Filmed February 26, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, welcome back to Conversations. I’m Bill Kristol. Very pleased to be joined, I think for the fifth time by my friend Doug Sosnik, veteran Democratic campaign strategists and political analysts, and did a great job for Bill Clinton there in the ’90s in the White House, but subsequently has become really, I think, well deserved reputation as being a shrewd and careful analysts, but also analysts of American politics, but also a little more imaginative and willing to be contrarian than some of your peers, who I will not shock anyone by saying, tend to have a little bit of a group-following mentality. What’s the right way to say that? Do you know what I mean? But you’re willing to cut against it some. So that’s, anyway, very much enjoy our conversations, and thank you for joining me again, Doug.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Thank you, Bill. By the way, it’s always good to be graded on the curve.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, we both benefited from that over the years. I think to the degree anyone’s given us high grades, which is another question. Yes, it is. We should thank those guys for being around. Okay. It’s February 26, 2026. It’s two days after the State of the Union. Donald Trump at about 40 percent-ish approval. The world, the first term, first year of the second term has been what it is. Just let’s go through, I want to go talk about 2026 and then save some time to go beyond that, what the world might look like in ’27 and ’28. But we do need to discuss the state of play in the Trump administration. What do you expect this November? What things could happen that would change what you expect, and so forth? Is it baked in? Let’s talk about the next nine months first and then we can talk about the next three years.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
So, what do you think? 2026, what’s going to happen?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think first of all, I think that whatever happens in 2026, I think no one should take any sort of interpretation of that as a precursor to what’s going to happen in 2028. They’re completely separate. Elections off years are usually a referendum, ’28 is going to be an election about choice. So, in ’26, by historical standards, all the expectations based on traditional metrics is that Democrats should have a very successful election year. First it’s off years are always bad for the incumbent party. And secondly, Trump has the lowest job approval rating of any president, I think in my lifetime at this point. And all the other indices in terms of right direction, wrong track, state of the economy, enthusiasm about voting, all those metrics suggest a blue wave election.
However, there are structural changes that have occurred in American politics culminating in Trump’s victory in 2016 in his first term that makes it much more difficult for Democrats to fully realize, which should be, as I say, like a blue tsunami based on the historical standards. Trump has a job approval right now of around six points lower than Bill Clinton when I was in the White House. And we lost over 50 house seats and I think six or eight Senate seats. In 2012, Obama had a 45% job approval in 2010, and Democrats lost, I think 63 House seats and eight Senate, eight governors roughly.
So, it’s going to be extremely difficult, even with Trump’s lower job approval, for Democrats to realize those kinds of gains. It’s going to be much more difficult, if not unlikely, because of the structural realignment in American politics based on education, in which there are just so many fewer competitive seats out here for Democrats to win in one of these kinds of wave elections. There are indications based on voting in 2025 and 2026, that Democrats are significantly outperforming Harris’ performance in 2024, and it can expand the map for Democrats, but we’re still operating in a world with a lower ceiling of opportunity.
BILL KRISTOL:
It is striking. The polarization just means that, yeah, that these red states are redder than they used to be. The blue states are bluer than they used to be. The mixed states don’t exist anymore. It’s so different from when we got involved in this stuff. And so, I think you’re right to caution people against the tsunami and the blue wave. I think we almost … I think some of our peers have taken that too far though that just because these states weren’t in play the last three times, they couldn’t get into play. And we haven’t really seen a real wave election, I don’t think, correct me if I’m wrong, since 2010. I mean, 2014 Obama didn’t do… They lost the Senate having lost the House, but it wasn’t a massive wipeout. 2018, good for Democrats. They didn’t win the Senate however, and in fact the red states, they flipped democratic seats to Republican in the States that Trump was strong in in some cases.
I feel like the younger generation… Getting a wave, I don’t know, the wave could overcome the structural barriers or not. That’s I guess where I go back and forth. I’m slightly on the side of a real wave could overcome what looked like real barriers and the Kansases and Iowas of the world where Trump’s approval is not great. It turns out, I saw a poll of Kansas, he said 48, 46 and the foreign economy’s suffering and some of these states come into play. But I don’t know, the House, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I take it you think the house very likely to go Democratic and the Senate difficult, very difficult, less difficult than people think?
DOUG SOSNIK:
So, let’s go back. I mean, one easy way to do this is to look at all the traditional numbers and metrics of how you identify what’s going to happen, and then measure it on election day in November. And I think it’ll be very difficult, if you look at Trump’s job approval on election day, I think it’s going to be very difficult to extrapolate that out in terms of the kinds of Democratic gains you would expect. But I think the 2018 is a good election to kind of explain the changes in politics. So, Democrats won 41 house seats in 2018, and by, I think any definition, that is a blue wave. Now, I don’t know if you want to do blue wave and then above that’s blue tsunami,
But 41 House seats is an outsize, the average is around 26 house seats. So that is a blue wave. And as you accurately point out, nevertheless, Republicans picked up, I think it was three Senate seats in 2018. Now, the reason why is this realignment. Everything about winning seats in the Senate is based on what seats are on the ballot. And the reason that even with a blue tsunami or blue wave in the House, Republicans picked up three Senate seats was due to the fact that the states that were up were democratic incumbents in bright red states. And that’s the new politics.
Let me just give you one stat. So, in the 2024 election, over 80% of the counties voted by 20 points or more for the presidential candidate. And it just really shows you how polarized we are. And it’s largely the best predictors. It’s really a combination of three things.
The best predictor is the level of education in a community. The second, which is tied to education is income. And then the third is population density. Because basically to live in a city or close to a city, you got to have a lot of money. And the further out you go, the more rural you are, the more Republican it is. And to take rural areas, on the other extreme, it’s overwhelmingly Republican. Overwhelmingly people don’t have a college degree. Overwhelmingly people are most challenged financially. So that is what we’re up against as a Democrats to fully take advantage. And so in the Senate, for us to take back the Senate, I mean, you take the abstract in the Senate, 35 seats are up, 22 of them are held by Republicans, historically unpopular president. You would be thinking of Clinton, Obama midterm numbers. And the fact is, first of all, there are currently only seven Senate seats that are considered competitive out of all of those, and three of them are held by Democrats.
And for Democrats to take back the Senate, we’re going to have to win in states that Trump has won not only the last three elections, but in states where he’s won by more than eight points. But I think back to your question on the house, I mean the two ways you look at the House, and I think the betting markets right now are not a bad place to look. The first are the numbers, and the second, probably more importantly, the trends. So, the trends are clearly moving towards the expectation that Democrats are going to take the House back, and the actual number is, I think 75, 80% now. And the trends are also for the Democrats to do well in the Senate and to take it back. Those odds have increased, but it’s still well under 50%.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, the Trump, I mean the degree to which everything is … I think Democrats have not won a Senate race in a state in which Trump was above 50% in the Trump era in that state on election day. Things are so driven. Unlike the old days where you could elect Pat Moynihan, or you could elect Al D’Amato, you could elect Senator Jon Tester in Montana. You could elect senators from different parties in the same state. That’s my Moynihan/D’Amato example. Or you could elect a Tester or Heidi Heitkamp in states that Republicans, not just Trump, were winning consistently at the presidential level, and by big margins.
That’s diminished so much in the modern era, obviously, because for the polarization. And I am struck, as I said, Kansas is, I saw a poll, 48, 46 for Trump approval-disapproval. I mean, I think they would need to… Don’t you think one determinant of whether the wave could move over to the Senate from the house would be if Trump… Trump’s approval would need to be underwater or very close to underwater in states he’s won by 10, 12, 14 points in the past, which is obviously a very big move. It’s bigger than the national move, which is now what? Eight or nine points down from where he was on election day a year ago. But it’s not inconceivably big, I suppose, would might be the counter-argument.
DOUG SOSNIK:
At one point there were two Democratic senators in North Dakota, two Democratic senators in South Dakota, two democratic senators in Nebraska. Of course, it’s mindboggling to think that Democratic can’t even be competitive there. Now I think that here’s the challenge though on stretching yourself to Kansas and Texas and these other places. What you will often see are polls that show a democratic candidate down by two points, 46 to 44 or whatever it is. The problem for Democrats in those states, while it’s close and you can see tens of millions of dollars that we as a party have wasted in close races in Florida, Texas, and South Carolina because it’s a two or three-point race. The challenge for Democrats in those kinds of bright red states isn’t the two-point margin. It’s like if they’re at 44, where are they going to get that six points to get to 50?
And that’s what the real challenge is for Democrats. And as long as we are not really competitive with non-college voters, which constitutes 60% of this country, we can’t take the Senate back. There are 25 states which constitutes 50 senators, which we’re not even competitive. And Trump has racked up huge numbers and it’s also reduced our opportunities in the House. I will say though, just to put a fine point on it, so Democratic performance than ’25 was 14 points better than Harris in ’24. There were 11 statewide elections in ’25, two in Pennsylvania, two in Georgia, and the rest of the country Democrats won, all 11 of them.
There were 20, I think 21% of Republican state legislators on the ballot in ’25, Democrats won 21 of those seats. And that’s carried over this year already. And so last year was 14 points over performance. This year it’s 10 points over performance. So if you maintain those kinds of numbers—and the Washington Post poll, which I think exaggerates it—right now, I think has Democrats with a 14 point enthusiasm advantage, which I probably think is overstated. But even if it’s half that, you take that in conjunction with this over performance. And then in the House, even though there are only 38 states right now that are considered competitive, 20 of which are held by Democrats, if we are able to over-perform at the 2025 level, that puts around 48 Republican-held seats in play.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I mean Virginia is a perfect example. Where I live is a perfect example. That was the Democrats picked up 13 seats in the house of Delegates, many of which they had never won in the modern era and was a pure, that was a real wave. And as you say, it was a 10 point out performance of Harris and Virginia think, or eight Points or something like that. And by Spanberger at the top of the ticket, it was a real wave, right? They swept in this attorney general candidate who had major flaws and problems. And I remember everyone felt, “Well, that one’s going to be very totally dead even on election day, and he won by six or something.”
That’s against a pretty good Republican actually. So that’s what a wave feels like. And obviously, that meant that—just to get to your point though—that meant that a lot of non-college white voters did decide in this one instance with a smaller turnout in this kind of election, obviously, to vote for a Democrat. Could that be replicated in ‘26? It’s harder though, right? They really do need to penetrate the white working class, the white non-college vote in a way that they have not been able to do much in recent years. Right?
DOUG SOSNIK:
I’m not sure about that. First of all, I would be careful about over-extrapolating the results in 2025 in Virginia to serve [inaudible] in 2028, but even 2026. And by the way, to your point though, Democrats have the largest number of State legislators since the mid-’90s in Virginia after an Election. But I think the reason I’m somewhat cautious about over-extrapolating that is the historically, I think other than the call for going back to the seventies, whoever wins the White House, that party always wins the governorship 11 months later in Virginia. So, it’ a huge advantage for losing, and I think in the annals of weak candidates, the Republicans picked one of the weakest in history.
And the other though, to your point, it’s less about Democrats, it’s completely about what you said. It’s completely true in ’28 about these non-college voters. But it’s not really the case in ’26. The case in ’26 isn’t trying to convince them to vote for the Democrats. It’s much more about trying to boost up the turnout of college voters, which historically are about 4% more of the electorate in an off year than a presidential year. So, we are far better off, and Trump is our biggest ally in this, by the way. We are far better off in trying to do as much as possible to maximize that college turnout vote. But this is a poison pill for us in presidential elections if we’re not competitive with working class voters. And what Trump is … Since 2012’s Romney defeat going forward, Democrats have atrophied support amongst all working class voters, not only just white, but also Blacks and Hispanics.
So, that is a barrier for winning the White House in ’28 if we can’t do better. The other thing that hasn’t been said, I should just say is, and one of the things I enjoy about doing these podcasts with you, Bill, is that you and I’ve shared the same historical sweep. In our lifetime I’ve seen three, what I call campaigns that turned into political movements. And political movements are bigger than campaigns. And Ronald Reagan was a campaign that turned into political movement that endured as a governing sort centerpiece in America through Bush second term. That was really the end from a governing of the Reagan movement. And the political ending of that was Romney’s defeat in 2012. That’s a pretty long stretch to have a campaign morph into a movement and dominate American politics. And I’m saying that as someone that spent six years in the nineties working for a Democratic president, but we were really living in the age of Reagan.
The second campaign that turned into a movement was Obama. And that really only lasted two years. And at that point, Obama was just a candidate again. Democrats suffered enormous, paid enormous consequences to Obama being president and not being concerned about the party. 2010 not only was the biggest loss for midterm since World War II, but it created essentially a lost decade for Democrats because Obama’s appeal was not transferable and Obama didn’t make any effort to make it transferable, not even bringing his list over from his campaign to the DNC when he became president.
And Trump is the third candidate that is the head of a movement. And we have been living in the age of Trump since he rode down that escalator in 2015. And we will continue to live in that age of Trump until he leaves office. But in this age of Trump, what has been consistent is two things. One is when Trump is on the ballot, he’s able to get people to turn out to vote who never voted before disproportionately these non-college voters we’re talking about. What has also happened is, since Trump has been president, Republicans have never performed well when he is not on the ballot. And Trump who, I mean, whatever you want to say about him, at least he’s honest because Trump’s all about Trump. And so, after the 2025 pounding that the Republicans took, the next day he was interviewed and asked for his comments and he said, “Well, you know what commentators say mostly is the reason that Republicans didn’t do well because I wasn’t on the ballot.” And he was beaming about that. And so I think that is a challenge for Republicans in ’26, which is not only having a bigger pool of voters, proportionately than the college educated who are highly motivated to vote against Trump, but whether they’re able to get that vote out that so far has been uniquely tied around the Trump movement. And I will say if you want to at some point, I guess we can talk about ’28.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s a good segue to ’28 here in a second. Yeah.
DOUG SOSNIK:
So just quickly—
BILL KRISTOL:
But let me ask one thing on ’26, one footnote in that I really do want to go because I think what happens to the Trump coalition, what happens to the Democratic coalition? Huge questions which you’ve given a lot of thought to and which are obviously indeterminate. But I mean very interesting to talk to speculate about. Just on ’26, anything that would happen over the next six, eight months that would cause you to say, “Whoa, maybe not any kind of blue wave.” Or, “Oh really a blue tsunami that even goes to the Senate.” Any events, incidents, data?
DOUG SOSNIK: (00:20:13):
Well, let’s take off the table a black swan event, which we can’t anticipate. So let’s just assume we’re kind of in our normal elections or I think primarily about referendums in an off year. And the single best predictor of that is based on the state of the country and largely the economy. I think there are three scenarios on the economy between now and election day. One is that we see a recovery, and I’ll come back to that. The second is that the economy gets worse, or already people think it’s bad regardless of what the numbers say. Or the third scenario, which I think is the most likely scenario is what we’ve been going through for the last year, which is kind of a push-pull and then one sets of data comes out which suggests something’s positive and then a month later another set of data comes out which contradicts that. And it’s kind of Swiss cheese economy. It’s just kind of a muddle.
I think the third is the most likely scenario, but in terms of how Republicans can mitigate what should be a terrible election for them. First is they already have this built in protection about the realignment, which at least potentially puts fewer states in play, but the second is that the economy improves. And while the numbers are overwhelmingly negative about how people feel about the economy, about how they feel Trump has handled the economy handling inflation, whether he’s put enough emphasis on it, it’s all overwhelmingly negative. However, in the last two or three months, a few things have happened. One is that if you look at any kind of survey of CEOs, they’re much more optimistic about the economy in ’26 now than they were three or four months ago. Consumer confidence, while still terrible, has actually ticked up in the last three months. And they’re dumping billions of dollars of tax refunds that are going to start hitting people’s mailboxes soon.
So if the economy continues to improve and it’s got a long way to go and there’s not that much time… If you recall—not to bring up a bad memory—but if you recall, Bush lost in ’92 because of the economy. But by July of ’92, we actually had come out of the recession and in fact the numbers were trending positive three months before the election, but it was too late for Bush in ’92. And so I think the country will largely settle in to how they feel about their life and the state of the country by the middle of the summer. And they’re going to settle in on A, are they going to vote and B, if they’re going to vote, who are they going to vote for? So anyway, scenario one I think with a strong economy, I think could mitigate their exposure and above structural issues. And then scenario two, which is an implosion economically, I think Democrats could realize these kinds of gains at which you can overcome these structural barriers.
I think if you summarize… If I were in the White House and you asked me, “Well, what are the two biggest problems we have this year right now in terms of Trump and the Republicans?” The first, which I think is going to play into ’28 is the exhaustion in America of Trump as president and his governing style. And I think that probably had more to do with anything with Biden’s winning in ’20, which the country was exhausted. But the other—and this is where you could push yourself to scenario two of an economic downturn away from scenario one, which is this sort of [inaudible] in America, and this was true before the tariffs ruling by the courts, but it’s even more true now—is the uncertainty in our economy based on the policies of this administration. And that really, I think will hold back economic growth.
And the last thing I’ll say as we transition to ’28 is, I think it’ll be one of the things you can always guarantee is every election for president, people say, “this is the most important election in our lifetime.” I’ve never watched a presidential election where those weren’t the stakes. But I think in fact they will be the stakes in ’28. Because we are going to be moving finally… It will have been 13 years because we are in the age of Trump. We’re going to be moving past the age of Trump to the age in America after Trump and first open seat in 12 years. We’re going to have, and way back to 1960, I think one of the most significant things that’s going to happen in the ’28 election is we’re going to have a generational change of leadership regardless of who wins that the country has been dying for.
And that’s why it’s got kind of that Kennedy feel in the ’60s and replacing for Eisenhower. But I have no idea what’s going to happen in ’28. But the election, it’s going to be about what America looks like after Trump. And I’ll just give you one small example and there are countless examples, but if Republicans were to win in ’28, by the end of that newly elected president, you’ll probably have a seven to two Republican conservative Supreme Court for the rest of our lifetimes. So I think the stakes couldn’t be higher in ’28. And as I said earlier, you should read nothing into the results of ’26 as a predictor of ’28. And I think both parties are pretty wide open in terms of which direction to go, although I think the Republicans are a little more defined than the Democrats, but we really are going to be in the age of a new era in American politics.
BILL KRISTOL:
Oh, that’s so interesting. So let’s talk about, I guess three topics then, around ’28 is the way it’s feels like it could break down to me. Whither the GOP as a party, as a coalition, but also a very important point you make as a movement, the Trump movement, which is different from the Democratic Party, as I think a very recognizable political party in the American sense. Coalition, progressives and moderates, different regional problems. It’s changed some because of the structural changes in American politics obviously, but the GOP is its own world now.
And so, what does the Trump movement/party look like, assuming Trump isn’t going to run again or even if he tries to maybe be contested a little bit. So whither the GOP then we can get to whither, what about the Democratic coalition? And then third, I think you speculated on this in one of our conversations a little bit, could there just be a real change? I mean a real kind of almost crackup of the system as it is as there’s so much unhappiness with it on all sides maybe at this point? So is that a reasonable order to go in? We can go in whatever one you want.
DOUG SOSNIK:
I’ll just do the third one first. I think there will be a crackup in our system, but I don’t think it’ll be in ’28. I think it’ll be sometime maybe in the mid-late ’30s when we’ve had the baby boomers have died off and the whole generation now is running the country and they think both parties suck. But I don’t think that’ll happen in ’28.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting.
DOUG SOSNIK:
It’s always more relaxing for me to talk about Republicans than Democrats. I think that you’re going to have a MAGA and a non-MAGA candidate in the Republican Party. And I think that Cruz will be the non-MAGA candidate. Bill, you might appreciate this. I have a friend of mine who’s a Republican senator, thoughtful guy who said to me, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m going to be for Cruz in ’28 because he’s the thoughtful adult.” So I think though you’re going to have the non-MAGA candidate, which is Cruz, and I think you’ll have a MAGA candidate. I don’t think it’ll be a primary between Vance and Rubio. I think one of them will run and the other might be on the ticket.
It’s interesting, there’s been some movement. So Trump’s got historically low numbers. He’s been able to maintain his support with Republicans until recently above 90%. It’s now in the low eighties for the first time. Now I suspect that number might tick up a little bit off the State of the Union, but you see underlying trends which may hearten you at least a little bit about when asked by Republicans, are you Republican because of MAGA? Are you a Republican because of being a Republican? And the NBC poll in December had it 50/50, which was about a 16 point change since April. So increasingly as Trump’s gone down, you’re seeing at least the alternative within the Republican Party.
There was a Economist poll that came out this week on Epstein, and over half the country said that they believed Trump was covering up crimes of Epstein. And 13% of Republicans felt that. Now that’s not an overwhelming number, but I do think for the Republican Party, you’re going to settle into this discussion without fear of retribution with Trump for the first time about who are we as a Republican? And the challenge for any Republican, because I think that the MAGA support for Trump is so personal and not easily transferable. Not only not easily transferable, but in fact a lot of the wings of the MAGA movement are actually in direct conflict with each other. And there are at least six wings that I think of under MAGA. One is America First, the second are just sort of traditional Republicans who they may not like Trump but they’re not voting for Harris. And then the third, are the traditional Republicans that were there because they believe in a strong defense and fiscal responsibility and all those almost like historical relics of the past, but they’re still there. And then the fourth is the MAHA movement, which is a very strong movement. And the fifth are the tech bros, which are in direct conflict with a lot of these others. And lastly are the overt— now it’s politically acceptable to be openly racist and openly anti-semitic. So those are six that I’ve identified. I suspect you can come up with more, but those are six tributaries of the MAGA movement that are, I think, literally only held together in support of Trump because it’s not a coherent intellectual framework for a party.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s so interesting. Yeah, I’m very struck by the MAGA thing and I guess I assume it’s, as you say, it’s somewhat Trump dependent. I think the history suggests that this kind of demagogue, I’ll use that term non-pejoratively really, just I think he is in fact a demagogue, but this kind of leader of a movement, let me put it that way. These things tend not to hold together very well once the original guy goes, especially when it’s so, as you say, the elements are disparate and contradict each other to some degree. And now I guess conventional—
DOUG SOSNIK:
Just on that. So you’re right, I agree with you about Trump and I think when you think about Obama’s sort of underpinnings of his movement, it was, I would call it kind of softer and kind of gauzy and aspirational, but with Reagan, you knew exactly what the underpinnings of the movement were, and that’s what I think enabled it to endure. I don’t think, obviously other than the cult of the personality with Trump, that’s the only coherent underpinning of this movement.
BILL KRISTOL:
You know, the Reagan thing, I hadn’t quite thought about it this way until you were saying it earlier, well I thought it was going from ’80 to ’92, obviously it was Bush was Reagan’s VP, but then going on our way through Romney. One reason why Reagan and Bush won by big margins in ’80, ’84 and ’88 and no Republican won by comparable margins after that, of course was one of the three legs of the stool. That was the usual metaphor in the Reagan years, as you recall, was strong national security foreign policy anti-communism, that went away basically at the end of the Cold War.
So perfectly reasonably in a certain way, just as an analytical matter, that movement was going to be less strong once there was no Soviet Union. And sure enough, it was a lot less strong once there was no Soviet Union. The Trump thing’s a little more confusing because the movement, as you say, is kind of these disparate parts. Some of them aren’t going away and the tech world isn’t disappearing, but maybe it becomes unpopular with some of the AI stuff. And MAHA is complicated because parts of it seem quite attractive, more than I would’ve predicted honestly. But other parts probably people at the end of the day do want vaccines and stuff. So I don’t know how all those play together and can it be held together by someone else, I guess?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Let me try to explain part of that. First of all, if you divide MAHA in half, the vaccine, all that stuff, that’s just crazy stuff that nobody in their right mind can think makes any sense. The MAHA movement on food related matters is a completely different story.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s interesting.
DOUG SOSNIK:
I mean if you saw Kessler who was in the Clinton Gore world, he came out in support. He led the whole fight about taking on big tobacco in our White House in the ’90s. He came out recently in support of a lot of what they’re proposing on the food side of MAHA. But what happened while you’re right about one of the legs of the stool getting knocked out with the fall of communism, I think what was really happening was a redefining of the fault lines in politics. And it became a sense with a decline in the middle class that began in the ’70s, first showed up politically in ’92 with Perot and I think the Bush presidency, second Bush with the big government going into Iraq on their lie, it became a revolt by class.
And so there were a lot of Republicans who left the party and they kind of had a sleepover in 2010 and all that when they went… you know, the tea party movement. But in a sense, we redrew the fault lines in American…I wrote a piece in Politico I think, about 14 years ago, called “Which side of the Barricades are you on?” And one side was like Romney next to Hillary Clinton and the Trilateral Commission and on the other side was Elizabeth Warren and Rand Paul. In a sense, Trump got in front of a line that started forming with the decline of the middle class and it reshuffled the fault lines to whether you’re an institutionalist regardless of party or whether or not you’re, quote unquote, “with the people.” And so I think that’s really what has transformed politics.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. There’s just one thing here on MAHA for a minute. This is not something I focused on. I need to think more about it and learn more about it. But I think it’s a very good point you make and I think a good correction really the way I put it, the vaccine and anti-modern medicine side of it, I can put it that way. It seems a little crazy. I don’t know what percentage of MAHA is that way. Some of them clearly are. There’s someone testifying just this week for Surgeon General who’s basically on board all that stuff and the measles stuff and all this seems a little crazy.
On the other hand, I was just on a call yesterday with Democrats sort of imaginative younger ones, trying to think about what fault lines there are and what Democrats should be looking more carefully at. And this person was a pollster and does focus groups and so forth, a lot of clients. And he said that the strength of MAHA adjacent stuff on food, pesticides, that stuff. People have no idea how strong it is out in the country. And it’s pretty organic. I mean it’s not like there’s… I mean RFK junior was in a way the leader of that, but he also was kind of kooky. So he was like a flawed leader you might say. And now he’s part of the Trump administration, so that creates some complexity.
But he said… that’s one. And the second one—I’m curious what you think about this while we just got you—this is a shorter term thing, but I think it’s very interesting and it has big 2028 implications. He said, “The degree of worry about AI is amazing and not just even primarily on the job front. People sort of know that technologies come and people lose jobs, but other people get jobs and at the end of the day, the automobile creates as many jobs as it destroys. And same with teller machine, ATMs and so forth. It doesn’t quite do the devastation of the job market people expect.” But he said the social cultural side of AI, the Grok thing where you can pro— Grok will sexualize any person’s image and so forth. People are a little freaked out about that, about the kids, effect on kids. And again, he said for now, the right is actually taken advantage of this. Alabama this week is passing legislation to try to curb all this. Whether they can do it at the state level, I don’t know. But he said it’s a… These are conservatives in Alabama, as you’d expect. Over the objection of people who are being backed financially in a big way by the tech companies, because the grassroots sentiment there is so strong on some of the AI stuff. So I’m curious. And of course, Trump’s on the other side of that now and also on the health stuff. The big business got to him and he’s okayed some, I don’t even know anything about it, honestly, some pesticide type thing where MAHA has sort of been on the other side. So I’m curious on both those issues. I mean, do you think they’re real, they’re big, where do they go? Et cetera.
DOUG SOSNIK:
And by the way, no better example of the conflicting strands of the MAGA movement where you got the tech bros competing with America First and the paranoid. So let me first say, so I was a chief of staff to a congressman, and I was a chief of staff to a senator. And what I essentially had during those periods, I would go back to, in the congressman’s case, the district, and in the senator’s case, the state almost every weekend, because I was chief of staff both in Washington and the… And I had a tremendous advantage, I thought, over my colleagues in Washington, because I was spending so much time in America and outside the bubble. Now, I’ve lost that because I don’t spend time in America like I did before. One of the things I’ve been shocked at about AI is how much the politics have changed in the last six months. It’s almost like a freight train. And there are two tributaries though of why this is becoming such an animating force in American politics. The one is what you alluded to around privacy, but the second is the energy costs in these communities of who’s paying for all these fields. And if you did a quick Google scan of politicians and positions they’ve taken on this issue, you’ll see a lot of these politicians have readjusted their position on AI in the last several months. And I think this is going to be an exploding issue because the technology is only going to be more invasive, as you alluded to, but also the costs, I think are going to be even more pervasive. And you saw it play out with states, Tennessee and others wanting to regulate AI, and the tech bros are all like, “You can’t regulate it.” And ultimately, all Trump cares about his business and he feels like we’re in an arms race with China on who’s going to develop AI the fastest. So he wants no impediments. So I think it’s going to be an enormous issue going forward for those two reasons.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Just on that MAHA for a moment, so if you go back to the mistakes of Democrats and how we ran campaigns in ’24 compared to Republicans, what Republicans did is they went to where people were. And so Trump would go on Joe Rogan or all these shows because that’s where the target audience was, and he would really just sort of be a guy talking about guy stuff. And he might slip in a little political stuff, but not a lot. But he was going to where they are and talking about what they cared about. And Democrats, we go about how we’ve always gone about, we go in political places, we talk about politics. Everybody hates politics. And the people that hate politics are the ones we’re trying to reach and we’re going on traditional outlets. You saw a report that Trump’s high command met with the Republicans the other day about the upcoming campaign, and basically said, “Don’t use the traditional media. That’s not where our target audience is. Our people don’t watch that stuff.”
And so we’ve had… The last two presidential elections have had historic turnout, more than any elections in a hundred years. Nevertheless, in the last election, almost one out of three people didn’t vote. That’s enormous. And if you take the MAHA movement, particularly on the food side, these are just normal civilian people that don’t care about politics, don’t like about politics, and in fact, the only thing reason they’re involved with politics is because concerned about the food. So they are tapping into how people live now, and these are the people that are the hardest to reach and increasingly more likely to vote. Not necessarily in a midterm, but in a presidential.
BILL KRISTOL:
So in the Republican… And they’re for now I guess sort of in the, well, sort of in the Republican coalition in some level.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, they’re culturally, I mean, again, there are two issues about these kinds of voters. The first is, are they going to vote? And then the second is, how will they vote? I think they’re culturally probably very uncomfortable currently with Democrats. So I think they’re much more inclined to either support Republicans or not to vote. There’s one thing I should point out, which is at least adjacent to this. So I think you all on the Republican side have a MAHA candidate, or a MAGA candidate rather, and a more mainstream. Trump and his White House will control the Republican apparatus in the nominating process.
And I was talking to some Nikki Haley people who worked for her, and I said to them, I said, “I didn’t need to know anything about the primary except two things in a state, and campaigning didn’t matter. The only two things I needed to know to tell you how they’re going to vote, first, is this an open primary or closed? And secondly, what’s the education level of people in the state?” I think Trump went to Iowa once. I mean, literally once. DeSantis went to every county. It didn’t matter. So going forward, in terms of the nominating process, their ability to control the mechanisms of the Republican primary will be an enormous advantage in terms of who they nominate.
BILL KRISTOL:
Do you think… Final thing on the Republicans, even though I know it’s a little more painful, we should talk about the Democrats just a bit. Does Trumps’ actual endorsement matter quite a lot if he chooses to in 2028? I mean, he still has big clout in Republican primaries presumably, or maybe he won’t by then, if he’s really a lame duck.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I know we’re going to get to the Democrats, and one of my least favorite questions, who do I think is going to be the nominee? No idea. I mean, we don’t know where the country’s going to be two and a half, two years from now. Although I do think exhaustion is going to be high on the list no matter what. And I think all the things, Bill, that you, I have no doubt, have heard since Trump wrote down that escalator in 2015 privately from Republicans, but never publicly or seldom publicly, you are seeing some cracks in that now with, it’s generally people that are retiring or former elected officials, but you’re seeing some cracks in that. However, I’m very skeptical that Trump is going to lose his chokehold on the Republican Party as long as he’s president.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s sort of been… Even if he’s at 38% in public approval, which probably hurts the Republicans in the general. There’s some history that if a president leaves office with a low approval, it’s harder for his successor to hold that for the presidency, for that party, for his party. It’s hard to see among Republicans that he won’t have a lot of clout. And so in some ways, it’s kind of, I assume Trump prefers the MAGA-ish candidate over the less MAGA-ish candidate, but there might be three, several MAGA-ish candidates, and he’s a wild card. And so it’s sort of one of the biggest—
DOUG SOSNIK:
I think they can… I would say a couple things. Let’s say Cruz is the non-MAGA candidate. I think he can finesse that pretty easily in terms of “Trump’s our greatest president, and I agree with his goals, I have a different style,” whatever. I don’t think you can be the non-MAGA candidate without in some form kissing the ring.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, you can’t be an anti-Trump candidate.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Right. So I think that that’s the price of admission. And I do think on the MAGA side though, you’ve seen it in every primary around the country, they can restrict the MAGA field, if they want, down to one. If you’re a MAGA candidate and his people have weighed in for a different MAGA candidate, you’re dead.
BILL KRISTOL:
Does that mean it’s Vance, most likely?
DOUG SOSNIK:
I think it’s Vance or Rubio. And I think, by the way, I think if Trump… I mean, there are lots of things I could say negatively about Trump. I could spend all day and tell you why I loathe him, but he’s pretty open about who he is and what he is and he’s completely transactional, and he’s going to want a Republican to replace him. And whoever’s in that position best to do that is going to be who he’s for. He’s consistently done that throughout his entire career. You’ve got some incredibly expensive primaries right now in the Senate for Republicans, like places like Georgia and Texas. They’re wasting tons of money there because Trump doesn’t want to weigh in and pick the wrong horse. So he’s completely transactional in every aspect of his life, and replacing him will certainly be no different.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. Democrats, I mean, essentially it’s both an open, ’28 will be, assuming Trump isn’t the nominee himself, an open presidential seat in the general election, but I would say on the Democratic side, obviously an open primary race in a way that I don’t think the Democrats have really had. Obviously, ’24 was Biden-Harris. ’20 was open. So I guess ’20 was really open. I was going to say 2016 was kind of a handoff to Hillary. 2012, obviously Obama, so there haven’t been that many of them recently. And 2020 was kind of weird with the pandemic and Biden getting fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire then becoming the nominee. I don’t know that’s much of a precedent for anything. So I don’t know what can one say? There’s the progressives and the centrists, there’s regional issues. What are you looking for as opposed to who do you think is the nominee? What questions do you want to answer?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, let me start by broadening the aperture of what you said. I agree with what you said. I think you could argue about Obama in ’07 or ’08, but essentially for the last 25 years, the Democratic Party’s been controlled by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and the Obama-Biden presidency for a quarter-century. So this is the first election essentially to open it up to someone that’s not part of that group before. And the second thing is since the Democrats rode down, since Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, it’s now been 11 years, we as a party haven’t stood for anything except opposition to Trump.
So we now have a quarter of a century of stifling an emerging new generation of leadership, and we are for the first time in over a decade forced to talk about not who we’re against, but what we’re for. And that’s what the 2028 primary’s going to be about. And I will give you a sense of what I think the profile would be, and I do want to make one observation on it. So the profile, first of all, has got to be someone who is for change and not part of the status quo. A lot was made about Mamdani winning the mayor’s race in New York because he’s a socialist. I think that’s the third reason he won. I think the main reason he won was first and foremost, he was the guy that was for breaking things, not for defending the status quo. And the second reason he won was they wanted a generational change of leadership in the city, and you could have no better foil for points one and two than Andrew Cuomo.
But I think that’s sentiment. And don’t be surprised, like when Mamdani came to the Oval Office and Trump and he had a good conversation and Trump said all these nice things about him, because they have a lot more in common than you might think. Because going back to that which side of the barricades are you on, politically, they’re both positioned on the same side of the barricade. And the same with him calling Elizabeth Warren a few weeks ago. And there’s questions about if they put some housing proposals together to cap the ability of companies to buy houses and can they get Elizabeth Warren to… So I think that they’re going to have to be an outsider and outside the sort of Acela Corridor. But Ronald Reagan lived in government housing for 16 years, eight years as governor and eight years as president. No one thought of him as an insider. No one thought of him as part of government.
And I don’t think Bernie Sanders is going to run, but Bernie Sanders, who’s lived in Washington and worked in Washington for what, 30 years, but no one thinks of him as part of the Acela Corridor. So you got to be outside the power center. You have to be on the right side of the barricades. You have to be for change, I think you have to be a generational change. But I believe what’s most important, and I don’t know if you have a different view of the experience, running for president is like nothing else. You can’t prepare for it. And the only people that I know who’ve been successful running for president know why they’re running and what they want to do if they’re elected.
And they need to be able then to coherently articulate that to people, and people have to hear it, understand it, and believe it’s authentic. And they have to believe that actually if the person got elected, they can actually be able to do something and be effective. If you go back to, in my lifetime, the two best politicians on the Democrat side in my lifetime were Clinton and Obama. When they first announced they were running for president, they were terrible candidates. They were terrible and they were stumbling around. But in each case, about a year out there, they got their voice.
And if you go back and look at the Clinton presidency and you read Clinton’s speeches at the end of ’91 or Obama’s JJ speech in October of ’07 and look at his presidency, the architecture, the narrative of why they were running, not only you could find it in those speeches, but you saw it in their presidencies. And so that’s what I’m looking for, is someone who actually has a reason for running and they can articulate that. The last thing I want to mention to the Democrats is it’s the first time in my lifetime, I think it’s the first time, I believe the first time in the history of American politics, probably in the general, definitely in the primary, Israel’s going to be a major political issue. It could be a defining political issue.
And then you can say, “Well, in ’24, maybe it affected Michigan,” but that’s on the margins. It is going to be a defining issue in the Democratic primary for president. And you saw recently, I think it was in California, I think it was a governor’s debate, and they asked the candidates, I think it was the governor’s… Anyway, they asked the candidates whether they thought that Israel had performed genocide in Gaza, and one of the candidates mumbled and fumbled and kind of middled it and didn’t really give an answer and got eviscerated, had to come back two or three days later and clarify their position.
And so I think that’s going to be one of the defining issues in the Democratic primary for president. And if you look at polling, which I find quite ironic, by the way, after Hamas goes into Israel and slaughters over a thousand people, that if you go from that moment to today, you’ve seen a steady, steady decline of support for the state of Israel. It’s across the board, but the two trends that are most pronounced underneath those numbers first is age. So the younger you are, the less sympathetic you are to Israel. And the other is by political party, where overwhelmingly, Democrats are no longer supportive of Israel and in fact much more sympathetic, in this case, to the Palestinians.
BILL KRISTOL:
I don’t know how much that’s Bibi-dependent. Does it change a little bit if he exits the scene? I don’t know. Maybe not though.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think Bibi had an impact on it, but I don’t think the basic… I think in order to fix the problem, you can’t get elected prime minister of Israel.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s also a constraint, I suppose. Yikes. Well, that’s an interesting wild card that we haven’t seen, as you say, in quite a long time, yeah, at all. I’m interested by the generational change argument and by the sort of structural… Yeah, I mean, just the clarity of the message is such an important point because everyone wants to, and I do this too, you find the perfect candidate, but you think of, I like governors rather than senators. I think a swing states… Someone who’s been popular in a swing state would be good. Young rather than old, this and that. But the actual human being who’s running matters more than the quote resume, so to speak. Reagan didn’t win… I used to say to people who go get obsessed with governors, like Reagan was a governor and Clinton was a governor, and hey, they both won… they didn’t win because they were governors. And they had to have an office to run from, obviously. In those days, unlike with Trump, you couldn’t run and just be a citizen, so to speak, but the governor was a credential you needed to have.
But I remember vividly in ’92 in the Bush White House, Sununu and others in ’91, ’90, “Oh, Clinton, we’re going to destroy his record in Arkansas,” and it didn’t make much difference. And honestly, by the time Reagan was running in certainly ’80, but even ’76, the referendum wasn’t on what he did in California. You can’t be a disaster. I mean, you have to sort of check the box as okay, competent, the state didn’t fall apart on your watch, but people underestimate the actual importance of the human who’s running and the message of the human who’s running.
And I’ll just say—I think I may have told this story before—in September, maybe even very early October 2016, I was on some panel, totally random, unmemorable panel. I was at that point a Never-Trump Republican, so I was not sure. They didn’t know what camp to put me in, the bookers. So it was me, someone from the Clinton campaign who was a competent senior person there, and someone from the Trump campaign. And it was a good panel as these things go, eight, ten minutes or whatever, and so they asked —I don’t know what I said at all—they asked each of them, “Okay, what’s the case for your candidate?”
The Trump person, who was not as polished or as experienced as the Clinton person, the Trump representative had five points. “We’re going to close the border. We’re not going to fight any stupid wars in the Middle East. He’s a businessman, the economy’s going to boom.” Whatever, “We’re going to stop immigrants, we’re going to stop murderous rapist immigrants from coming in,” whatever. The Clinton person was much more sophisticated, complicated, and totally unclear what the message was. He’s like, “Hillary has 75 pages of proposals on child and medical leave and the healthcare and this and that.”
And I remember reading that and saying—actually to the Clinton person, I was not for Trump—saying, “You got a problem, because that Trump message, I don’t like it, but it’s clear, and your message is not,” and I wasn’t being a jerk. I just said it in passing, and I think this person knew that, actually, and stuff. But I mean, that’s when I really thought Trump could win in 2016. Anyway, that’s just your point on the clarity, I think. I don’t mean to ascribe my thoughts to you, but I mean I think it’s so important.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Let me say a few things. First of all, the way I described that last part you just discussed is the difference between appealing to people through their head or through their heart. And politicians who get elected president connect with people emotionally, through their heart, not through their head, which I think is what you saw. I didn’t finish a couple points you made. So there are two tests to being elected president. The first is do you have the vision thing… Do you know why you’re running, can you articulate it? Which we talked about, and you can’t do that in the middle of a primary. And then the second is, do you have the temperament. If you can’t take the pressure of a primary, how can you take the pressure of the presidency?
So we’re in the phase between now and January of ’28, which is the vision thing. Who’s able to figure out why they want to be president? They then have to demonstrate during the primaries that they have the temperament to take the pressure of the job, which Clinton was able to do with all his problems. So I want to mention also, I think Reagan and Clinton had some other similarities of why they’re successful. First is where they came from. They both came from humble beginnings. They didn’t figure out how to talk to those people, they are those people. And secondly, they both had to perform in states where they had to deal with a strong opposition to get things done.
I just want to, lastly, and I think this is under-covered or reported on, is the generational divisions in our country, and it’s economic, it’s the view of the world. You’ve seen an unbelievable… Investing in 2010 after the 2008 economic crisis, COVID was really lucrative for people with money. The increase of their 401(k)s, the huge increase in the value of their house. And if you look at the concentration of wealth now, a third of it is seniors. And conversely, you’ve never in our lifetimes ever seen less opportunity for somebody getting out of college. Anyone who uses the term “American Dream” is probably over 50, because young people don’t even know what you’re talking about, because no one’s even talking about aspiring to that anymore because it’s not gettable.
When I was growing up and you were growing up, there were two God-given rights in America. One was if you worked hard, you could get ahead, no matter what family circumstances you were born into. We were much more mobile socially than Europe. And the second was everyone knew the next generation’s going to have it better than the last generation, and right now, 75% of the people in America do not believe the next generation’s going to have it better than the last generation, and you see it in the polling by age.
The oldest voters right now are the most supportive of Trump, compared to any other voters. Part of it is they’re insulated on healthcare because it’s paid for, but they also are economically in a different position than someone getting out of college. And at least in the short term, AI is going to make it, I think, even more challenging for people getting out of college, and it’s going to take a long time for this younger generation to get ahead. And so these are huge divisions in our society that are due to these long-term trends of a hollowing out of the middle class and Wild West capitalism with no guardrails, with winners and a lot of losers. And that’s what’s led to the age of Trump.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I think more broadly, wouldn’t you say, we’ll close with this. I mean, it’s a very good thing to close with, just because it raises such big questions. It leads to… there’s a book that was popular when I was young, The Age of Discontinuity, I think it was called. But I think we really are. It leads to all kinds of things which are hard to predict. It leads to not-business as usual in our politics, Trump being the most extraordinary example of that, but Mamdani being a kind of example. And I feel like people who keep thinking, “Well, these are the exceptions,” that we’ll go back to the rule, I think it’s the opposite, don’t you think? That seems to be what you’re suggesting. We’re entering a new era which will manifest itself in very different ways, and maybe not so much in ’28 and ’32 and all that, but will manifest itself, right?
DOUG SOSNIK:
It will. And I think if you look at American history, and I should be careful about this, because you know way more about American history.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, I don’t know about that.
DOUG SOSNIK:
We’ve changed where we got our leaders over time, and up to Trump, we’ve pretty much, from Kennedy’s day, we just went to the professional class of leaders. And I think that era of where we’re looking for our leaders is over. I forgot, I was going to give you one what-to-watch in ’26. Maybe I’ll give that to you and you can either stick it in ’26 or you could just throw it in the trash.
BILL KRISTOL:
Or we could just keep it where it is. Okay, tell us. People are interested anyway. Yeah.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Anyway, just to finish up on our discussion of ’26, I don’t really have any idea what’s going to happen, although I do think we’ll be able to look at a lot of events in our country and be able to see the mood of America and get a better sense of not only who’s going to vote but how they’re going to vote. But there’s some things that I’ll be watching through the process electorally to get some idea of how big a blue wave we have, if at all.
The first, I’m going to be interested in a couple of primaries starting in May. On the Republican side, the primary for Massie’s seat in Kentucky, where Trump not only has recruited a candidate but is fully funding them. This is not a seat that the Democrats can possibly win, but I think it will be an interesting barometer of Trump’s hold on the party, and whether or not you can actually take him on and get away with it. And the other is in Louisiana, where he’s recruited a woman member of Congress to run against Cassidy, who voted to impeach him, where I do think it’s probable that the Trump-backed candidate will win that.
But again, these are just a couple of early tests to see Trump’s control on the party. But in regards to the Senate outcome, to me the base case is the Democrats have to win North Carolina and Maine, which are both held by Republicans. And if Republicans were to win either or both of those, you pretty much don’t have to wait for the rest of the night to know the results.
I’m also going to be watching the Democratic primary for the Senate in Michigan, which is in August, where I think the Democrats have far outperformed the Republicans this cycle in candidate recruitment. And in fact, I think the Republicans have done a poor job of recruiting candidates for the Senate, but Michigan’s an exception. They’ve not only recruited a strong candidate who almost won the last time, but we have three people running in the Democratic primary. And one of them in particular is really to the left, far enough to the left that I think even in a blue wave, the Republicans could win that seat.
And in terms of whether or not the Democrats can actually break the structural impediments, it’s going to be assuming that they can win Maine and North Carolina and get the right candidate in Michigan—and I guess in Maine also there’s a primary—is whether or not we’re still at that point two seats short, but watching the results in Alaska and Ohio. And that shows you how steep the hill is for Democrats. But in both cases, Democrats recruited the strongest candidate, and Sullivan, the incumbent in Alaska, is not particularly popular, and Trump is not particularly popular, by the way, in Alaska. And in Ohio, I think Republicans have a weak candidate.
And the other thing I’ll be looking at in the House are these districts that the Republicans drew in Texas, where they are attempting to pick up five House seats through the mid-decade redistricting. And what they did, though, is they based how they drew these lines to their political advantage based on Trump’s 2024 performance, particularly in South Texas, where he had overwhelming support compared to any other Republican with Hispanics.
These voters have abandoned Trump in droves since he got elected president, so I think that a big tell on election night will be what happens in these South Texas seats that have been redrawn. If Republicans are able to hold those seats, I think it augurs well for them to limit their losses. But if Democrats are to pick up several of these seats, which right now I think is probably more likely than not, it suggests a very good night for Democrats. But as you go in deeper into the night, you’ll get a better definition of how good a night it is for Democrats.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s all very helpful, actually. And yeah, it’s interesting. You and I were discussing before we got on the air that one thing we’ve both seen in our lifetime is unanticipated consequences of both public policy decisions and political decisions. And it would be funny if the Republicans, having started this whole gerrymandering war, end up, A, they only get a draw in the sense that California and Virginia neutralize Texas and so forth, and then B, Texas itself doesn’t work out well and turns out to be a dummymander and they were overambitious and so forth. That would be a nice irony.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Yes, and not the first or last time that will have happened. I think, though, just in closing, I think this election this year is going to mark the closing of a political era.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s interesting.
DOUG SOSNIK:
And the next election in ’28 is really fundamentally going to be an election about who we are as a country and where we want to head in the future. And I think people will look back long after you and I are gone at that ’28 election as a benchmark of the next era, much as we had done in our country going back to at least 1960, as the beginning of time of modern politics. But I think that’s what the stakes are going to be in 2028, and the only through line right now is the overwhelming number of people in America that feel alienated towards our political leadership, towards both political parties. They feel like the system is rigged and they want a change. Now, that’s all fine, but what that kind of change is what the election’s going to be about.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well said, and a good, important note to end on, and we’ll have much to talk about all these things as we go through the next almost three years. So we should keep an eye on ’26. We’ll get back together either maybe late in this year or certainly after the results come in, but as you say, one caution is that ’26 doesn’t predict ’28. The off-year has been a very bad predictor of the next presidential. And especially, I’m very intrigued by the way you put it, that ’26 is the end, perhaps, of an era, and ’28 the beginning of a new one, which means it really is more discontinuity than even normally. So Doug, this has been a very stimulating and thought-provoking conversation. I really appreciate your taking the time. And as I say, we’ll look forward to getting back together soon.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Great. Thank you for having me.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
