Filmed December 29, 2025
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again today by Ron Brownstein, opinion columnist at Bloomberg and for CNN, a CNN political analyst, author most recently of a book on popular culture, very interesting book on the ’70s, Rock Beyond the Water. You and I were discussing it a week or two ago when Rob Reiner died. And you have a very interesting section on All in the Family, which we should discuss some other time in a different conversation actually.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
Such an important—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
RIP though, what a great guy he was
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Yeah. That show was so important in the history of TV and in some interesting ways you and I both remember it. I’m a little older. I watched it in college, you watched it, I guess in what? Middle school, high school?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah, middle school and high school. Yeah. But everybody watched it. We all watched it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Isn’t that amazing? What were the numbers like?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
40 million people were watching it at one point, a week. There hasn’t been anything like that on TV in decades.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. And at the same time, it wasn’t like in those days you could watch it and stream it whenever you wish to call it up.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
This isn’t why we’re here, but I remember saying to someone the other day that I’m sure my dad and your dad went through their entire lives without ever saying, “I’m behind on a TV show.” The concept didn’t even exist. It was there and then it was gone. You weren’t trying to catch up with All in the Family or Mary Tyler Moore. It was really with Lost, I think, that that began, that you were behind and you had to see everyone in order to understand what’s going on.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Yeah, no, it’s really true. Okay, but we’re here to talk about the political situation. We talked right after the election. You had an excellent analysis of the 2024 results, and we’re now a little over a year from that, almost a year into Trump’s presidency. More than a year into his becoming president-elect. And so let’s talk for a minute about what happened over this past year in 2025 politically, and then what might well happen in ’26. Then we’ll get to maybe the bigger picture of questions about the coalitions, the two parties, what might conceivably happen in ’28. But ’25, what’s the political story of 2025?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
As usual with Trump in the White House this past year was a hell of a decade. So much happened, but amid all of the swirling currents that you get whenever Trump is in the White House, I really feel like to go back to pop culture, the real message of ’25 was “the fundamental things apply.” At various points in his career, Trump has given the impression to many that he’s repealed the laws of political gravity, that all the rules no longer apply, that all the guideposts you think are out there are just obsolete in the Trump era. Well, it turned out that ’25, I think, reasserted all of those traditional guideposts. ’25 told us that when people are unhappy with the economy, the incumbent president suffers. And when the incumbent president suffers, his party gets a cold, to borrow the old phrase.
And basically those two pillars of historic political gravity held in ’25, Trump’s approval rating fell over the course of the year, as most Americans concluded that A, he had failed to deliver on his core promise in ’24, which was to get their cost of living under control. B, they thought he was slighting it in terms of other issues that he was more worried about. And C, they thought that to the extent that he was paying attention to it, his agenda was making things worse, not better. He was compounding, not solving the problem. And as a result, his approval rating on the economy fell to depths that he never reached in his first term, even during the depths of COVID. His approval rating on the economy now is lower, and his disapproval rating is higher routinely than it ever was at any point in his first term.
And inevitably that functioned as an undertow, pulling down his overall approval rating. And now, when the President’s approval rating starts falling, historical relationship is you expect his party to start losing elections. And again, we’ve wondered whether Trump has repealed these traditional laws of political gravity. It turned out he hadn’t. We got to the November elections in New Jersey and Virginia, Prop 50 in California. And we saw that in each of those states, bluish states, but nonetheless, states where Trump improved in ’24 relative to ’20, we saw in each of those states, 55% or more of voters disapproved of Trump, his performance as president, and over 90% of those disapprovers voted Democratic. And that core relationship, which is the fulcrum on which all our analysis of midterm elections turns, held. That relationship held. And that to me is the most important point looking forward to 2026.
BILL KRISTOL:
Just one question about ’25. I think that’s really excellent and I don’t disagree with a word of it, but one could say if one wanted to be… Well, I guess how much of this is Trump not delivering, or appearing not to deliver to be more neutral in a way, on what he had promised. The promises were so exaggerated no one could have delivered on that, actually reducing prices and so forth radically and all that. And how much of it is just every, it seems like every president elect drifts down in his first term, which again, almost compounds or reinforces your point that for all the drama, and Sturm und Drang of Trump, we had a normal crummy first year for an incumbent president, maybe especially second term, but even first term in the case of Biden, where you just deal with all the problems of the world and voters have exaggerated expectations for whatever reason, and then you lose. What numbers would you put on the approval? He begins around 49, 50 and goes down to…
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah, he’s dropped 10 points, basically, I would say.
BILL KRISTOL:
Almost 10, right? 42, 41.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
We all do this every day, every week, interpret this thing of Trump, that seems like a mistake, but some of it is just… Well, let me put this way. If he had been a very different president, where would he be, do you think? He wouldn’t be ahead, up. He wouldn’t be up much, right? Conceivably, could he have held at 48, something like that? Could he have been at 45 instead of 42? What do you think?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
There are a couple of points to make. The first one is I agree with your overall point. Even with all of the craziness and uniqueness, all the unusual aspects of Trump, in many ways, particularly in the second round, more than even the first round, he has functioned as a normal political candidate. To me, we talked about this after ’24. One of the most striking things, maybe the most striking thing about ’24 was that voters treated him even with all of the eccentricities, and all that comes with electing Trump, they essentially treated him as the normal representative of the party out of the White House when they were unhappy with current events. When they were unhappy with the performance of the incumbent president, voters bend toward the other party. And Trump essentially performed almost exactly where you would expect.
I think I gave you this number last time we talked. In 2008, when Barack Obama was running to succeed the unpopular outgoing president of the other party, exactly 62% of people who said the country was on the wrong track under Bush, voted for him, according to the exit poll. And then in ’24.
BILL KRISTOL:
For Obama.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
For Obama. Voted for Obama. 62% of people who said the country was on the wrong track voted for Obama in ’08. In ’24, even with everything else going on and all that Trump brings to the table, 62% of people who said the country was on the wrong track under Biden voted for Trump. They basically treated him strangely like a generic opposition party candidate. And then to your point, ’25 looks a lot like ’21 for Biden, ’09 for Obama, ’01 for Bush until 9/11, certainly ’93 for Bill Clinton, and even 1981 for Ronald Reagan. And every president has come in and struggled to consolidate their gains from the previous election. Now, part of that is what you said, unrealistic expectations. Part of it also is that all of those presidents sought to pursue an agenda that almost certainly went beyond what voters elected them to do.
They understand, they come in, they have a limited window, and they have maximum legislative leverage, and they pursue big goals, and inexorably there is a backlash to them. All of these presidents, and Trump fits that very much in ’25, the One Big Beautiful Bill, totally partisan, advancing a lot of Republican goals, doing a lot of things that the public doesn’t like. That’s the other thing. I was thinking about this yesterday, Bill. It’s not only that he’s failing to deliver, it’s not only that he is failing to deliver the main thing that people were hoping they were going to get, which is an improvement in their cost of living, he’s delivering a lot of things they either didn’t want or didn’t expect. You look at something like tearing down the east wing of the White House. That’s two, three to one opposition.
The tariffs have majority opposition. The extent of the militarized nature of the ICE deportations have majority opposition. Border, different story, public supports by and large what he’s been doing there. Putting his name on the Kennedy Center, I saw the other day, two-thirds opposition. Trying to preempt state regulation of AI, majority opposition. It’s not only an absence of action on the thing that people care most about. It’s that he is doing a lot of things that people don’t like. Now, you could say if he was making progress on the economy, my instinct is that voters would probably be willing to overlook that in the same way that many people, while maintaining a skeptical view of him, overlooked those concerns in the election because they thought he was going to deliver a good economy. But if you’re not delivering the main thing that people thought they were going to get, the choice of delivering a lot of things they either didn’t want or didn’t expect, I think gets magnified.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s interesting. So we go into ’26. We have these results from November, not good for the Republicans, Democrats outperforming by quite a lot compared to ’24 or ’21, however you want to compare them.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Even better than ’17, I think, and certainly in Virginia.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. And then you have polling showing him at, let’s just say 41, 42%. Now, how much typically changes in the even numbered year? You have all these races, Senate races, to 435 House races, governor’s races, turmoil, this, that, unexpected issues. How good a predictor do you think is the current moment of where we end up in November? And what would the current moment suggest in terms of actual results on Election Day?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I think it’s a pretty good predictor. I think that the midterm is less valuable as a predictor of the subsequent presidential election. That is definitely true. But the odd year election, I think is a pretty good predictor of the midterm. ’21 was a pretty good predictor of ’22, and so forth. I think what, to me, to go back, the biggest message of ’25, the elections of ’25 was that “the fundamental things apply,” which is that when people are unhappy about the economy, president’s approval rating goes down. And that the single most important factor in any off-year election during his presidency is his approval rating. We saw in Virginia, New Jersey and in Prop 50, at least 90% of people who disapproved of Trump voted for the Democrats. To me, this was really the telling signal above all. Jay Jones, the Democratic Attorney General candidate in Virginia who had problems, texting about fantasizing about political violence against opponents, 89% of people who disapproved of Trump voted for him in the exit poll.
And in fact, if you go back to—all of which I have done, I must have had nothing to do this day, but I have gone back—if you look at every exit poll conducted in 2018 and 2020, while Trump was president, every Senate race while he was in the White House, in 2020 was the only Republican candidate who held their Democratic opponent to less than 89% of people who disapproved of Trump. Every other race, at least 89% of Trump disapprovers voted for the Democratic Senate candidate. And roughly the same number, 89, 90, 91, 92% of people who approve of Trump vote Republican. If you look at the national results in the National House exit poll in 2018, 90% of people who disapproved of Trump voted for Democrats. In 2020, 89% of people who disapproved of Trump voted for Democrats for the House.
But again, comparable numbers of voters who approve of Trump are voting Republican. And what that tells me is that almost everywhere where Trump is over 50, it is going to be very, very hard for Democrats to win. They are going to win vanishingly few. They are going to win very few elections where Trump is over 50. But where he is under 50, it is going to be very hard for Republicans to win. I can imagine Roy Cooper winning in North Carolina because he’s so popular. If Trump is at 50 or 51 in approval, I could see that. I could imagine Sherrod Brown tipping Ohio conceivably if Trump is at 50. But by and large, what we’re going to see is, I think, a very, very strong relationship, whether we’re talking about Senate races, governor races maybe a tiny bit less, certainly House races. You tell me Trump’s approval rating in that constituency
And here’s a really good way to kind of think about how important this is on both sides of the ledger. We think about 2018 as the Blue Wave, and it was. Democrats won over 40 seats. And as I said, in the exit polls, 55% of people disapproved of Trump, of voters, and 90% of them voted Democratic. But in that same Blue Wave, Republicans beat four incumbent Democratic senators, which is very unusual in a theoretical wave year. They beat Democratic incumbents in Missouri, North Dakota, Indiana, and Florida, all states where Trump was above 50. Now, in that year, Tester, Sherrod Brown and Manchin also survived in states that were Trump over 50. And Democrats won states in 24 that Trump carried, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin. They won Senate races there. But I think that if we’re looking at the dynamic of ’26, the issue is going to be where is Trump in that state, in that district?
He was at 45 in 2018 in national approval in the exit poll, and Democrats won over 40 seats. Probably can’t win as many this year for reasons we could talk about, the demographic mismatch isn’t as big as it was then. But if Trump’s at 45 below, it would be shocking if Democrats didn’t win 20 seats in the House, 25 even.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, it’s so interesting. Just a couple of points, and then you can correct or elaborate on my elaborations. Of course, this is reasonable in a way. It’s not mystical math here. It’s an off-year election. What is Congress going to do? They’re currently controlled by the President’s own party. If the President keeps control of his own party, he’ll get done some at least much of what he wants done. If he loses control of one and certainly both houses, he won’t get done much that he wants to get done. Democrats won’t be able to do much because Trump will veto stuff he really doesn’t like presumably, and they may not win both houses. So for voters to think about it, the reason Trump approval disapproval is so key is that an off-year election is either, do you want to check Trump or not, basically.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yes, totally.
BILL KRISTOL:
And so it’s not like… Just to clarify, it seems a little crazy to say, “Well, this one number is the explanation,” but it’s a number that’s key to the way people think about off year elections, I think.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
And more, and more over the course of our lifetime. The phrase I use is that the color on the front of the jersey now matters a lot more than the number on the back of the jersey. It used to be if you were a Landrieu in Louisiana, or a Pryor in Arkansas or a Bumpers, you could surf, you could swim against this tide, but right, these are becoming fundamentally parliamentary elections and they’re about whose hand do you want on the tiller driving national policy? And for the vast majority of voters, the way in which they make that determination is their view of what the incumbent president is doing. That is how voters decide which party they want in control, whether they support what the president is doing or not. And as we’re seeing, all of these incoming presidents by and large have pursued a reconciliation, basically a reconciliation strategy of passing an agenda that is popular among their core voters essentially on a party line basis in their first year.
And then the rest of the electorate is like, “Whoa, this is more than I signed up for.” And you get the impulse in that first midterm to check the president rather than to empower him to go further. Reagan, were you in the administration from the beginning or later?
BILL KRISTOL:
No, just the second term. Yeah, second term.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
What was Reagan’s slogan in ’82, stay the course? You just elected me. I’m doing what you elected me to do. And voters are like, “Eh, I don’t know if we signed up for all of this.” Bill Moyers and people like us, and the documentary, and Stockman and the Cuts. It just keeps happening. And certainly Trump in ’25 took what was by historic standards a very narrow victory, as a license to upend not only the policy agenda, but the constitutional system at home and our relations with the world. It’s not shocking that there are a lot of voters out there saying, “Whoa, let’s kind of slow this down a little bit.”
BILL KRISTOL:
And I suppose, well, just a couple of implications of that. One is that the character of the opposition party, the names on the jersey, as you put it, matters less because you’re not electing X to the Senate to pass his favorite bill. He’s not going to. So you’re electing him to check Trump, or to okay what Trump’s doing. Yeah. So I think, again, obviously the character of the opposition party will matter a lot in 2028. We’ll get to that, but probably less, not nothing, but probably less in 2026.
RON BROWNSTEIN
I wrote a piece this spring going back and looking at the impact of views of the party out of the White House on the midterm. And the answer is, there is no consistent relationship. In 2010, the image of the Republican Party was, in general, if you ask, “What do you think of the Republican Party? What do you think of the Democratic Party?” The Republican Party image was no more favorable. In fact, it was less favorable in many polls than the Democratic image. And then they had the best midterm of either party in 1938 because they weren’t voting about what they thought about the party out of the White House. People were voting on what they thought about the guy who was actually in the White House. And at that point, they were pretty unnerved by… They felt the economy wasn’t recovering, and the ACA seemed like an overreach and it hadn’t kicked in and all of that
So attitudes, yes, attitudes, general attitudes about the parties, trust in the parties, I think they still matter quite a bit in the presidential election. And Democrats obviously have a lot of work to do on that front. But I don’t think this is going to be nearly as relevant as people think in ’26. And like I said, can Susan Collins win with Trump disapproval at 57 or 58 in Maine? Maybe if it’s the oyster farmer. Probably not if it’s the governor, can Roy Cooper win if Trump is at 50 or 51 in North Carolina? Maybe. But how many more of those are there going to be on either side? I don’t think very many.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, this is where the math, just the 90% on each side makes such a difference compared to the old days when people voted for the individual candidate in some ways and there was less party government. And you mentioned reconciliation, but you were short handing the reconciliation bills. That’s not a strategy of reconciliation or strategy of partisanship. And I do, yeah, it just becomes math. If you get 90% of the 55% who disapprove and your opponent gets 90% of the 45% who approve, you win. And the opposite is true. Now you jerk that 90% up maybe to 93, you could decrease it to 87. But if you just, again, just mathematically, the denominator, whatever the right way to say that is, it becomes so crucial, the 45 or 55.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
You’ve just described the battlefield of 2026. If Mike Rogers can hold the Democratic… Mike Rogers is a good kind of formidable candidate with some centrist credentials in Michigan, the Republican.
BILL KRISTOL:
Barely lost in ’24.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
If he can hold the eventual Democratic nominee to 86 or 87% of people who disapprove of Trump, he probably wins. If they get 89 or 90, he probably loses.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, if Trump is at… But that’s on the margin, assuming Trump is right at the bubble where he goes to a 50/50. But of course, if Trump is down at 38, which is possible—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
You’re not going to win.
BILL KRISTOL:
No. And if Trump is up at 48, then it becomes very doable for him. I mean, 50.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Exactly.
BILL KRISTOL:
It is striking how much that denominator, if that’s the right word or whatever, matters. On the Jay Jones race, I had a funny exchange with a couple of colleagues, younger colleagues, and they were predicting what was going to happen the day before the election or something. And they were all, “Well, of course, Spanberger’s going to win, and probably the lieutenant governor candidate win, but Jay Jones, man, that press has been brutal. He probably won’t make it.” And I remember it was possible. I mean, he did run 9, 10 points behind Spanberger, so it wasn’t crazy to think this. But I remember thinking, “I don’t know, but if you guys are too young to have been through, in a funny way, real wave elections.” The whole definition of a wave is that Jay Jones wins, and incidentally does not win by 0.3. Jay Jones won by 5 or 6 points. Against the most attractive of the three Republican candidates running because the incumbent AG was by far the best of the Republican candidates.
And that’s what a wave is. And I guess it gets to my question, how much do you think ’26 is a real wave? How much of it is just the kind of normal midterm snapback in both the House and the Senate?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Well, I think there are a couple—
BILL KRISTOL:
Say what you were going to say, what I have to do at the very end there if you want.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I think there are a couple constraints on it being a wave in the way that we historically think of them as ’94 or ’06 or ’10, where it’s this massive 50 seats and five or six or seven Senate seats. I think there are two constraints on that. One, as I said, I think 2018 gives you a really clear look at the first constraint, which is that the places where Trump are still popular, if he is net positive, it’s going to be really hard for Democrats to win. I mean, I’m guessing in ’86, Reagan was still net positive in North Dakota, South Dakota, and some of the other farm states where Democrats won those Senate races. I don’t think that will happen today. So ’86 Republicans lost seven or eight Senate races, including in states where all across the farm belt where Reagan was still probably right around 50.
I think, can Democrats really win in Iowa? Can they really get Trump? Is Trump really going to be under 50 in Iowa? Maybe he’s going to be right around there. I mean, so that’s the first constraint. I mean, the first constraint is that in the places where he retains popularity, it’s going to be hard for Democrats to win. Maybe a couple governor’s races could be different. Obviously there’s a little more play there. Kentucky, Kansas have Democratic governors, for example. But the second bigger thing in the House in particular is that the demographic mismatch has already been culled to a large extent. One way you get a wave is you have a lot of House members holding on in seats that demographically look like places that mostly vote for the other side.We saw this in ’94. The backlash against Clinton took a first ax cut at Democrats who were holding on in heavily white working class districts, especially in the South. And they had been winning there. They had survived the whole Reagan and Bush era, but the timbers underneath them were getting rotten. And all the weight of the first two years of the Clinton presidency was added on. A whole bunch of them lost.
In 2010, you saw the second piece of that, which is the Tea Party election obliterated Democrats in white working class districts. I mean, the Blue Dogs, as they were called by then, were hunted virtually to extinction. Now what that’s meant is that so right now, as I calculated the other day with my colleagues at Bloomberg, there are 160 House seats where there are more whites than the national average and fewer of them have college degrees than the national average. These are basically the core white working class districts. And Republicans already have, it’s 142 to 18 in those districts. There aren’t that many more of those places to win. Now what Democrats are facing this year is a little bit on the other side, which is that in 2018, you had the Republican equivalent of the Blue Dogs where all of these House members who had been holding on and white collar suburban districts that have been voting Democratic really since the Clinton era, but they were still holding on in the suburbs of Philly or Detroit or Northern Virginia say—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, my district here, Barbara Comstock was winning. And they hadn’t been voting that Democratic in all those presidential elections yet. Remember, this is only ’18, so they’re still sort of voting for Romney, right?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
So in 2018, 31 or 32 of the 40 seats Democrats win have more white college graduates than the national average. It’s the same kind of thing as 2010. The timbers underneath were getting rotten year by year. And then you put all the weight of the Trump first two years and all these guys fell through the floor. Well, okay, the problem Democrats have is there just aren’t as many of those seats available to them. I mean, there are only three Republicans in the House and districts that voted for Trump. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator left in the states that voted three times against Trump. 19 states voted three times against Trump. Democrats have 37 of their 38 seats. So there aren’t as many mismatches to easily take out in a “wave” year. Part of the definition of wave, as you know, as I think you were alluding to with your younger colleagues, which is now pretty much all of our colleagues. But part of a wave year is people lose who you don’t expect to lose. That’s almost the definition of a wave.
And I suspect we will see some of that, but it’s hard to imagine it getting up to these historic standards because we’re sorted so effectively now that, if you look at the target list for the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, it is heavily centered on districts where the white education level is just below the national average. They have to cut into that core Republican turf. I mean, they’re not going to win districts where only 25% of whites have a college degree, but if it’s 35, 37, 38, the national’s 42 I think, that’s where there are…like places in Pennsylvania or Jersey. I mean, those kinds of districts. I mean, there are a few of the 2018 style districts, Omaha where Don Bacon is retiring or Tom Kane Jr., places where they might be able to just do what they did in 2018. But to go further, they actually have to go a little deeper into both demographic and partisan territory that leans a little more Republican. And so that puts limits on how far you can go.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. Well, okay, we’ve gotten to the very interesting question of the socioeconomic, let’s call it demographic, nature of the two coalitions that are the two parties. And it’s probably worth saying, you’ve alluded to the importance of college education at least among whites is a key factor. But just say a word about what the two parties look like coalitionally. Both, I guess there are two ways to cut this, right? One is what percentage of white college graduates are Democratic versus Republican? And the other is to flip it on 90 degrees, as it were, and say, in each party, what percentage of the coalition is X? Because that’s important too, we’ll come to that maybe. But anyway, so walk us through that. You know this stuff better than anyone.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
The phrase I’ve used sometimes is the parties represent not only different visions of America, but different versions of America. The Republican Coalition today, Trump has diversified it. He has brought in more non-white voters and hasn’t probably raised the floor as high as they expected or hoped after ’24, but he has raised the floor with minority voters. But nonetheless, if you look at the broad outlines of the Republican Coalition, it more or less looks like America itself 20 years ago. I mean, basically slightly over half of Trump’s votes came from whites without a college degree. Another maybe 52, 53%, another 30% or so came from whites with a college degree. And the last 15%, which was a significant increase from the past, came from people of color. And we’ll come back to that, especially people of color without a college degree. And that led to a lot of the speculation after the election that Trump had built this new stable multiracial working-class coalition.
The Democratic Coalition today looks like what America itself may look like in 15 or 20 years. I mean, it’s essentially a little under one third of the Democratic votes for Harris, all the votes for Harris, came from whites without a college degree. So a little over 30% of Democratic votes were whites without a college degree versus a little over 50% of Republicans. A big difference. About 30, 31% of her votes came from whites with a college degree, roughly the same as the share that Trump got of his votes. Nearly 40% of Democratic votes came from people of color.
Another way to look at this is, by the way, is married single, right? I mean, the parties are kind of mirror images of each other. Religion is really telling. If you look at religion, right now, white Christians are down to about 40% of the whole country. Somewhere in the Obama era, the white working class fell below a majority of the population, which they had been through all of our history. White Christians, some point in the 21st century fell below a majority of the population are now down to about 40%. But two-thirds of Republicans are still white Christians. Compared to only one fifth, 22% of Democrats. They’re non-white—
BILL KRISTOL:
Just [inaudible] for once. That’s so striking.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
It’s three times. The biggest share.
BILL KRISTOL:
Two versions of America, but I mean, that is a massive gulf. White Christians are the biggest group in America. And you’re saying two-thirds of the Republican Party. When you’re a Republican office holder, you look out if you were an average—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Two-thirds of your voters are white Christians.
BILL KRISTOL:
And if you’re a Democratic officeholder in an average district and you look out or you look nationally—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
One fifth.
BILL KRISTOL:
…that’s just such a difference of—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Oh, Democratic Coalition, 22% roughly white Christians and roughly one-third non-white Christians, one-third people who are not affiliated with any religion, so secular, more or less. And then the last 10% are Jews, Muslims, Hindus. So it’s a very diverse religious coalition. Republican Coalition is growing more secular too, but still 65% are white Christians. Another 16% are non-white Christians. Only about 5% are other religions. And then the last 12 or so are people who are secular.
The people of the Public Religion Research Institute do a nice chart in their annual survey of American religion. And the Democratic Coalition looks a lot like Americans 18 to 29 overall look in terms of their religious breakdown. And the Republican Coalition looks a lot like people 65 plus. So I mean, one reason you could say our politics are so unstable is the Republicans represent what America has been, and they are slightly at a phase with where we are today, but Democrats are at a phase too because they’re pitched into the future. They’re both phasing in and out in some time travel story.
So you have these two… And so the geography follows this too, right? Because essentially a Democratic Coalition that is heavily based on college educated whites and non-white voters, and that’s the economy and demography of a lot of big metros where you have a lot of white collar information age folks across racial lines, and then a working class that’s primarily non-white, a service industry working class that’s non-white. And whereas the Republican Coalition is based more on the periphery of the big metros, which tend to be more homogeneously white, blue collar and Christian, more tied into industries like ag and energy and manufacturing.
The phrase I sometimes use is all the cherries on the slot machine now line up. I mean, you just see how the parties have sorted the country demographically, generationally, religious lines. Trump pressed at these boundaries in ’24, without a doubt. I mean, he improved in virtually every big city in the country. I mean, I think literally in every big city in the country. And he made big gains among working class non-white voters, especially men, but not exclusively men. He did very well among Latinas, not only Latino men. And so you had all of these very optimistic predictions among Republicans that he had cracked the code. And he had built this stable, durable, working-class coalition across racial lines that would be in position to dominate politics for years.
Because the imperative for Republicans and for Trump is that their best group, which are whites without a college degree, are still shrinking. I mean, it’s really important. Even with all of their increase in turnout under Trump, their share of the overall population is declining so much that their share of the electorate is still going down. Every data source agrees. The data sources differ a little on how much of the electorate you think are non-college whites, but every one of them agree that pretty much it goes down two to three points every four years. In the census, they were down to 38% of all voters, the lowest ever. ’20 was the first time they fell below 40 or around 40 in the census. So the Republicans best group is shrinking. Even in places like Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, it’s not shrinking as fast, but it’s still shrinking.
And so Trump in ’24 seemed to point a way out of this. It’s like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. It’s squeezing in on them. He seemed to point a way out of it by saying, “Okay, well, no, we can bring in these growing groups, which are blue collar, non-college, non-white voters.” And he did. I mean, he was very successful. But a year later, if you look at all non-college non-white voters, his approval rating consistently is under 30% with them in polling. Now 25, 26 sometimes. And these are voters who Republicans were, I think, overly optimistic that they had brought them over on cultural issues, kind of a revulsion for Democrats around some of the cultural issues. And they may in fact agree more with Republicans than Democrats and some of the cultural issues, but it’s pretty clear that what brought them over was they were unhappy with the economy. And now that they are still unhappy with the economy, they’re drifting away. And if they drift away, Republicans are back in the same demographic squeeze that they faced before 2024.
BILL KRISTOL:
And that’s the demographic squeeze that hurts them in the House quite a lot more than in the Senate, right?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yep, absolutely. Yeah. In fact, in the Senate, you could say there is a blue collar barricade that Democrats have to get over to win the Senate. If you think about it, you can win North Carolina, Georgia, those two Senate races, Democrats get in the 20s among non-college whites only in the 20s in those states because so many of them are evangelical Christians, but the black populations are big enough and the college white population is open enough to Democrats that you can put together a winning coalition as Biden showed in 2020 and Ossoff and Warnock showed, and the Democrats are showing the governor races in North Carolina. If you go beyond that, you think in Maine, you’ve got to win non-college whites. In New Hampshire, you’ve got to win non-college whites to win. Two states Democrats have to win in the Senate. That’s different. They’re New England, more of them vote Democratic. They can probably do that.
Where do you go next? You go to Michigan, there’s no way around it. I mean, non-college whites are shrinking there too, but they’re still just under half of the electorate. You have to perform credibly. You don’t have to win them, but you have to perform credibly there. Ohio and Iowa, they’re even more of the electorate. They’re 56 to 60% of the electorate.
BILL KRISTOL:
And they’re older states too, which corresponds with the non-college, I guess.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Well, it goes with it. So Sherrod Brown, I don’t know what the exact number is, but he’s got to perform very competitively among… There’s no alternative. You can’t add it up any other way. And in Iowa, even more so because there are basically no minorities. So it’s like 60% non-college whites, 30% college whites, maybe 8% minorities. You’ve got to come very close to winning non-college whites to win the Senate seat in Iowa. And that’s before we start talking about Montana and Wyoming and the Dakotas and places where Democrats won in our lifetime. So, I actually think the working class white problem is a bigger issue for Democrats in the Senate than either the House or the presidency.
BILL KRISTOL:
Because of the way the Senate has seats has states that are lop— has more states that advantage than [inaudible 00:40:56]
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah. I mean, you can win the Electoral College if you add Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to the 19 states that voted each time against Trump. And yeah, you’ve got to perform credibly among non-college whites in those states, and Wisconsin has the biggest share, but Democrats have shown they can do that in those places. To win the Senate, you’ve got to go beyond that into some pretty tough terrain.
The best way to understand that, by the way, I’ve said a few times, 19 states voted against Trump all three times. 25 states voted for Trump all three times. I’m going to give you a trivia question. So that’s the most states any party has won in three consecutive elections since Reagan and Bush won 38 in the ’80, ’84 and ’88. They won 38 states three straight times. After that though, in 1989, after those three consecutive victories, Democrats still had a majority of the Senate seats from those 38 states.
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Wow, right? Including both of them in 11 or 12. I think it was 12. They had a majority of the Senate seats in the states that voted three times for Reagan and Bush in the 80s. So, 25 states have voted three times for Trump, since ’16. Do you know how many of the Senate seats Democrats have in those 25 states?
BILL KRISTOL:
I would guess one or two. Zero.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Zero.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. So, that’s a big … Yeah. That says it all really.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah, it says it all. It was seven after 2016, eight when Doug Jones won in Alabama, and since ’18 on, again, in this pattern we’re talking about, and where Trump is strong, he’s strong. And they have eliminated the Democratic senators in those Trump states. So, obviously, if you’re seating 50 Senate seats off the bat, you’ve got to run the table on everything else and hold the White House.
So, you’ve got to find… And even the Democratic competitiveness in the Senate, to some extent, seems to me is very much on unstable ground. Because the best way to think about the Senate, 25 states voted three times for Trump, Republicans have all 50 of their Senate seats. 19 states voted three times against Trump, Democrats have 37 of their 38 and they have a reasonable shot at the last one, Susan Collins, a very reasonable shot, this year. But if you look at the six states that have flipped back and forth in the Trump era, so you got Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin in the Rust Belt, and then Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, in the Sunbelt. Democrats now have 10 of their 12 Senate seats. Is that sustainable? If you have states that are flipping at the presidential level, can you really count on a five to one advantage, and they’re probably not in the long term.
Because some of those seats will come up in presidential years or whatever. So, ultimately, I think Democrats have to figure out a way to get back into something two, three, four of the 50 in the Trump states, North Carolina, Ohio, obviously Texas is kind of out there, where the Trump decline in the Latino vote, Alaska, Democrats are very interested in Alaska, if Mary Peltola runs.
But to me, that is the job. Yes, you can win North Carolina and Maine, maybe even Ohio, and then win the White House back, and you’re there, but until you can sort of more… If the other side starts with a 50 seat cushion, it gets really hard.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Yeah, just to finish that point up. Yeah, the natural break in the Senate, if you want to put it this way, is 50 to 38 Republican. The natural break in the House pretty much mirrors the popular vote normally, and the popular vote over the last several cycles, both presidentially and in terms of the national House races has been 50/50-ish, I think one could say.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Well, the Democrats won at what, in seven of eight.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, Democrats have won the popular, usually the House has been more flipped back and forth, but usually it’s narrow margins.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Right, narrow, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Except when you get the mini waves, or waves. So, I mean, the House reflects less than it used to in the sense that the waves are constrained by the nature of the district, by the geographic sorting, but still reflects the popular vote in a way that the Senate doesn’t, that’s the simplest way to put it, I suppose.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah, that is.
BILL KRISTOL:
There’s a big advantage there in the Senate. One thing that I think is brought home very well, the different character of the coalitions and the parties. I guess, one way the Democrats could help themselves is by reducing the Republican advantage, obviously among white working class voters, they could also maximize their own advantage among some of their voters, though they’re pretty high up already with them, and more the greater risk is probably that repeat of what Trump was able to pull off, than to really blow that number up even higher, the majorities among minorities and so forth.
Now, the white college voters are split basically, 50/50-ish, right? And that, you could just intuitively look at that and say, well, that needn’t last forever. There are many different people who are white college graduates, and obviously if you start to divvy those up by region, by church attendance, by the professions they’re in as white college graduates, you start to see the splits there too. But how fluid is that, or how much is that kind of… Is that 50/50, I don’t know, a fairly stable 50/50, if you want to put it that way?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Well, I think the college educated white women are now overwhelmingly Democrat, it will not be surprising if in competitive races in ’26, most Democrats are winning over 60% of them, and abortion was obviously really important in that, in ’22 and ’24. I think RFK Jr. and vaccines is going to help push those numbers even higher. I would love to see, I have not taken the time to look at this, but I’m guessing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s approval rating among college-educated white women is pretty low. College-educated white men are a true swing group, and they are very economic-focused. They’re pretty conservative on economic issues, I think. They’re, as a group, again, we’re kind of generalizing about the whole group, but the group probably leans toward lower taxes, less regulation, they’re probably the part of the electorate most likely to have stock, and maybe the most influenced by improvements in the stock market.
So, it’s going to be hard for Democrats. I think the goal for Democrats probably in a good year is slightly better than 50/50 among men, and then you get into like 62, 63 range among the women, and more women than men vote. And then on the non-college whites, the flip side is that the men, non-college white men are kind of like the Republican equivalent of the college white women. They’re just hard to move for Democrats, it just doesn’t really matter what’s going on. But the blue collar white women, the non-college white women, they are movable, I think a little more… This is all relative, movable means like four points, three or four points. But it is worth noting that the Democrats best recent performance among blue collar white women was in 2018, when the Republicans last tried to repeal the ACA, and the focus on healthcare and preexisting conditions was quite intense.
There’s lots of research outside of politics that say that in working class families particular, I think all families, but especially working class families, women do a lot of the healthcare planning and paying and managing and dealing with, and they may be more sensitive to the Democratic argument that Republicans are endangering your healthcare security to fund tax cuts for the rich. And I would not be shocked if Democrats perform a little better than we’ve seen among the blue collar white women to the… The more healthcare is front and center, the better their chances of driving up that number. But having said all that, having said all that, the key for Democrats in the near term is reversing Trump’s inroads with the working class non-white voters. By the way, as I have written, college-educated non-white voters are growing much faster than non-college non-white voters. So, the numbers are not close since the early 2000s.
We’ve added millions of college educated non-white voters, and the number of non-college non-white voters is basically pretty close, it hasn’t changed that much. So, again, Republicans are playing with the side of the pie that’s not growing, but it is growing some, unlike their base of the non-college whites, who are actually shrinking. So, I think for Democrats, I think job one in ’26 and ’28 is really to push the Republicans back closer to the levels from 2000 to 2020 among working class non-white voters. Trump’s gains in ’24 really did offer the possibility of a very different political future, if he could consolidate it. There’s no indication that he’s consolidated it.
On the one hand, like I said, they’re not getting the thing they wanted the most, which is a better cost of living, and on the other hand, they’re getting a lot of stuff they didn’t really want, especially this militarized deportation offensive. I think you had to twist yourself into knots to convince yourself that wasn’t coming, but nonetheless, there are a lot of Latino voters who convinced themselves it wasn’t coming, and now that it’s here, they’re not sure how they feel about it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. I’m so glad you brought up and clarified the importance of gender, which is I guess the one thing I feel like we had left out, or I’d left out, in thinking about the socioeconomic splits and fault lines that obviously intersect in complicated ways. But well, you just mentioned ’26 and ’28, so let’s close for just a few minutes on ’28, which is much more speculative, much more wide open. You said earlier that the off year doesn’t predict the presidential year much. And that makes sense also intellectually, and people treat it as a mystical thing sometimes, but if people are voting in the off year to check the incumbent president, then the next election’s about who’s going to be president, it’s not about would we want to check the president.
And so, it’s a very different calculation, and you can want to check Reagan in ’82, and by ’84, you could decide, I still want Reagan, either he’s been vindicated, or even if he hasn’t been fully vindicated, I still like him better than the Democratic alternative as president. And in fact, with the other party having won, in that case, they held the House, and didn’t take back the Senate yet, but in many cases, having won one or two Houses, you actually feel a little better about voting for the incumbent president. That was Clinton ’96, I would say, because he’s going to be checked a little bit more than he was in his first two years.
So, on the one hand, it’s such a different dynamic, a presidential election, a very different electorate, you can say a word about that, this will presumably be an open seat presidential election. Trump running for a third term would have its own dynamic, of course. So, either way, a very more volatile situation. So, on the one hand, so different, but on the other hand, I don’t know, you have these two massive forces engaged in trench warfare, so it’s so different, but it’s not so different at the same time.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
As you said, shouldn’t we predict that 25 of the states go Republican in ’19/18, whatever that was, go Democratic again? They did the last three times. So, how different is the presidential character of it? How different is the open seat character of it? How different is the leadership of each party, which didn’t change much, you could say, well, didn’t change at all on the Republican side, obviously, in ’16, ’20 and ’24, and in a way didn’t change much on the Democratic side? You had Clinton who, you had three veteran… Well, Clinton and Biden who were similar generation, you might say, and had worked in similar Democratic parties, and then Harris who was younger, but was basically Biden’s VP.
And so, finally, and then putting this all together also, how much does it matter that… How much is it an open seat, and how much is it still kind of a referendum backward looking on Trump? So, we could maybe begin with that last one, which is… Yeah.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
So, let’s start. I think that obviously the midterms have always been an imperfect predictor of the following presidential. There are lots of examples in each case. 1930 was really bad for Republicans, and then Hoover got wiped out in 1932. 1918 was really bad for Democrats, and then they lost the White House in 1920. 1958 was really bad for Republicans, and then they lost the White House in 1960. And ’66 was bad, and they lost the White House in ’68. So, there’s certainly cases where the midterm did lead to the following result, but lots of times when it didn’t. ’82 was bad for Reagan, then he won 49 states. Clinton got wiped out in ’94, won reelection. Obama had the worst midterms since 1938, and then he won reelection. For that matter, the 1938 was horrible, and then Roosevelt won reelection. So, midterms, the relationship between midterms and the subsequent presidential has always been a little random.
I think it’s even less valuable now than it used to be, precisely because we are in this era of super high turnout, largely driven by Trump. And I think the main aspect of my interpretation of the world, that the last few elections have caused me to question and to conclude that maybe that I’ve been wrong about is, I think when you get up to 155 or 160 million people voting, which is what we’ve had in the last two elections, you’re in a circumstance where there are a lot more people voting, certainly than in the midterm, who just aren’t that invested in the ideological firefight between the parties on all of the issues on which they are butting heads, and are really voting on conditions.
BILL KRISTOL:
Give people a sense of what the magnitude of the numbers. So, if it’s 155, 160 in the presidential, what’s the off-year election total number?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I think it’s like 120, 115.
BILL KRISTOL:
Or less even, 110, 120, I think. Yeah.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
115?
BILL KRISTOL:
Two-thirds, basically, I think is…
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Which is a huge X to add to the electorate, right?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
And 160 was 2020, I think it was 156 this time. Even comparing it to previous presidentials, which would have been in the low 140s, right? We’re adding a lot of casual voters, people who are not tied into the system, and I think are not that deeply engaged in a lot of the issues that motivate the partisans. Partisans are engaged in that. But these are people, people describe them as low information voters, or low propensity voters, they may not be following every turn of political debate, but as I like to say, they are expert in their own lives, and they know how they are doing. And they are just a block of voters, a lot of them are younger, a lot of them in this last election were younger, non-white, non-college non-white voters. And if you look, Trump really did well among younger Latino voters who did not regularly participate before because they thought that what they got wasn’t working.
So, I think that starting with the assumption that the midterms are always an imperfect predictor of the following presidential, I think they’re less valuable even than before because the nature of the electorate is so different. And you’re not only getting a lot more voters, I think you’re getting a lot of voters who are not as invested in the structure of the fight between the parties. Now, I think you were alluding to this in your question, there is one through line though, which is that I think attitudes to the outgoing president are still really important in the midterm. In the election to succeed him, assuming Trump is not going to run. And it doesn’t work evenly in either direction. There are multiple examples of an outgoing president being popular and not being able to deliver the election for his successor. So, if you think about, Reagan did, in ’88, Reagan was popular and he did deliver it for Bush.
Clinton was at 60% approval, Gore lost in 2000. Obama was still pretty popular in 2016, and Clinton lost. Eisenhower was obviously very popular, Eisenhower was well over 50 in ’60, and they lost. So, a popular president, I think, is no guarantee of winning, I think an unpopular president is—
BILL KRISTOL:
All three of those came pretty close though. So, maybe—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
They came very close.
BILL KRISTOL:
… a popular president is probably—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
An asset.
BILL KRISTOL:
… an indicator that you’re not going to get crushed—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
It’s an asset, but it hasn’t been dispositive.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Now, an unpopular president, let’s think about this. Wilson leaves office in 1920, he’s unpopular, they lose. Truman leaves office in ’52, he’s unpopular, they lose. Johnson leaves office in ’68, he’s unpopular, they lose. W leaves office in ’08, he’s unpopular, they lose. We don’t have enough… All the political scientists will tell us both. We don’t have enough cases here to have an ironclad rule, but I think that an unpopular outgoing president is more consistently a drag on the successor than a popular outgoing president is an asset to the successor. So, if Trump’s somewhere around 50, this can go either way. If Trump leaves office where he is now, it would really be something for Vance to win. It would—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, how much would it matter if it’s Vance? So, some of those—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I don’t think it matters.
BILL KRISTOL:
… some of those instances were where the incumbent VP clearly got hurt, Humphrey by Johnson, let’s say, others though, what strikes me is, in ’08, having been pretty close to that campaign, is McCain was not like Bush.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
He was not—
BILL KRISTOL:
The McCain and Bush wings were war with each other for years in the Republican Party, and it didn’t seem to matter, frankly, right?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I don’t think it matters to them. It probably matters a little, and a little can be the difference between winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or losing them and being president or not, but I don’t think it matters vastly. If it was JD Vance in ’28, he’s going to win… If it’s JD Vance, 92% of people who disapprove of Trump are going to vote for the Democrat, and if it’s somebody else, it might be 90, that’s what we’re talking about, that kind of magnitude of difference. So, I think that is going to be really important, and again, it’s also in each place.
The Democrats did not make as big an improvement among non-college whites in ’25 as they did among other groups, like Latinos or college whites, in those New Jersey and Virginia races. So, when you get to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, is Trump a little better at the end of the line than he is in Virginia, and maybe even North Carolina? It’s going to matter. Again, I will be fascinated when we get to ’28, how many states does a Republican win where there’s majority disapproval of Trump on his way out the door, assuming he’s going out the door. And to your point, I agree with you, I think it matters a little. If you find somebody who’s not directly tied to them, but I don’t… If—
BILL KRISTOL:
Glenn Youngkin or Brian Kemp, you don’t think it really fundamentally changes anything?
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I don’t think it changes it entirely. It would change it a little, I think it would change it a little. But again, the same way I was saying, if Mike Rogers loses, 89% of people who disapprove of Trump, he’s going to lose, if he loses only 86% of them, he might win. That’s kind of the difference. But the difference between winning and losing can be that narrow in a country this dug in. So, if that’s the case, where are we? We’ve got the 19 states that voted Democratic in all three elections against Trump, we’ve got the 25 that voted for Trump all three times, neither one of them is 270 electoral college votes, don’t make me remember off the top of my head how many… I think they’re almost exactly the same.
And then, you’ve got the six that have flipped at any point, which are Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or as Tad Devine, the great Tad Divine, longtime political consultant calls them, “MIPAWI,” because they’re basically one state and they almost always all vote together, and then North Carolina. And then do we have anything else? Do we think that Trump will go out of office strong enough that Republicans can really contest Minnesota or New Hampshire?
BILL KRISTOL:
New Hampshire, yeah.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Or he will go out weak enough that Democrats can really contest Ohio, or Texas, or Alaska? Maybe, but more likely he’ll go out in a position where those seven states will again pick the president.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, that assumes, yeah, no great depression, presumably or farm prices are so horrible that Democrats win Kansas, Iowa.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Strong enough. Yeah, strong enough or weak enough. If he’s weak enough for Democrats to contest Ohio, Iowa, Alaska.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Yeah.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Or if he’s strong enough that Republicans can really contest Minnesota, New Hampshire, maybe Virginia and New Jersey, although it seems less likely after ’25 than they probably thought. Yeah, you can imagine the circle getting somewhat wider if the range of possibilities on his performance get somewhat wider. But assuming he’s somewhere between 45 and 50, at the end, doesn’t seem unreasonable, probably going to be under 50, but it might be close to it. You’re back in the same place. And so you’re asking, Republicans probably don’t have a choice. I mean, if Trump’s [inaudible] among Republicans stays at 85 or 90, Vance is going to be the nominee. I mean, there’s no way to beat the sitting vice president if the coalition is satisfied with the outgoing president.
The Democrats, James Carville once said to me, “Every Democratic voter is now a political consultant.” They’re not asking who they want as president so much as they’re asking who they think people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin really above all, will accept. So you filter whatever you think. “I love Gavin Newsom. I love the way he’s standing up to…” I’m thinking as a South Carolina, a Charleston white collar Democrat. There aren’t as many of them there, but there’s some. And they’re sitting there looking at the field, coming through. “I love Gavin Newsom. I love the way he stands at the Trump. I love the way he pushes back against him.” How’s he going to do in rural Wisconsin? I mean, that’s the next thing. So all of the Democrats are going to have to deal with that. And as voters sort out who they think has the best chance.
BILL KRISTOL:
So it sounds like you’re saying, I mean, obviously things can change and all kinds of events could happen that could totally disorient and disrupt things. But that ironically, Trump, let’s just assume he doesn’t run, but of course it’s even more true if he does run. Trump remains in a way the dominant first question you should ask about the ’28 election, not just ’26.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I think so. I think so.
BILL KRISTOL:
And secondly, that for all the generational change that I think is very … I mean for the Democrats, it has been unusual to have had Hillary after Obama, which seemed like, okay, generational change, whole new world. Then you get the wife of the former president who also was the Secretary of State or the current president. That’s Hillary Clinton. Then you get Biden, the vice president of the former president who’s older than Hillary. And then you get Biden at least till the last 100 days of ’24. And then you get Biden’s vice president. So that presumably, unless Harris would be the nominee, you get real change. If you can put it that way for the first time in the Democratic side since ’08, I guess. Republican side, you get presumably not Trump for the first time since 2016, after three straight. You think, okay, wide open, open seats. Who knows? Everything’s shaken up. But it sounds like you’re a little dubious about how much things fundamentally get shaken up.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Well, I feel like strong candidates advance currents that are already flowing or accelerate trends that are already happening. Some of the white collar counties in Virginia and Colorado went for Kerry in ’04, and then the states themselves went for Obama. He pushed it further. Democrats had started doing well with millennials in 2000 and 2004, and Obama pushed it further. Obviously, Republicans have been strong since Reagan with non-college whites, but Trump pushed it further. And then he started making those impressive inroads among working class non-whites and took that to a peak in ’24. So I don’t think candidates entirely create their own weather. They more kind of intensify the weather systems that are already out there. And to me, job one for Democrats in ’28 is to win back those working class non-white voters who strayed. I think that is the most achievable thing they can do to get back to the White House.
And if you do that, you’re probably improving a couple points with the non-college white women. So it’s finding someone who can do that. There’s obviously, no matter how you draw it up on paper, they actually have to go out and run in the primaries. That to me is such an important thing. I mean, you can sit here and say … I could actually say Mark Kelly, Ruben Gallego would be the perfect ticket except they’re both—
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. They won literally in ’24 when Trump was winning their state. And so what’s complicated about that? Or Slotkin and the same thing.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Yeah. It’s like you have people, but you actually have to go out and convince primary voters to vote for you. It doesn’t matter how the political consultants can sit around playing fantasy baseball. I mean, there are people that do wins above replacement for political candidates. So taking the baseball stat, trying to apply it to the political world, you’ve got to go out and do it. And toward that end, I will just say that a year ago, I assume that … I think Chris Murphy and I think Mark Kelly and even Gallego could all be formidable, but there’s going to be, I think, a lot of inclination among Democratic voters to find someone outside of Washington, a governor. I think that a lot of voters will kind of feel like getting away … They’re so down on the Democratic leadership in Washington that even if you’re not part of it, you kind of get tainted by it.
It is worth noting that a year ago, all of the governors, Democratic governors who might run in ’28 were somewhere … If you looked at states where none of them had an intrinsic connection, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, they were all at three to five, Pritzker, Tim Waltz. Now the rest of them—
BILL KRISTOL:
Wait, just short at three to five percent.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Three to five percent.
BILL KRISTOL:
In states that they didn’t get in other states.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
That they had no intrinsic connection to. Yeah. Now they’re all at three to five still. And Newsom’s at 20 to 25, and that doesn’t mean he’s definitely going to be the nominee, but it’s not nothing either. I mean, he has caught the attention of Democratic voters and the wall he’s going to hit and he’s going to have to get over is what we were talking about before. All those people say, “Yeah, I love him. I love what he’s doing,” but how are they going to react to him in suburban Detroit and in rural Wisconsin? I mean, he’s going to have to get over that hump and then you’ll have these others making their case that, “Well, no, I’m the guy who can do that.”
I think it’s kind of interesting. Tell me what you think of this. I’ll posit a scenario and you can give me your take on it. Newsom clearly has catapulted to the head of the line by being the Democrat who was most effectively identified with the visceral hunger in the party for someone who is not only willing, but able to push back against Trump without doubt. And that’s what’s taken him from three to 23. Pritzker has done some of the same things, but not as visibly.
Shapiro, who in some ways on paper should be a major figure in this in ’28 and may well be, I think he’s operating under a different theory. He’s not fighting as visibly with Trump as Newsom is because he, I think, is trying to run up the score as high as possible in Pennsylvania, carry in some of those House members. And he believes that not being first and foremost in the ring with Trump every day is the way to max out that score. And then the day after the election in ’26, he can turn around and say, “I just showed you I can do the single most important thing you have to do to win back the White House, which is to win these rust belt states and to win 45% of non-college white voters.” And so he’s kind of playing a game where he’s beating ground now in the competition to be the most visible counter puncher to Trump in the hope that it will position him to make this other argument a year from now.
BILL KRISTOL: `
No, I think that’s intelligent. And I think, I mean, intelligent analysis by you and maybe intelligent, probably intelligent by Shapiro. I mean, he’s playing the hand he’s got, and he is who he is. He’s a certain type of person and he probably wouldn’t be good at being Newsom quite, but he certainly, if he can win another big victory in ’26 as he did in ’22, even anything approaching it, he’s like, “Geez, you’re not going to nominate the governor of the single largest of the swing states who’s now won twice, including with Trump winning in between and losing the Senate race in between.” So he is literally winning quite a few percentage points of people who have voted Republican in other races. I mean, it’s a pretty big calling card.
And I am struck also, I mean, governors have been a thing for quite a long time. Most of the time in American politics, if you look at the history of presidential nominations and presidents. And then intensified, I would say, this is in our relative views as political observers and participants and reporters with the victory of Carter, well, the victory of Carter, Reagan.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Reagan.
BILL KRISTOL:
Clinton and W. It was like, “Whoa, the governors, that’s the right thing to do.” Now meanwhile, of course, since W., no governor has been nominated in either party. Everyone who’s been nominated has been a VP or a senator, or in most cases, VP’s who had been senators or Trump. They put a couple of governors on the ticket for VP, Pence, Kane. Some of them did okay. I guess you just have to say Pence did okay. Some of them were not great VP candidates, I think you can say. And the Democrats haven’t nominated governors since Clinton. So I mean, it is sort of funny that, I don’t know, the Democrats in particular who are presuming more have a lot of the gubernatorial candidates possibilities, maybe more obviously right now, presidential, what’s the word they say in the Popes? Papabile, whatever the presidential equivalent of that is, they look like there are more of those governors and Senators or House members, but I don’t know. They seem to have an inclination not to nominate governors and they’ve done okay with some senators. I don’t know.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I was thinking, and you may be right. I was thinking—
BILL KRISTOL:
I don’t know which way this cuts, but on the other hand, if you step back and say, “Yeah, who should they nominate?” You sort of think, okay, you see the largest state. That’s California where he’s shown some ability to reach out of the state and get some support or the biggest swing state. That’s Pennsylvania or maybe you can get to sort of Beshear, someone who’s won in a …
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I think the problem for Beshear is he’s approaching this as like a, can’t we all get along?
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
And I think that’s kind of off for where we are. I mean, I think Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly believe with good reason that Trump’s movement is an existential threat to American democracy and the values of America as we have known it and that failing to beat it will fundamentally lead to a different country in all sorts of ways, right? Civil rights, civil liberties, erosion of elections. And Beshear is a talented guy, but I think I might be the only one who remembers because it wasn’t much of a race, but in 2000, what was Gore’s principal argument against Bill Bradley during the Democratic primary? It was that during the height of the Newt Gingrich revolution, you walked away, you went off to Wall Street or wherever you went and I stayed in the ring and they used to chant at his rallies, “Stay and fight.” That was the chant, stay and fight.
And I think there will be a version of that. I think the table stakes for being taken seriously as a Democratic nominee in ’28 is to A, show that you were there when everything seemed the most dire when in the early part of this year, when it looked like Trump was just steamrolling through institutions, like who stood and fought and the second that you see the magnitude of the threat. And it’s not just like Biden trying to get back to the world that we were in before.
I mean, I am sure we’re going to hear Democratic primary voters ask the candidates in ’28, “Are you going to appoint someone like Merrick Garland? Who is your attorney general going to be? Is it going to be someone who is going to hold them accountable?” And I wrote about this last week. I mean, I can’t imagine a Democratic presidential candidate getting through the primaries without having to explicitly say, “My attorney general is going to scour every decision of the Trump administration to see every time a law was broken and then we are going to go after them from day one.” How do you get through a Democratic primary without making a promise like that?
So again, I think the stay and fight that you not only were there when it counted, but that you understand there’s kind of an ongoing … The Biden thing was like, “Well, if we just go back to normal, it’ll all go back to normal.” I don’t think that’s a winning message anymore.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s so interesting. And it does suggest, we should let people go, but this has been such a fantastic conversation for those of us who love politics at the end of this year and trying to look ahead. Of course, there’ll be 18 surprises which we’ll have to revisit. But just on that point, I think too many of our world analyze it the way I was starting to actually, and who’s got the most plausible claim because he or she wanted a key state or comes from a key demographic group or there’s a sort of historical reason why that person would have it or here’s the trend. It’s all senators, it’s not governors. Whereas I do think in this case in particular, but often really, it’s the message meeting the moment more than the biography meeting the moment. I really think that’s a big trap.
Reagan didn’t become President of the United States or the Republican nominee because he had been governor of California. It was a necessary credential. In those days, unlike with Trump, you couldn’t skip everything else, you couldn’t beat fate. But it wasn’t why he was the nominee. I mean, there were plenty of very well qualified people running in 1980 who had been governors of other states and—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
Huge field.
BILL KRISTOL:
…Vice president of the United States and big shot senators. It was because he was the leader of a movement that seemed to be in accord with what Republicans thought the direness, I’m going to say, of the moment was in late Carter and so forth. And I think that’s very true of the other people who … So I think Clinton, very true, you were so close to this and wrote about this so much at the time in ’92 a new Democrat, he’s not going to take us down the path of Mondale and Dukakis of losing, fine people though they were.
So I do think that part of it is underestimated when people do the kind of analysis of states and job descriptions and bios, so to speak. And it is more … Now what people want in ’08, I think you’re probably right that a lot of what you said is what they’re going to want, but who knows what the country … They want someone who understands the world, someone who understands the economy, someone who understands them. There are a lot of other factors that will be rising or falling by ’28, obviously, but I think that’s a very useful corrective to the kind of … But I do wonder on the Republican side whether the conventional, if Trump’s pretty popular around Republicans, why won’t it be Vance? And that certainly has held times.
Again, you predicted Biden-Harris, I believe, is the ticket way back in 2019, and you saw that basically. The appeal of normalcy in that case, but also of having been vice president. I don’t know. I’m a little skeptical on the Vance thing, but I couldn’t put my finger on why I’m skeptical. It’s just that Trump’s been such a disruptive force. Are we going to revert to normalcy and nominate his VP? Maybe. I mean, I don’t know, but could it be some other—
RON BROWNSTEIN:
It’ll be interesting just—
BILL KRISTOL:
Trump little … I was going to say a Trump junior type, another Trump, maybe literally another Trump incidentally, but another sort of outsider-ish type who is truer to MAGA or truer to Trump or different from MAGA if people are sick of MAGA. I don’t know. I just don’t know. But on the other hand, it’s a very interesting moment of the uncertainty in both parties meeting the trench warfare of our politics. It’s a kind of unusual thing. I mean …
RON BROWNSTEIN:
I can kind of envision the vectors of the Democratic race in my head more easily. I mean, like Newsom, I think, will be formidable around the argument that I was the guy who most met the moment when the moment was most dire. And then there will be someone kind of—
BILL KRISTOL:
And he’ll be out of office right after.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
He’ll be out of office.
BILL KRISTOL:
’26.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
And there will emerge, I think, another alternative who will be ideologically not that dissimilar from him, maybe a click or two to the right, but mostly we’ll be saying, “Yeah, it’s great, but he’s from San Francisco and California and he’s not going to win the places we have to win.” And then there’ll be somebody in all likelihood carrying the banner of the left who will be formidable, but probably not absent something else electable. And those seem to me obvious lanes. Again, given that Newsom has kind of moved so much in this year, but again, all of this, the choices you get depend on the people who come out of the early states. The whole thing, it’s like a lava lamp. It just kind of moves around.
The shape of the argument, the shape of the coalitions depend on who are the finalists. And they kind of operate like magnets and they pull the voters. But one thing, Bill, I will say maybe as a last thing before we go, the dye gets set very early in the primaries. If you look at the nature of the coalitions that the candidates assemble in those first couple states, they almost always hold all the way through. There’s the famous anecdote that David Plotz accidentally appended an internal spread— In 2008, he appended an internal Excel sheet in an email to a reporter with their projections of all 50 primaries, and he got all of them right except one. And he’s a very smart guy, but it wasn’t only because of that.
It was at once as Howard Wolfson was working for Hillary said to me at the time, “You can basically run a computer simulation at this point. Plug in the share of the state that are college whites and black voters versus non-college whites and Latinos.” That was kind of their two bases and you know who’s going to win. So we will get an idea very early in ’28 of how the primary electorate is sorting out. There’s not a lot of history of it changing midstream, but we got a whole other election to go.
BILL KRISTOL:
I was about to say, that’s so interesting, but we’ll have to get together in mid-26 first to see if that’s going as we sort of vaguely think it is and then we can … The end of ’26, no shortage of things to analyze, but this has been really terrific, Ron. Thanks for taking the time. This has really been illuminating.
RON BROWNSTEIN:
And Happy New Year to everybody out there.
BILL KRISTOL:
And Happy New Year to you and to everyone else out there and thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
