone and in some almost sort of parodic ways that Newsom has gone by doing the whole, like, Trump shtick online.

Ezra Klein

Okay, but let me complicate this in one way, because it's why I find Newsom really interesting, because he is doing more than that.

Chris Hayes

I agree. Yes.

Ezra Klein

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 other staff. 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.

Audience Member/Caller

Right.

Ezra Klein

He, you know, Rhodes scholar, but poor Arkansas boy, you know, New South Obama, I mean, the master of this 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.

Chris Hayes

Right, That's a good point.

Ezra Klein

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 gonna believe you. Right. But the weird thing Newsom is doing is containing 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 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 sort of. 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.

Chris Hayes

Yeah, I mean, I think that's. I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. It's a very Ezra Kleinist approach. I do wonder whether there's also a kind of incoherence in that, narratively, that makes it a little difficult to pull off.

Ezra Klein

I don't think he's been able to synthesize him yet. I'm not sure you can. It's why I find his campaign Very interesting. He'll often talk about the place. Right now, in his rhetoric that falls the most flat for me is he'll start talking about they need to be a repairer of the breach. A repairer of the breach. It's a biblical line. And you don't feel it. You don't feel how he's going to repair the breach.

Chris Hayes

Right.

Ezra Klein

I want to end here on the big attentional campaign that kind of ended in failure, which was Spencer Pratt. 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. You know, he's gonna, you know, maybe win 50% in the runoff, maybe, you know, maybe at least make the runoff. But then it didn't pan out to anything. He underperformed Donald Trump, I think, and

Chris Hayes

I think it's a great counterpoint to many of the theories I've been exposing. 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 hot house of insanity. That when you enter it, when you're not in it all the time you enter it, you're like, you guys are nuts. Yeah. And that's exactly the way many people felt about, like, what we might call kind of of peak woke Twitter. So part of it, I think, is a product of how much that was in X candidacy.

Ad/Promo Voice

Yeah.

Ezra Klein

There's also a question of what's real there.

Audience Member/Caller

Right.

Ezra Klein

What's being clip farmed?

Chris Hayes

Totally.

Ezra Klein

What has a lot of bots pushing it.

Chris Hayes

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.

Ezra Klein

I think one of the greatest advantages Democrats have going into 2028 is not

Chris Hayes

being there, is it?

Ezra Klein

Elon Musk has control of Twitter. I think people think of this as a problem. For Democrats, it's the opposite, because there's something 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 over Twitter, talking to each other, they convinced 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 like, like the liberals and Democrats and leftists are split and broken across different platforms. And that is genuinely an advantage.

Chris Hayes

I have come to this exact same conclusion.

Ezra Klein

Yeah, like Twitter, it's like it's a kind of a curse, right? It makes you feel very powerful and you pay for it. Let's end there.

Graham Platner

Always.

Ezra Klein

Our final question, what are three books you recommend to the audience?

Chris Hayes

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 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 Puso. 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, through someone else that I know. Courtney Maugham called Alan Opts 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.

Ezra Klein

Chris Hayes, thank you very much.

Chris Hayes

Much thank you.

Ezra Klein

This episode of the Israel Clancho is produced by Roland Hu, Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassian, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, emma Keldeck, Jack McCordick Marina King and Jan Kobel. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Penny and Audio is Annie Roy Strass.

Podcast Host/Announcer

Foreign.

Ezra Klein

What if you could use your home to build more home? It's possible with a SOFI Home Equity Loan. A home equity loan allows you to leverage your home's equity at a typically lower rate than a personal loan with low fixed monthly payments, and all without increasing your mortgage rate. Whether it's a new bathroom, updated kitchen deck or more, your home home could help grow itself. View your rate@sofi.com homeupgrade today. Mortgages originated by SoFi bank and a member FDIC, NMLS number 696891. Terms and conditions apply Equal housing lender.