Recorded August 26, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again today by Doug Sosnick, a longtime political veteran here in Washington, Bill Clinton’s political director in the White House for most of his term— all of his term? I can’t remember. Much of his term, right?
DOUG SOSNICK:
Yeah, I worked for six years for him.
BILL KRISTOL:
Six years is a long time in the White House, so that’s good that you… And you Kept your youthful disposition, and didn’t go crazy, so that’s also good. Doug’s done a ton of work over the years for a variety of clients in politics, also the NBA, so we’ll have a different conversation and talk basketball, and go over the Knicks’ fantastic season this year, their great victory. I grew up in New York, and my senior year in high school was 1970, and I so vividly remember watching TV as Willis Reed hobbled onto the court and hearing Marv Albert describe it in May of 1970, I think it was. So, it was exciting. I’m not a huge fan anymore, I’m not nearly as much as you, but it was a wonderful basketball year for me, so I just want to say that for the record. You’re probably not allowed to be a fan, because you do work for the whole league or are you… You didn’t grow up in New York.
DOUG SOSNICK:
Yeah, although I thought it was really exciting, and I thought it was great for the league and great for the city of New York. And one of the things—I didn’t want to get into politics, but I think that the most important thing—for the NBA right now is, I think we’ve had eight champions in the last eight years.
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow.
DOUG SOSNICK:
And the notion that at the beginning of the season, any team has a chance to win the championship is really, to me, the centerpiece of a thriving league.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s a good point. And it was politically amazing in New York. I was down a little bit, didn’t go to the games, but around that, in between the games, so to speak, in the city. And our son and daughter-in-law live just outside the city, and go into the city. And so the spirit was really, it’s very unusual, I’d say, for one team to do that. Especially to a city in New York’s size. It’s not like a small city that’s thrilled to be in the finals. This is New York, right?
DOUG SOSNICK:
Well, and to the broader point, which really I think gets into politics, there are very few touchstone points anymore of monoculture, that brings people together. When we were growing up, whether it was the evening news, or everybody watched the same three networks and shows. But we’ve really moved away from that now, and sports is one of the last outposts where people across all kinds of different backgrounds come together at the same time and share an event.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it really does. That has stuck, to a surprising degree, actually. Yeah, it’s impressive. It’s very true of the World Cup too, I think. Anyway, we probably shouldn’t just plan the whole hour around sports here, we need to get to politics. We’re going to talk about the midterm election some, since you’re such a pro at analyzing these things. And we had a conversation six months ago, I think it was the day before, maybe the war in Iran, President Trump began the war in Iran. That conversation stands up pretty well though, politically.
But we’ll talk about the midterms a bit. But I really want to talk about, let’s call it political economy a little more broadly, and the politics of this new economic situation that we’re in, which you’ve analyzed very well in your monthly newsletters. You have some terrific slides on this, and I’ll let you talk us literally through the slides, but talk us through your observations about wealth distribution and its effects, sort of populist economics and so forth, and do a little political economy. And then, maybe how both parties could and will react to that.
And also you have a good new Substack, which congratulations on that, and people should read it because you can get very good analysis for free there from DOUG SOSNICK: on Substack. So, 2026. What do you think? We’re almost to Labor Day, so this is the classic time when you’re supposed to say, “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen.”
DOUG SOSNICK:
Well, I think there are two strong cross currents that work against each other. The first is just where we are, and history says that Democrats should have an overwhelmingly successful election. First of all, since the turn of the century, 11 out of the last 13 elections, the country’s voted against who’s ever in power. The last five midterm elections, the party in power lost at least one branch of the Congress. If you look at the indicators of what’s been going on since the 2024 election, it’s overwhelmingly positive for Democrats. In 2015, Democrats ran the table. They ran about 13 points, job performance, our Democratic vote about 13 points higher than Harris’s total in 2024. All the special elections in 2015 and 2016, I think the Democrats won everything.
BILL KRISTOL:
2025, right? You’re taking it a victory…
DOUG SOSNICK:
So they won every single special election. Democrats won 21% of the House of Delegate seats around the country, or state legislator, of Republican seats. 2026 specials, Democrats have run the table. The turnout in the 2026 primaries, the Democrats have overwhelmingly turned out at much higher levels than even say in the last blue wave election of 2018. You look at the current polling, Democrats are increasing their generic vote advantage over Republicans now at around six or seven points. If you look at likely voters, it’s even higher. If you look at the enthusiasm level in polling, who’s most likely to vote, Democrats have an enormous advantage there. And interesting, by the way, that one of the lowest people to turn out are non-MAGA Republicans who are least enthusiastic about that
And lastly, just from history, since Trump rode down that escalator and took over the Republican Party in 2015 and got elected in 2016, the Republicans have never been able to perform well when he’s not on the ballot. And so if you look at Trump’s job approval right now, which is probably most polling, I think would put it probably around the mid-30s, or maybe charitably the high 30s, that is, if you go back to the last two biggest wave elections in midterms, in ’94 when I was in the White House with Clinton, and 2010 with Obama, Clinton had a 46 job approval on Election Day in 1994. Obama had a 45% job approval, which is maybe as much as 10 points higher than Trump’s right now.
And so, we as Democrats lost control of the House and the Senate in ’94, first time since the 1950s. We lost over 50 House seats, over eight Senate seats. In 2010, the Republicans picked up, I think, 63 House seats en route to taking back the House, and I think eight Senate seats. So if you look at by historical precedents, this should be the biggest wave election since World War II. However—and this is the “but” —politics has really changed in the last 20 years. It’s changed structurally in terms of how we vote, it’s changed in terms of this increased level of polarization. So it’s led to far fewer competitive seats, which makes it much more difficult for the Democrats to achieve the kind of victories this year that history would suggest based on all the data, which is overwhelmingly positive for Democrats.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s a very good, succinct, and I think very clear clarifying explanation. Having said all that, do you concur with the general view that Democrats very likely to win the House, despite giving away a few seats… Not giving away, but having a few seats taken away in the late redistricting? And do you concur…I’m maybe a little bit of an outlier in being fairly bullish on the Senate, and thinking some of those Midwest… the Iowas and Ohios might come through. And the farm economy stuff, the tariffs, maybe Kansas even. And Texas, possibly, obviously. Where are you on just the House and the Senate in a sort of practical way?
DOUG SOSNICK:
So the first thing that anyone should look at when they’re looking at trying to figure out what might happen in November, is turnout. Because midterm elections are all about who votes and who doesn’t vote. And for the Democrats to be able to take the Senate back, because of the structural problems of having so many seats that are not competitive, we as a party have to probably outperform 2024’s Harris total by about 10 points. And communities are connected, and there’s a zeitgeist of what’s going on, and right now I think we’re close to that water level of being able to do that.
So I would say the short answer is I think the Democrats, I think are very likely to take back the House. I think it’ll be outside of the kinds of margins that both parties have had in the last 10 years, of three- or four-seat control. I don’t think the Democrats can win the 50 or 60 seats that history would suggest we will do, but I think that the Democrats can take the House back with enough cushion that they don’t have to hold their breath on every vote on the floor of the House.
And I think in the case of the Senate, I think we really have moved to close to 50/50, which I think if you’d asked me a year ago or six months ago, I would have said it would be impossible. But I think that the short version, for the Democrats to take the Senate back, I think starts with one Democratic seat in Michigan that we hold, which is much more complicated now because of who we nominated. And in Maine, which is a Republican seat. And I think that’s sort of settled down a little bit, but I think it’s still going to be close, and Senator Collins is never to be underestimated.
So those are almost in a sense gaining issues, in the sense of Democrats can hold Michigan and take Maine, and I assume they’ll be able to take North Carolina and hold Georgia. And then it gets to these double-digit Trump victories in these right red states that are all very close right now. Texas, Iowa, Alaska, Ohio. And I think that the momentum is in those states, and Democrats have been outperforming there, but because of the changes in the structure of American politics, it’s much more challenging than you might have thought say 10 or 20 years ago, if we had podcasts back then and were doing it.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it’s incredibly more challenging. Those states were, of course, swing states 10 or 20 years ago. Literally, Obama won several of them, right? Certainly Iowa and Ohio. And so, it’s…
DOUG SOSNICK:
Right. And public policy has consequences. And I think that, to me, and obviously I’m speaking as a Democrat, I think that Trump’s tariff policies are incoherent. I mean, beyond the fact it’s bad policy, if you look at how he’s implementing it, it makes no sense. But there are three of these states we just discussed, Maine and Michigan and Iowa, that are particularly impacted by his tariff policies in general, and particularly with Canada. And policy matters. And I don’t know, from your time back working in the White House, but ultimately what I’ve learned in politics is if you’re an incumbent, how you govern and how people’s net lives are impacted, is single most important thing to be successful politically. And if people don’t feel like their lives have improved based on the people in power, that’s political poison.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s so important. And I’m glad you mentioned tariffs. We’ll move on quickly, after a couple more things just on 2026, because the war in Iran is obviously very big and unpopular. Never was popular from the beginning, and now it’s been a failure, frankly. So, probably, there’s some price to be paid for that. And then obviously inflation, and the general malaise for various reasons, and Trump’s personal… seeming to be out of touch with people’s concerns. And he’s only concerned about ballrooms and the arch and all that.
Having said all that, tariffs is one thing I think that maybe… It had settled down. I mean, everyone thought a year ago it would do damage, I think it has, both from the point of view of inflation and also to the economy. And there was a lot of back and forth in the summer of 2025, but it sort of settled down. And I guess if I were a political advisor in the Trump White House, which not a possible, hard to even imagine that, but if either of us was I imagine we would’ve said, “Just leave it alone. It’s kind of faded a bit from people’s consciousness.” People, they incorporate in a sense the higher price. You take the hit, but then it’s stable, if you know what I mean.
I do think the stuff he’s done with Canada, but also the stuff on beef, where he’s acknowledged that tariffs have driven up the price of beef and that’s why he’s now desperately trying to import beef, which is annoying the producers here, incidentally, who are quite important in some of these key states like Iowa and Kansas. And may not actually help consumers, it’s very unclear where he is getting all this beef from, and so forth. I mean, it just feels to me like, of all the things to do in the August before an off-year election, don’t put tariffs back on the front pages. Am I wrong about that?
DOUG SOSNICK:
No, you’re right. First of all, let’s go back to what happened with tariffs in the beginning. And I think that the, sort of, smart guy’s expectations was that tariffs were going to take a bigger bite out of the economy, and create much higher prices than it turned out. I think if you take, aggregate all of it and flatten it out, it was around a nine or 10% increase for people. And for big companies, they absorbed a fair amount of that without passing it along. Now smaller—this is part of what’s happened in our economy—smaller businesses didn’t have the financial wherewithal to survive that, and couldn’t pass it along as easily as big companies. So it was an uneven impact.
But I think in the last six months, the combination of his tariff policies and going into Iran, if you look at all the data on the economics, you look at the data of wrong track in the country, if you look at the data on people’s expectations economically for the future, you can see that things had settled down. While not great for Trump and the Republicans, there’s been a deterioration in the last six months on their positions. And the last thing I’ll point out, which is pretty damn significant, one is a general thing, which I think if you recall in the ’92 election, just to take you down memory lane for a moment. Clinton largely got elected based on the recession, but the fact was the recession ended in July, but it was too late for Bush.
And if you think about the midterms, within about two weeks, people are starting to vote. And not only is, I think the zeitgeist settled in now about how people feel, but by the end of the first week of October, 19 states, people will have started voting. So when you say, “We have the election coming up, what’s the mood going to be? How are people feeling?” Historically, we’re way past that settling in now, and I don’t think that’s going to change. And frankly, if anything, it could get worse before it gets better, but I don’t think it’s going to get better. But people are actually starting to cast ballots in a matter of a few weeks.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s changed from 20 or 30 years ago, obviously, and an important point to make. Final thing on just ’26, what would you advise me or anyone watching this to look for, to get a sense of where… Is there a moment when you’ll feel like, “If the generic is at X, the results is likely to be Y?” Is that a September 15th thing? Is that an October 1st thing? Is it going to be a lot of fluctuation in the last month, or is that not historically usually what happens?
DOUG SOSNICK:
Well, again, just the way I would look at it going forward is, you want to look at who is most likely to vote. And a lot of these polls will have adults, or registered voters, and that’s really not the pool of voters to look for. And unlike in presidential years, which the numbers tend to underestimate Republican strength because of turnout, in off years right now, if you look at the registered voter polls and just all people, it underestimates the strengths of the Democrats.
And the other thing I’ll point out from the 2022, the last midterms, was the turnout in the non-competitive states in America was quite different than in the purple states that decided control of the Senate, and where the governor’s races were. And there was a much different voting pattern, which benefited Democrats, who turned out in much higher numbers in 2022 in those purple competitive states. It was really a tale of two electorates. So what I’m looking at in the aggregate then, is two things. One is, always look at trend lines, not just a snapshot, and the trend lines have been very positive for Democrats in the last two or three months. Look at generic in general, but particularly of likely voters. Look at the enthusiasm in polling of how likely you are to vote. And then, in the states, in the demographics, what I’m looking at, as I mentioned earlier, for the control of the Senate, it’s whether Democrats can hold Michigan and what happens in Maine.
And then, you turn to these Trump by more than double-digit victories and see where those races are, but also what the actual number is for the Democrats. So a Democrat in Texas, for instance, can get a race to be close, like Beto O’Rourke did in ’18. But it’s one thing to get to 47% of the vote, but it’s another thing, how do you get to 50?
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
DOUG SOSNICK:
And so what I’m looking at in these red states where Trump is unpopular right now, as we said earlier, several of them have been hit disproportionately hard by their economic policies and by tariffs, I’ll be watching them.
And the last thing is the kinds of groups of voters I’m particularly interested in looking at are Hispanic in general. There are four or five Hispanic seats in South Texas that were drawn in redistricting this year based on the Trump vote in 2024, which has been eroded considerably. I think Speaker Johnson is touring four of those districts today. So I’m going to look at how those districts go as a precursor to maybe how the rest of the country will go where there are large Hispanic voters.
I think women voters in general, I think, have really abandoned Trump and the Republicans en masse. And so, again, looking at how likely they are to turn out. Younger voters have also abandoned Trump and the Republicans. I’m not really holding my breath on how they’re going to vote, but I am holding my breath as to whether they’re going to vote or not. And independents… Well, actually, I think independents, which I think was within two or three points in ’24, they’re overwhelmingly negative to Trump and Republicans, down to job approval at around 30 right now. And so, again, whether they’re going to turn out and vote. So that’s what I’m watching for, looking for.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s really helpful. And I guess the one thing I’ll add is, Ron Brownstein likes to stress this, but I think it’s sort of right, I mean, the Trump approval has correlated a lot with the vote in states in the Trump era. I mean, the parties have become so polarized and the Republican Party’s so wedded at the hip to Trump at this point. And the issue becomes, do you want a Congress or a Senate that will go along with Trump or that will check Trump? I mean, that’s the most simple way of putting the choice.
And I think if Trump is at below 40, then he’s probably below… Then he’s hovering around 50 in the states where he’s 10 points better than nationally, which is the states you’ve just mentioned, where he ran at about 11 points ahead of where he… The Iowas and the Ohios, he ran ahead 10, 12 points of where… Eight, nine, 10 points of where he was nationally in ’24. You don’t always get state-by-state polling of Trump’s approval, though we probably will in October. I do think it makes a lot of difference if Trump’s at 41 or at 37, don’t you think, nationally? I just find—
DOUG SOSNICK:
Oh, enormous difference.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah.
DOUG SOSNICK:
I mean, remember, Biden was at 41 or 42 in 2022 when the Democrats held their House seats losses to less than 10 and picked up actually a Senate seat. I would say that the thing to really watch underneath the point you just made is the demographics of the states.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah.
DOUG SOSNICK:
And when you look at Trump had a very good night last night in South Carolina and in Oklahoma, those states are overwhelmingly Republican. They are towards the bottom of the level of college-educated voters in those states, which correlates to the economy, which I think we’re going to get to. And so, to me, the demographics of the states tell you everything you need to know about Trump and how well he’s doing.
And Trump barely campaigned in the 2024 Republican primaries, and all that mattered in those primaries was two things. What percent of the voters in Republican primaries are college-educated, and whether they had an open or closed system, and that’s all you need to know. And so in every state that was closed, no independents and had low percentages of college-educated voters, Trump walked away in a landslide. And the states that had open primaries or a large degree of college graduates is the states that Haley did the best.
So as you’re looking at the 2024 states, I think you have to look at the demographics underneath it as the best predictor of turnout. And again, just two points I want to reinforce, one I’ve done already four times, which is all that matters in midterms are turnout. But the other is just to reinforce that in these states that are not overwhelmingly Republican, overwhelmingly lower levels of college degrees, never have Republicans been able to turn out voters when Trump is not on the ballot. Because Trump’s magic has been able to turn out people who traditionally don’t vote, and they overwhelmingly, not only are they occasional voters, but they tend to skew to be less-educated voters.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. No, that’s important. Okay. I think this is very helpful to people to think about ’26. We’ll get together after the election and talk about it. But let’s talk more broadly about where we are as a country, in terms of, let’s call it, the political economy. You’ve been really focused on… Neither of us is an economist, but I think we’re allowed to talk about economic facts, and a lot of these is just our data that economists have developed, or businesses, other analysts. But I’ve been struck, looking at your charts and your recent newsletters, how much you emphasize the income and wealth disparities, and the increasing disparity in labor and capital, if you want to put it that way, in terms of return to labor and wages as opposed to stock market investors. You both emphasize the facts about it, which you should say a word about, obviously, and also seem to suggest that that’s politically awfully important going forward. So tell me about that.
DOUG SOSNICK:
Yeah. I think to understand politics, that’s really the core, trying to look at the long-term trends, what’s happened in our country and why has it happened. And I think it’s really important to emphasize that people should view politics as a lagging indicator of how the mood of the country, not the leading indicator. So in other words, things have to happen in our country for a long period of time before it registers in the ballot box. I have framed for most of what I’ve been thinking and talking about in writing for the last 10 years under the banner of politics in the age of Trump, because we have been really, since he rode down that escalator, we have been living in the politics in the age of Trump. Now, I think that the 2028 presidential election is going to be the election about what does politics look like in America after the age of Trump, and that’s what the election is going to be about. But for the last 12 years, we’ve been living in the age of politics as the age of Trump. Now, one of the things that I always emphasize, which I think is unsettling to people, is that I don’t believe Donald Trump caused what’s going on in America. I think he’s a symptom of it. And I think that the political tectonic plates that have been forming formed long before Donald Trump ever rode down that escalator, and in a sense, he just got in front of that line that had been forming, which I’ll get back to in a moment, and accelerated a completion of the trends that had been happening.
And so what I believe has been happening, I’d go back to the middle 1960s, the Vietnam War, and I don’t think about the Vietnam War the way I guess people traditionally do. What I think about the Vietnam War was it was the first war in our country’s history where we were not all in this together. It was the first war where if you had money and power, you could game the system and not serve. And I believe the seed of the resentment and anger—and that transcends partisanship, whether it’s MAGA or whether it’s DSA and the rise of Trump—I think the seeds of this notion, that we have a system that favors the rich and powerful, was planted in the Vietnam War.
But underneath all of this was the beginning of a decline of the middle class, which began in the early 1970s. And if you look at data, overwhelmingly, you can see the decline began then. We have been going through the biggest economic transformation in our country since the end of the late 1800s and early 1900s when we moved from an agrarian society to an industrial society. And so, in the beginning of the 1970s, we began a transition from a industrial manufacturing top-down society to a global digital society, and so that began the hardening out of the middle class. Now, the people hit by that were disproportionately people who did not go to college and had a middle class lifestyle. And when I started politics in the early 1980s in Michigan, there were a lot of people that we were working with who were in the labor movement, who didn’t go to college, who worked on the lines, had a nice house in town, had a cottage in the north, had a boat, had middle class lives. So we began the hollowing out of the middle class in the early 1970s.
Now, while you and I, I would say at this point, tend to agree on more things than disagree, we probably didn’t always feel that way. So what I’m getting ready to say, you may not agree with all of it. I believe that in the 1970s, when we started moving towards making shareholder capitalism the coin of the realm in our society, it also accelerated the gap between the people like CEOs and the people who worked on the lines, like 11-to-1 ratio of salaries from a CEO to a worker in the 1970s, and that obviously has exploded now to 200-to-1 or whatever.
And then, Reagan came in the ’80s and started changing policy in America to reward the theory of shareholder capitalism, in which the worker became a burden and a cost that you wanted to get rid of. And then, you saw much more of the offshoring, harnessing technology, because it was more efficient, and CEO pay was tied to stock price. And then, in the ’90s, when I was in the White House, we accelerated the trade, which, again, is taking away jobs. You look at NAFTA, which I think, in a lot of ways, was a good thing. But on the other hand, we didn’t factor in the cost of people, the workers losing their jobs, we didn’t factor in the environment, and this created more of a gap. And then, of course, when China came in the WTO in early 2000s. And so if you just look at the battered middle class as we sit here today with all those trends, you started with the ’70s, the economic crisis of 2008 hit particularly the people who were hardest hit before that with this decline. The 2010s saw people with money much faster recovering from the 2008 economic crisis. Then you had COVID, which had a bigger gap, and again, people who had money all of a sudden, between their stocks and their values of their home, have created this enormous widening gap between the people with money and everyone else in the country.
And since the beginning of this decade, we’ve been living in an inflationary period that we have never lived in since the ’70s and the early 1980s. And so that’s the combination of factors that’s created essentially two Americas. And that while the aggregate number of America compared to anywhere else in the world, we are doing terrific and all the aggregate numbers are pretty good, and that’s what Biden used to say about why things are great, and what Trump is saying, the disproportionate distribution of it to a small handful of people has created this environment.
And the last thing I’ll say is—and you lived through it—while those things started 20, 25 years ago, they only first surfaced in 1992 in the presidential race, where Ross Perot got 19 million votes, almost 20% of the vote, and that was disproportionately people who had been left behind. And we saw in the transition, and Clinton was the last Democrat to do it, there were a whole host of states that were disproportionately hard hit by these economic trends, disproportionately high number of people who didn’t have college degrees who’ve been hard hit by these economic changes. And so places like West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri, Louisiana, all these places that have been historically Democratic, by the time Clinton left, they all became firmly Republican.
And so, in a sense then, that line began forming in ’92, as I mentioned about Trump. And I think the end of the Reagan political project was Romney’s defeat in 2012. But all those trends really hit a tipping point with Trump on the outside railing against the people in power, and as I said earlier, he consolidated this trend, which has created where we are today, which is two Americas, which is structural changes where all politics is national, it’s all based on education levels, and this hardened increased polarization underneath that, which is making it more difficult for us as Democrats to expand the map in a year that should be historic for us.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. In 2015, Trump came down the escalator and Bernie Sanders launched a campaign for the Democratic combination, and everyone thought, I mean, come on, an independent guy who’s to the left, he’s a socialist, he doesn’t even want to be caucused with the Democrats, or be called a Democrat, in Vermont. And I remember talking to people in ’15, and Hillary was going to be the nominee, everyone assumed, but there were other people who might challenge her, Martin O’Malley and various people. Sanders ends up getting, I think, 43% of the vote overall nationally in the Democratic primaries, and poses a serious challenge, obviously, to Hillary.
So I’ve always though the Sanders half of 2016 was kind of under… I mean, if you put together Trump and Sanders, if you came down from Mars and you were a historian, a political scientist, and you said Sanders is going to make a serious challenge to Hillary Clinton, the prohibitive favorite, Trump is going to come as a true outsider, a fake outsider in some ways, but a true outsider in the sense that not an elected official, not a loyal Republican, and is going to become the spokesman for that disaffected wing of the Republican Party, and they’re going to be the two stories, in a way, of 2016 in the primaries, one successful, one not quite successful. You would say, “Well, gee, what happened? There must have been a massive recession. There must have been just something…” That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re five years into a depression, right?
I mean, the country seemed to have recovered for six or seven years from 2008 at that point, but I think you’re… And I myself was therefore quite surprised and still afterwards a little bit like we weren’t having dust bowls in 2016, we weren’t having people… I don’t know. It wasn’t the middle of Huey Long time and so forth. But I think I underestimated just how much dissatisfaction there already was, disaffection there already was, grievance there already was that could be exploited by both the left and the right. I guess now, one has to say that that was a bit of a forecast of what was going to develop gradually or in spurts maybe over the next 10 years. Anyway, I mean, that does get us to where does this all go though?
DOUG SOSNICK:
Yeah. So let me just respond to that quickly. First of all, I’ve had several of the Trump guys who worked on the campaign in ’16 tell me that they think that if Sanders had been the nominee, they would’ve lost.
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow.
DOUG SOSNICK:
And if you look at 2015 and you look at the trends I mentioned earlier about the 30, 40-year decline in the middle class, who got hit the hardest by the 2008 economic crisis, the slow recovery for people who’ve been hit the hardest four or five years later, many of them wiped out, never recovered, again, while the aggregate numbers were pretty good, they don’t reflect underneath that how it’s distributed.
The other thing though I’ll say is, and I guess at some point you’ll probably want to talk about the DSA if you must, but if you look at a lot of Democratic activists, they will tell you that the establishment for three election cycles in a row failed them. The first was that a lot of them would say, and a book just came out by one of Sanders’ media guys, that the system was rigged in ’16 against Sanders. The only way Hillary won is because it was rigged. And a lot of people think that was the case for Biden in 2020. And I certainly think that there are a lot of Democrats who thought the system in ’24 or ’23 with Biden as president and not stepping aside, this contributes to this anger in the Democratic Party about the people who’ve been in power.
And I will also say though that, while there’s obviously an intellectual fault line between the Democrats and Republicans in America, the real fault line in our politics right now are the people who are for change versus people that are part of the status quo. And so when Mamdani got elected in New York and went to meet with Trump in the Oval Office, and that meeting actually went a lot better than people thought. They have a lot more in common in some ways than you would’ve though on the surface because they’re on the right side of change versus, well, in theory, change versus status quo. It’s one of Trump’s problems right now as president, it’s hard to be for change if you’re running the country.
But that’s really the animating force in American politics right now, is which side of that… I wrote an article over 12 years ago now called “Which Side of the Barricades Are You On?” I think it was in 2013. And the point of the article was on one side of the barricades was Romney and Hillary Clinton and the bankers, and on the other side was Rand Paul or Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders.
And so if you take Democrats right now that are positive on DSA, it’s 25, 30%, whatever. And if you take the MAGA piece of that, which is 30-whatever, I don’t know, you’re talking about half the country right now, what’s animating them is opposition to whoever’s in power. And it’s because people feel like the system is rigged, that they’ve been screwed. And there’s so many instances I can go through some of them which every single day they’re reminded of this. It’s bad enough for people if they feel like they’re not doing well, but when the overwhelming number believe they’re not doing well because the system is rigged against them, that is what’s driving our politics.
And that’s going to be really what to watch for in the 2028 election, which is I don’t see any way a candidate can be nominated and elected president if they’re perceived to be part of the status quo and not part of change. So you take Bernie Sanders, for instance, some ways like a Ronald Reagan, Reagan was governor for eight years and president for eight years. No one ever thought of Reagan as being part of the status quo. No one ever thought of him as about being part of the establishment. He was a change agent and candidate. But it’s the same with Bernie Sanders. So it’s really your policies and approach more than your zip code. But that’s going to be the fault line, I think, in terms of who wins the election in ’28, which is who’s going to be the candidate for change that has a set of policies in which people can believe in their hearts is going to rectify what they believe is an increasingly unfair system.
BILL KRISTOL:
I’m going to ask you to game that out a little bit in each party, but I do think it is striking what you… yeah, I mean, one thing that will happen, of course, I have this problem, I give talks as you do, and I sort of give my analysis of 2026, which is very much like the one you’ve given here and I think will be correct, fairly normal in a way, normal off year, all the historical precedents, if the president’s unpopular, if you control both houses of Congress, it’s a referendum on you. People usually are unhappy about various things that have happened, especially if the economy’s not doing well and there’s inflation and other things. And so people want to check the president rather than give him a go along Congress. And it becomes really just a, do you want to check him or do you want them to sign off on everything the president wants?
And so that’s kind of more conventional historical analysis. I think it’s probably correct for ’26. But I think what you’re saying is that would be an extremely misleading way to think about ’28. And that ’28 is a whole different dynamic, and maybe really an end of an era in the sense that, I was struck as you were talking about 2016, 2020, 2024, another amazing fact about that is Trump, of course, was the nominee three times. He was, I don’t know what, he was 69, then 73, then 77. I probably have those years off by one or something, but basically that. Hillary was close to Trump’s age, late 60s. Obviously in 2020, Biden is older than Trump. And in ’24, Harris is younger, but Biden stayed in so long that it was kind of honestly more Biden than Harris probably in people’s minds, and she was vice president to Biden.
We had three elections in a row at a time of huge technological change and turmoil where people who literally were senior citizens were running against each other, except for Harris. So that’s going to change. So that’s part of it, isn’t it? I mean, that is another wild card of ’27, ’28. Are you of the school that more likely to have someone who’s younger, and better to be young, better to be a change agent.
And if you agree with that, I’d be curious if you want to elaborate on that, but also then just take it down to either party. How does it play out? I mean, because it doesn’t seem to necessarily to be ideological. The Democratic Socialist, DSA you’ve mentioned have sort of wrapped that around themselves pretty effectively, but you can imagine a young, more moderate Democrat being, I think, a change agent. And also on the Republican side, maybe with Trump, it’s such an incoherent mix of policies at this point. But anyway, I’ve gone—
DOUG SOSNICK:
Well, given the age of Trump and Biden, it’s not going to take much for the next president to be younger. And by the way, Clinton hasn’t been in office now for over a quarter of a century, and he’s the same age as those guys. And you’re absolutely right, and I didn’t highlight enough the desire for generational change to be one of the drivers going on. You’re absolutely right about that.
And I always said about Mamdani, for instance, I think there are three reasons he won for mayor, and the most important one was he was for breaking things and for change. The second was a generational, desire for generational change. And I think the third were his policies on socialism.
In terms of ’28, I have a pretty simplistic view, which is that I don’t think the country wants to vote for a Republican for president. And I think that the election is going to boil down to who we nominate for Democrats. And I think that, while our popularity has marginally improved in the last year, and we’ve now gotten Republicans down to our level of unpopularity, that if we don’t nominate someone that the majority of people in America are comfortable with, they’re not going to vote for a Democrat. They’ll vote for a Republican, but I don’t think they’re going to want to.
And I think it’s really going to boil down to who the Democrats nominate. And I don’t have any idea who it’s going to be, except I think it’s going to have to be someone outside the system. They’re on the right side of change, be a generational change, and they’re going to address what’s happened in our country and our economy with this enormous accumulation of wealth. People over 70 have over a third of the wealth in America. Over half the money that is spent by consumers now is in the top 10%.
When you have accumulation of wealth by one group of people, and you look at the younger generation where no one thinks they’re going to have it better than the next generation, the younger generation can’t afford houses, and if you can’t make money, you can’t accumulate wealth. So I think there’s actually broad agreement politically that that’s going to have to be the focus of the next candidate.
I think there’s certainly disagreement on how you get there, whether or not you tax billionaires or whether… I do think there’s actually though… And I think by the way, in ’27 and ’28, let’s assume Democrats take one wing of the Congress in Trump’s final two years. I think one thing is not going to happen and one thing that is going to happen in that period policy-wise. What’s not going to happen is we’re going to have a lot of policy changes and we’re going to have a lot of new laws. It’s just not going to happen.
But I think what is going to happen is what is done in this country at the beginning of 2029 when we have a new president, a lot of that is going to be based on the political and policy debates that we have in ’27 and ’28. And I actually think there are a lot of things in Congress that’s going to transcend partisanship, things like taxing corporations more. I think that these populist wings will come together and support policies that will pass by a majority in the Congress but won’t become law because of vetoes. But that plus whatever the candidates run on, and one of them’s going to win, I think that policy debate in ’27 and ’28 is going to be where the actual policy direction of our country is in ’29.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s so interesting. And I spoke to a business group about a month ago in the Q&A that got pretty much into their particular set of interests in their sphere of business. As we talked about it, it occurred to me that I think you’re probably right. I mean, the odds are that you’re going to be right in most areas on this, that there won’t be much legislation that actually is passed and signed just because it’s too hard to get stuff passed these days in the Senate, and then Trump’s not going to want to sign a lot of it and everything’s very partisan.
But I also said to this business school, I don’t know if I’m right, they were talking about their issues, I asked them, “Well, I don’t know. Who’s the champion of your issues, the things you care about, who are your obstacles, the committees?” As they talked, it also struck me that, you know what, you can have some very weird combinations passing stuff on housing or something like that, making housing more affordable.
And I don’t know, are we so confident that Trump doesn’t sign some of that stuff? He’s not like Mr. Ideological Purity here, free market guy. So I mean, I actually think if I were a lobbyist in Washington, I’d be a little attentive to what’s going… I wouldn’t be so confident that I can relax for the next two years. But I also take your point very much that fundamentally it’s laying the groundwork for the ’28 campaign and for the next administration.
DOUG SOSNICK:
Well, I’ll lay out in a minute why those people and pretty much anyone who’s in the intersection of business and politics should not relax. But let me just as a general matter say, and you can never have any idea what Trump’s going to do. I mean, he didn’t sign this housing bill this year that he supported. So who knows what he’s going to do?
But I will say over time is, if you ever look at close votes in Congress, what happens is the extremes, whether they’re the left or the right, vote one way and the people in the middle vote the other way. You’ll see that on any close vote. Now, the people on the extremes, they get to their position for opposite ways, but they end up in the same place. You can look at any close vote and that’s what happens.
Let me just say for anyone who’s wondering what ’27 and ’28 are going to look like compared to ’25 and ’26, I’m telling you it’s going to be much more volatile in the next two years than it is now. And it’s going to be, I think, much more dangerous if you’re in the intersection, as I say, of money and governing for at least five reasons.
The first is, I think it’s very unclear, and I’m not going to try to load the deck here with my opinion, the first is I think we should not make any assumptions about the election we have in November and what happens the day after, and either party or both parties accept the results and what happens then. I’ll just leave that as don’t take that as a given.
The second thing is, assuming Democrats take the House… I mean, by the way, the Republicans have done legislatively with Trump one thing since he took office, which is the Big Beautiful Bill, which by the way, they never talk about. So they haven’t done anything, accomplished anything legislatively. Well, after the election, there are a number of things they have to do because of deadlines, like funding the government, which is the continuing resolution is December 4th in the House and the 11th in the Senate. They got to somehow get through a farm bill. They got to figure out how they’re going to pay for the Iran war. So there are a whole host of things legislatively that’s going to happen in the lame duck that’s going to affect a lot of people.
The third is obviously divided government, if we have it next year, is a completely different situation than what we’ve had in the first two years of Trump. The fourth is we’re going to have the first open seat election since 2016. And that’s going to incentivize both wings of the party, the left and the Democrats and the right and the Republicans, to be much more dominant.
And back to what you mentioned about 2016 and 2020 for that matter, the populists and Bernie, they didn’t win the primaries, but they won the debate in the elections. If you look at candidate Clinton in 2016 on her policy positions compared to Senator Clinton in the beginning of the century or candidate Biden in ’20 compared to 35 years of Senator Biden, they’re unrecognizable. And the reason that they shifted was because of the politics and the pressure, in this case from the left. And so you’re going to, I think, see much more… That is the animating force in American politics right now, which is populism. And I think it’s going to have even greater importance in driving the policy debate and the positions that people take, which all reinforces is populism and change.
The last thing is there are whole sets of issues that are not in the middle of this, but are collaterally going to change the positions of parties. And there’s nothing that’s a better example of that than Israel, which has never ever had a decisive impact in the outcome of an election before, ever, including ’24 where you could argue maybe Biden lost Michigan because of Israel. I’m not sure that’s the case, but even it was, he still would’ve lost the election.
These forces that I’ve been describing, they’re going to be an animating force in the Democratic primary. I don’t see how a Democrat can be nominated Democratic nominee for president with the traditional position that Democrats have taken on Israel. And I think also, you’re seeing it now in the splintering of MAGA, it’s the case of the Republicans.
So there are a whole host of issues, I’ll use Israel as just an example, that in this new environment, this could be unrecognizable from the environment we’re in today. We’re 60 days away from a completely different political environment. And I think people are underestimating how different it’s going to be and how volatile it’s going to be without really any moorings for either party.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s so interesting, and so well said and so important, I think, for people to think hard about. We’re going to have a fairly conventional debate. Some things have broken through. Israel, obviously, in some of these primaries, AI and data centers perking up as an issue. And that one, I think, don’t you think, I mean, I’m curious what you think about that, just the speed with which that emerged, and now the degree to which there’s panic. The Democrats, it’s more of a natural issue for some of them obviously, but now the Republican, Governor Abbott in Texas is suddenly, “Oh no, we can’t build all these data centers.” And I guess Governor Shapiro, who was welcoming them a year ago, and now it’s like, “Oh, we need to have some…” I think Warren had that bill, Sanders maybe was with her, to pause data centers. It seemed like a kooky, lefty anti-progress idea, and now it’s kind of half mainstream, right? Is that a precursor of what we’re about to see more broadly?
DOUG SOSNICK:
Right. Well, so let’s talk in general for a minute. In politics, if there’s ever a negative attack against a politician that reinforces a preexisting negative about that politician, it has much more bite to it than just some random attack. And so I think what’s happened in the case of data centers and AI, which has in a sense been conflated, is that is coming together in one place, all the forces that have driven the anger in America. Where people with money and power are just doing what they want to do, they’re freeloading and other people are paying. The fear of AI and loss of jobs. So the reason it’s had such bite is because in a sense it brings together all the forces that have created this anger. And the most interesting thing I’ve seen is this is like a freight train, the politics, how it’s changed.
The Washington Post put out something, I think about five days ago, which tracked support of data centers by political party. And I’ll put out a deck in about 10 days and I’ll have this slide in there. But it shows the cratering of, first of all, Democrats coming out first against these data centers. But secondly, the cratering amongst Republicans in the last three or four months, so that now it’s almost indistinguishable between Democrats and Republicans whether you support these data centers. And going back to what I said earlier about the article I wrote 12 years ago about which side of the barricades are you on, this is a perfect example of the people with money and power with AI, because all the money that’s being made, it’s all through AI. It’s people also getting screwed. And the data centers are getting built, and people feel like they didn’t have a say in it, they’re in their communities, all the noise, all the effects on water and the air, and they’re paying for it.
It’s the perfect metaphor of why people feel so angry in America.
BILL KRISTOL:
I think six, or nine or 12 months ago, friends of ours would’ve said —and did say to me and probably to you—”Well, yeah, there’s some unhappiness with these data centers. They’re unsightly and there are some real issues of electric use and so forth.” But AI is going to spend a fortune, and the establishment always usually wins these fights at the end of the day. They certainly have even in the Trump era, which is so populist, but at the end of the day, the Big Beautiful Bill was not a populist bill, and the Democrats for all the talk didn’t run wildly populist campaigns, or governed even in ’20 or ’24. And the establishment will prevail and all the money… I was talking with some Democrat about this. She was working for someone who is on the anti-data center side of things. It was like, “Well, we’re going to just get swamped with money.”
And I’m just curious, how does that balance out? Because there’s some truth to that, right? There have been massive expenditures on the other side of this, which is why incidentally they did so well here where I live in Northern Virginia for a few years, because there was huge rewards politically for being… And to be fair, people also though it was a good thing for economic development and stuff, but for being on the side of the big AI giants. So I’m just curious how you think that plays out.
DOUG SOSNICK:
Well, first of all, Northern Virginia’s ground zero of data centers in America right now. The overwhelming majority of them are in that area and that’s changing. So it’s true, you mentioned it in the [inaudible], if you take any sporting event, there are usually one or two decisive moments to determine the outcome of the game. Sometimes when you’re watching it in real-time, you’ll say, “That’s the tipping point.” And sometimes you have to go at the end of the game and look back and say, “Okay, these are the two most important moment, whatever.” It’s the same in political campaigns. There’s always a moment or two that are decisive in determining the outcome. Now, often it’s whether someone attacks the other guy, and whether the other guy responds to the attack or not. Often those are the inflection points.
I believe that while this was always built, this election cycle was always built to be good for the Democrats, I think that the inflection point, if we look back on it, is going to be going into Iran, which was six months ago already, which will be eight months ago on Election Day. But if you look at all the polling on Trump, on the Republicans, mood of the country, consumer con— whatever it is, you’ll see that it changed after we went into Iran and people started feeling the impact of it. And so the data centers and other kinds of collateral issues around that have more of an impact on voters’ opinions if they’re feeling more and more negative about their own life.
And so I believe that while this was never going to be a good cycle for Republicans, and it would always have to be an exceptional cycle for Democrats to take the Senate back, I think the inflection point of, at least the arc of this cycle was February 28th when we went into Iran. And just not to belabor the point, and putting aside [inaudible], not to pick a scab about going into Iraq, at least in the case of Iraq, faulty as it may have been, there was a rationale that Bush presented a why we’re going, explained it to the American public, worked with our allies to go in. And so whether you agreed or disagreed, and whether or not the facts they used were accurate or wrong, which they turned out to be, of course, that’s not what happened here. Trump had made no rationale of why we’re going. He not only didn’t work with our allies, but in fact alienated them along the way. And so the public didn’t understand why we’re going. They never were sold on it.
And I believe you’re going to see, I don’t know how much of it’s going to happen between now and the election, but there’s been a suppression of information of what’s actually happened, that is slowly creeping out, whether or not it was the ship that was the longest deployment in history, and Trump said it should have been longer. And leaking about people jumping off the boats. The only reason that that boat’s going to port now is the political pressure that came out. The fact that we had all of our installations that we were using in the area to redeploy our guys, and we’re staging for supplies are all wiped out. No one knows about it. The number of people who’ve been killed and certainly injured that we don’t know about, that’s going to keep dribbling out, because you can’t suppress that forever. And that’s going to fuel the anger that people have about the war of choice. But ultimately that’s a bigger issue if they feel like this war that they didn’t believe in or understand has hurt them economically in their life.
And overwhelmingly people do. All the polling overwhelmingly says that. You have almost 70% of the people in America now that think going in there was a mistake. And there’s an overwhelming belief in America that we’re going to pay a long-term price for that. We already are, but we’re going to pay a much longer term price for this. And this is really, to me, why if you’re a Republican and you had some hope and it doesn’t go well, I think you’ll look back to February 28th as that moment that was a decisive period.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it’s interesting. Iran, obviously the casualties are nothing like Iraq and so forth, but there has been an immediate economic effect on gas prices. You can’t really quarrel with that, Strait of Hormuz got closed and here we are. And so that’s a real thing. You didn’t really have a comparable thing to that in Iraq. The economy had been kind of weak before, actually pretty decent in ’03, ’04. There wasn’t an immediate… It cost money obviously, and much more importantly it cost lives and all that. So I think there’s a real-time effect of Iran. And secondly—and people do forget this, it’s a talking point that people dismiss, but it’s an important point—there was a bipartisan vote debate, and then huge debate and then a bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress to go into Iraq, which made it a little harder to make it a huge political issue in 2004, especially because John Kerry and John Edwards had voted for it.
And of course, in fact, you could even argue, couldn’t you, that one of the key moments in the ’04 campaign is when the Bush people quite cleverly picked on Kerry on this, that he’d voted for it before he voted against it, and he was trying to maneuver. ’06 was the price, was the campaign where the party was just, it’s over, it needs to be over. They wouldn’t support the surge. They wanted to get out and they did very well. In ’08, they nominated a candidate, incidentally, who it’s almost inconceivable that Barack Obama could have been nominated, I think against Hillary Clinton, if Hillary Clinton hadn’t voted for the war and Barack Obama had been against it.
So I think just really emphasizing your point, but it’s happening in much more quickly now, partly because everything happens more quickly, but partly because it was such a unilateral decision by Trump, and the effects are so immediate that it doesn’t have that slightly longer fuse, I guess you would say, that Iraq had.
DOUG SOSNICK:
You’re totally right. And by the way, who knows, but I suspect if Hillary had voted differently on the Iraq war, that she would’ve been the nominee. Because the Obama narrative, his vote, it’s not just his vote on the war, but his vote on the war reinforced his broader narrative of why he was running for president. But I think there’s something else that people underestimate. I don’t know what the demographics are on your listeners, but I can talk about the demographics of Americans. The majority of people in America have never lived through an inflationary period of time. The majority of people in America did not live through the Arab oil embargo. They did not live through in the ’70s. They did not live through gas lines. They did not live through the highest levels of inflation that we’ve had in decades that we’ve been living in. As I said earlier, we’ve been in an inflationary period in America now since 2020.
We’ve never, for most Americans, have ever seen that before. And as a friend of mine told me a long time ago, his daughter was in high school and he said to me, “She has no idea what a gallon of milk costs, and she has no idea what a loaf of bread costs, but she can tell you exactly how much gas costs in every station between our house and our school.” And I think that if you’re old enough to have lived through that prior period, it really is almost like a rash that forms immediately when you think about it, about how it so psychologically impacts. And remember, inflation, the cost of gasoline or a loaf of bread is the same for a person making $20,000 a year or $20 million a year.
And so these trends in America of two Americas, inflation is one of the most punishing aspects in our society of making the gap between the people with money and the people without money even wider. And it happens five times a day, you’re reminded about it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Oh, that’s so interesting and so much to think about.
DOUG SOSNICK:
And the reason why I’m saying, in the last couple of months now, one of the most… I have a slide on this. Biden would talk about incomes are up 5%. Well, when inflation was up 9%, that’s not such a great thing. And so for the last couple of months, inflation has been higher than income growth, which means that, yeah, you might be making more money, but you’re actually going backwards, because stuff costs more than the more money you’re making. And you’ve got around 60% of the people right now that are largely living paycheck to paycheck.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. No, there’s so much interesting things to think about here. And I think one big takeaway for me though is we need to have a conversation maybe after the lame duck, but just as things get going in January, because I do think we’ll have some sense then maybe of how the post-2026, I guess let’s call it in your terms, the post-era of Trump era is beginning, even though Trump of course will be president for two more years, and he may be doing things that we’ll try to keep in the presidency after that. I mean, shouldn’t underestimate the importance of what he could do in ’27 and ’28 in all kinds of ways. But politically, I think what I’m taking from this conversation is what a rupture we’re going to have in a sense the day after election day this year.
DOUG SOSNICK:
And you’re right, Bill. And there’s so many tributaries of friction points coming up to track. So for instance, if let’s say the Democrats take the House back, well, you’re going to have probably 12 members of the Squad. So if Democrats take the House back, how’s Hakeem going to manage them? Let’s say the Republicans hold the Senate by a seat or two, but with four or five Murkowskis of the world, are they going to start breaking away from Trump on things or not? You’ve got a Democratic nomination fight that’s going to start. You’re going to have the DSA wings and the latter. On the Republican side, you might have a three tributary. You might have a MAGA candidate, a non-MAGA candidate, and an America First candidate easily, probably will.
So you’re going to have all these breakups of the baling wire that the last two years of Trump and the White House and controlling the Republican Party in Washington, and the Democrats being in opposition and not having a presidential election, all that baling wire that’s really very flimsily holding this pile of nitrogen together, it’s all going to be unwrapped in real-time starting in January.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s really a good insight and a good metaphor too, I think. So okay, we’ll have this conversation again in January. Meanwhile, I really appreciate you taking the time today, Doug. It’s been very stimulating, both the short-term stuff, obviously very important and interesting, but I really think this is a longer term question of where we go in ’27, ’28 and the possibility that we’re really in a new moment or new era, which I take it you think then continues for quite a while, right? The ’27, ’28, everything doesn’t get resolved on January of 2029 or whatever, right?
DOUG SOSNICK:
I think that ’27 and ’28 will be a transition period, and the new era in American politics will be in January of 2029.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. A lot to follow there, a lot of things to hope for, a lot of things to worry about obviously. So Doug, thanks so much for joining me again today. Really, really appreciate it.
DOUG SOSNICK:
Thank you for having me.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
