In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Richard Aldous, Sabina Ćudić, and Damon Linker explore the future of the Democratic Party from midterm predictions to the unstoppable rise of Zohran Mamdani, the impact of the ongoing government shutdown, and the recent meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
Richard Aldous is Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Bard. His latest books are The Dillon Era and Schlesinger. He hosts Persuasion’s books and ideas podcast, Bookstack.
Sabina Ćudić is elected member of the National Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, vice president of the Foreign Relations Committee, vice president of the European liberals in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and the president of Naša stranka, a progressive, social-liberal political party.
Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and writes the subscription newsletter “Notes from the Middleground” at Substack.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Welcome to the tenth installment of The Good Fight Club. I am joined today by our semi-regular co-host and panelist Sabina Ćudić, who is a member of parliament in Bosnia-Herzegovina and, since a week or two ago, the leader of her party. I am joined by Damon Linker, who is familiar to readers of Persuasion because he often publishes excellent articles and is the author and publisher of the Notes from the Middle Ground Substack. I am also joined for the first time by the host of a rival podcast on the Persuasion network called Bookstack. It’s an excellent podcast. He is also a professor of history at Bard, Richard Aldous.
I thought that we would start with the looming midterm elections. The midterm elections are next year. This is halfway to the midterm elections, the first electoral test for Donald Trump since he was elected about a year ago. We have landmark races in Virginia for governor, where it looks like relative-moderate Abigail Spanberger is probably going to eke out a rather interesting competition from a candidate with roots in Jamaica who is an immigrant to the United States on the Republican side. We have a gubernatorial race in New Jersey, and we have, of course, the mayoral race in New York City.
Damon, what do you think these elections are telling us about the state of the Democratic Party and whether it is able to fight back against Trump at the ballot box? How do they all go for the more important midterm elections next year and, of course, for the all-important presidential elections in 2028?
Damon Linker: Well, I guess I’ll be a bit of a muddying-the-waters kind of guy and say that I actually don’t think the outcome of the upcoming elections is going to tell us all that much because we’re dealing with a situation where the Democrats tend to do better the fewer people vote. That’s the way things work these days in the United States because the Democrats have become a party of the highly educated and highly engaged.
When off-year, somewhat unusual elections take place, Democrats show up while not as many Republicans do. This dynamic works not quite as much but is still somewhat in play during midterm elections. It’s least salient in presidential elections. That’s why Trump manages to do as well as he does in the presidential elections, but then, in special small elections in off years, Democrats overperform. I would expect the Democrats to do well in these races, but what it tells us about the future, I’m actually not sure very much.
Mounk: Yeah, this is downstream from some really interesting socioeconomic transformations. It used to be that Republicans had the more educated and more affluent coalition, and more educated and affluent voters tend to show up even for less important elections. So Republicans used to overperform in midterms. It’s a really interesting testament to what Piketty calls the “Brahminization of the left” that this has reversed, and now it is the Democrats who do better than expected in midterms and then underperform in presidential elections.
In 2022, the midterms lulled Democrats into a false sense of security. Democrats did much better than expected in the midterms, and they thought, perhaps we’re on a good course. In 2024, Trump won nevertheless.
Richard, what about some of these murky figures in this upcoming election? You have somebody like Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative who runs, at least in certain ways, as a moderate. Then, of course, you have someone like Zohran Mamdani, who’s likely to be elected as mayor of New York City on a much more progressive lane. Is this the first step in an internal primary campaign, an internal civil war within the Democratic Party for its future direction? Will those figures prove to have lasting importance? How are we thinking about these candidates?
Richard Aldous: I think this is one of the things that is so interesting because this election does show the crunch that the Democratic Party is in. Historically, it is true that when the Democrats move to the center, that’s when they tend to get elected. But when you look at that race in New York, it shows how two things can be true at the same time. A lot of the things that Mamdani is saying about New York—about it being so expensive, that real wages are down by around 10%, and so on—are true.
At the same time, it’s also true that the way in which New York historically has had such a generous welfare system is because it has allowed finance to thrive and has enjoyed the profits that come from that. So when you see big figures and big firms like JP Morgan, for example, moving the majority of their employees from New York to somewhere like Texas, that undermines the very premise of the thing that Mamdani is going to try to do.
I think there’s a real dilemma here for the Democrats about appealing to their own voters while also being able to expand beyond them and pay for the things that their own voters want.
Mounk: Sabina, I believe you mentioned once to me that Zohran Mamdani is a friend of yours, perhaps an acquaintance of yours. To what extent do you think he can represent something like the future of the Democratic Party? On the one hand, it’s very clear that he has huge political talent, that he’s very charismatic on social media, and that he’s dealing—as my colleague Sam Kahn wrote in an excellent article that came out in Persuasion a few days ago—with the gerontocracy problem that Democrats have.
On the other hand, he may be undermining some of the economic bases of the success of New York. He has taken stances on cultural issues, such as embracing the idea of “defunding the police,” which may play well with a younger electorate in Brooklyn and more affluent parts of New York, but which are probably unpopular nationwide. He himself is actually quite significantly underwater in terms of nationwide favorability ratings. How are you seeing the evolution of the Democratic Party through his figure and others who are rising at the moment?
Sabina Ćudić: Let me start by saying that I come from a majority-Muslim country, so there is a layer of interest in these elections also through that lens of the future of the Democratic Party and the possibility of it providing an all-encompassing and authentic response to what is perceived as this enormous wave, a tsunami of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia that has been shown throughout the race. In a sense, it’s a lens through which we look at how we perceive the future of the Democratic Party.
It’s not just about his success but about where Democratic voters will shift—not just in the midterms in 2026, but where they will stand in terms of candidates for the presidential elections in three years. For example, what is largely seen not just as progressives versus moderates but also the willingness, desperation, and cynicism of his counter-candidates—obviously Adams dropped, but now with Cuomo, who participated in some talks and debates with extreme right-wing hosts—to really galvanize parts of Democratic fringe voters versus the progressives.
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It seems like, as you said, a civil war within the party whose outcome will in good ways but also probably in misleading ways shape the debate in the upcoming years. Why do I say misleading? Because I think we will jump to conclusions that are not necessarily true. Some of these conclusions might be that we need to go fully progressive or that we need to fully abandon the moderate candidates who will, even if they win in Virginia and New Jersey—at least that is my understanding of the polling—win by a significantly more modest margin compared to Mamdani. So it is seen as a referendum on where the party should go.
But again, I think that referendum might provide some misleading directions. As you said, what stands in New York does not necessarily stand in North Carolina or Arizona.
Aldous: It is interesting though, isn’t it, Sabina, because that last point that you made about New York, that this is a kind of curiously New York time in terms of politics, that we have a president of the United States who was from New York, we have the democratic leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives both from New York, and then these kind of two stars on the kind of progressive side of the party, Mamdani and then AOC, who are also from New York. So there’s a kind of a curious way in which New York is more relevant in American politics than it’s been actually for decades as well. You almost go back to the 1950s when you had Nelson Rockefeller against Averell Harriman and this kind of thing. But it is very striking how New York is representing so many different strands in politics at the moment.
Mounk: I love New York, but perhaps a bad state of American politics is the thought of New York.
Linker: I agree with a lot of what everyone has been saying. I do worry, at the level of theory, that while it’s great for the Democrats to be a diverse party, this comes with real challenges. When you have progressive areas of the country—whether large cities or college towns—they can pick a Democratic Socialist to be the nominee and actually win their elections, while in more conservative parts of the country, such as union-voting Midwestern towns and regions, they have more conservative Democrats.
The path to victory, or at least one path to victory for the Democrats over the near-term future, is to cultivate this diversity within the party—to say it’s okay if you are, if not pro-life, then at least open to restrictions on abortion if you come from a more conservative part of the country, and still call yourself a Democrat and a good member of the party.
The problem is that we live at a time in which all politics gets nationalized very quickly, and the Republicans are really good at this. There is no way that, assuming Mamdani wins—especially if he wins big—every stumble, everything he says that’s controversial, every problem that arises from his agenda as it gets enacted in New York, won’t be hung around the neck of every Democrat in the country when they run.
Ćudić: Is that also true with Trump and the Republicans? Can we just, for a second, wonder what it is that makes people in New York—admittedly including people that Ezra Klein talked to—vote against their own economic interest in voting for Mamdani? 47% of surveyed Jews in New York voted for Mamdani. It is beyond just policy.
It is, and as you correctly pointed out, speaking on the question of New York, what people—at least in Europe—see equally in Trump and Mamdani is the sense of authenticity that is being brought to the table, which inspires even those people who stand to lose from their policies, for both of them.
Linker: That’s true, although it’s a complicated story about New York politics. Over the last three decades or so, we have had sixteen years of mayors who were either Republicans or very conservative independents in the form of Rudy Giuliani and then Michael Bloomberg. So the recent history of New York City shows that it’s not like San Francisco or Provincetown. It’s not a place that’s 90% left progressive.
It’s quite open to voting for a kind of law-and-order candidate who will actually push the boundaries of, say, using the police to try to keep crime under control and pass business-friendly, finance-friendly tax rates and regulations. What we’re seeing here is the shift in the Democratic Party, especially among younger Democratic voters. The party has moved further left in the last ten or so years, partly in reaction to Trump but also because of demographic changes and the character of Millennial and Gen Z voters.
Mounk: I think one of the interesting points about this question of electoral coalition that Damon and Sabina are discussing is where the support for Mamdani comes from. It’s surprising in a number of ways. Sabina pointed out that about 47% of Jews intend to vote for Mamdani. It’s also surprising that only about 50% of Muslims intend to vote for him. So there’s not much of a religious split in who’s going to vote for this candidate, which should be surprising if you just follow social media.
I worry that Mamdani has general charisma and is able to communicate with authenticity in a way that a lot of Democrats cannot, but on the most important dimension—which people aren’t discussing very much—he’s making the problems of the party worse. He’s doing best not among Muslims, not worse among many Jews, and it’s not about any of those dimensions. He’s doing the best in the parts of the city that have a lot of highly educated young people, and he’s doing the worst in the outer boroughs where there are more working-class voters.
The Jewish vote goes right through that separation. A lot of young Jewish graduates from good colleges in South Brooklyn are going to vote for Mamdani. A lot of poorer Jews, perhaps immigrant Jews from the Soviet Union and Brighton Beach, are not going to vote for him. Similarly, I haven’t seen the exact geographic breakdown of which Muslims are going to vote for Mamdani and which are not, but I’m pretty sure that a huge majority of college-educated Muslims in Cobble Hill and Manhattan are going to vote for him, while some of the less well-educated, less affluent Muslims in the city may not.
My concern is that this is the wrong direction for the party to go in because it needs to expand its socioeconomic coalition rather than double down, as Kamala Harris did in her 2024 presidential campaign, on that coalition. I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before. The most striking thing to me about the 2024 election is that, according to an analysis by The Economist, in terms of socioeconomic coalition, Kamala Harris most resembled, of the last twenty Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, Bob Dole, the Republican candidate in 1996. That is the fundamental problem of the Democratic Party right now.
Ćudić: The only way to solve that problem is to see whether he delivers, and there is enough time between when he wins and the midterm or presidential elections. There is enough time for him, if his policies deliver—which I am somewhat skeptical of. I come from a social-liberal background. I’m the president of a social-liberal political party, fiscally more conservative, and I’m skeptical of the capacity for delivering on his promises. But let’s imagine that he does. Would that change the profile of his voters?
Aldous: We think about this election in national terms, but we have to remember that all politics, famously, are local. This is not a national election. This is an election taking place in New York.
Those young voters you mentioned—The Economist had some good statistics last week showing that real wages are down 9% since the pandemic and that 54% of the median wage goes to rent in New York. There are issues around childcare, transport, and other local concerns. He has managed to utilize and weaponize these very local issues to speak to people who might not necessarily vote for him or agree with him on global issues, like what’s going on in Israel, and say, you know what, I can’t find somewhere to live, childcare is terrible, my life is really not great living in New York, I don’t want to have to move to New Jersey or somewhere. So I’m just going to give this guy a chance, because why not?
Linker: I don’t disagree with that, but Yascha’s point is worth emphasizing again about the demographic breakdown of these Mamdani voters. We’ll get more confirmation after Election Day, but it appears that he is continuing the trend we’ve seen behind the weakness in center-left parties across Europe and in this country, which is that the sorting of the parties is resulting in the Democrats becoming a party of wealthy people or those just below wealthy.
A lot of the people Richard is talking about who really love Mamdani are young people in the city who aren’t making enough to afford rent and food because it’s an expensive city, and they’re angry about that. But these are upwardly mobile, future professionals.
The Democrats need to keep in mind two dimensions of the challenges confronting the party. Does the party move to the center or to the left? That’s the debate that takes up most of the oxygen. But it’s a different axis to ask whether the party will be more or less in favor of the establishment and the system—that’s the populist axis. It’s perfectly possible to be a more centrist Democrat who is also a populist and runs against the failures of the Democratic establishment.
Mamdani is the perfect exemplar of a left populist, and that mix, though it might be extremely successful in New York City in 2025, will be a major loser if generalized beyond that context to the broader country. I really hope for a different mix with some other candidates coming down the pike.
Aldous: The other thing I would add to that is that, of course, you’re quite right that the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class broadly, but it is still the party of those who are highly educated but not upwardly mobile—those who have gone through a college education and now perceive themselves as being low status, not the status they thought they were going to have. That has been a key demographic for Mamdani in the campaign.
Mounk: The Democratic Party is a party of high status and low income. One of the problems is that this tends to be a temporary position. A lot of college graduates are high status and low income for five or ten or fifteen years, then suddenly they are high status and high income. Whether they still vote the same way at that point is open to question.
There’s another dimension here that I want to touch on. We’ve been talking to some extent, and in a really good way, about left versus moderates. However, there’s also a big debate in the Democratic Party under the surface at the moment about whether to emulate Trump’s style or to continue listening to Michelle Obama’s famous invocation that “when they go low, we go high.”
You have relative moderates in the party, like Gavin Newsom, who certainly has taken some very left-wing positions, being the governor of California and rising in that state’s politics, but who is also an establishment Democrat who is relatively moderate for California. He is mocking political opponents with fake AI videos and social media posts that, according to legislation he introduced last year, would actually be criminal. He is emulating Trump with these trolling, all-caps tweets in Trump’s style, and it has really worked. Since he started doing that, his odds of becoming the 2028 Democratic nominee have shot up on prediction markets.
You have someone like Abigail Spanberger, who is ideologically quite moderate, not distancing herself from Jay Jones, the candidate in Virginia running to be attorney general, who texted a political opponent that he hoped a Republican candidate would be killed and even said he wished ill upon his children because he was supposedly raising little fascists.
The party is also standing by someone like Graham Platner or other key figures in the party—from Bernie Sanders to some of the Pod Save America crowd—who not only have made quite extreme remarks on Reddit and social media, but who until recently had a Totenkopf skull-and-bones tattoo inspired by the SS on his chest.
Is the Democratic Party, whatever it ends up doing ideologically, starting to emulate Trump? Is that a way to get to the kind of authenticity you’re talking about, Damon, or is that very much the wrong way of trying to reach more Americans?
Linker: My view is that we need more of this. I’m not sure of the exact right mix. Trump is a very sui generis figure. He hit on a distinct combination of Archie Bunker policy positions and attitude with a lot of humor. He was already very famous as a reality TV star, known as a socialite with beautiful women, wealth, and gold-plated apartments. That mix is something you’re never going to be able to reproduce in either party going forward.
The general sense of being populist and scrappy, being willing to insult certain pieties within the culture—much as I don’t like this politics and think it can be dangerous in some circumstances—has real appeal. At the far extreme, you end up with people like Nick Fuentes and others on the far right whose entire public persona is about puncturing pieties and saying the most outrageous thing they can think of at any moment, with no substance to it at all. The danger is that we end up with candidates who have Totenkopf tattoos on their chests and post really nasty tweets. I’m not endorsing any of that, but I do think the path toward something successful politically for the Democrats lies more in that direction than in producing more Chuck Schumers.
He’s the head of the Senate, one of the main party figures, but Hakeem Jeffries isn’t much better. Even though he’s younger, he’s still a very staid party player. Everything he says sounds like it’s been consultant-driven, poll-tested, and ultra-cautious—very risk-averse in both what he says and how he plans. The party needs to be shaken up. That runs risks, but it’s also a path forward for where American culture is now.
I don’t personally like this. I’m in my mid-fifties, highly educated, and I like a good civil debate and thoughtful expressions of rhetoric and allusions to history. But honestly, there isn’t an audience for that kind of politics anymore, and it makes me sad, though I think it’s a reality.
Mounk: I think you’re in danger of making me forcibly defend Zohran Mamdani here, which is to say that I was joking earlier, but I don’t think the choice is between Graham Platner and Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer. On that dimension, I would place Mamdani somewhere quite different.
In terms of his personal style, Mamdani is a kind of happy warrior who has some plans for New York City that I think are going to go badly wrong. The idea of state-run grocery stores is, in my view, a really bad idea. Perhaps that will end up being important, or perhaps it will be a distraction that doesn’t matter much. But in terms of his personal style, he comes across as clear and authentic—a communicator who is able to go on all kinds of different platforms, from very brief videos on TikTok to long podcasts. I don’t think he’s emulating Trump in that way.
By contrast, what Newsom is doing doesn’t feel authentic. It feels like some clever consultant had the idea of, why don’t you pretend to be Trump? It doesn’t feel authentic to me.
Linker: Mamdani’s style is one of the options for a more populist approach, and it’s certainly one I prefer stylistically, even if substantively I don’t agree with him on much. I also agree with you about Newsom. The I’m going to tweet just like Trump tweets approach isn’t, I think, the best way forward. However, as you noted before, it seems to be working for him so far among Democratic voters.
Ćudić: I’ll be blunt and say that America brought and championed an extreme sterility and Puritan spirit in politics, which lasted for many decades. We Europeans are much more used to seeing the dead French president’s mistress sitting next to his wife at the funeral, or a president marrying his high school teacher, or all kinds of variations like that throughout Europe. The remedies that the United States brought to the table are not just in politics. Even your most advanced fashion magazines cannot show nipples compared to ours, and so on. I think that has reached its peak, and the pendulum has swung.
I was probably mentioning this to you, Yascha, at some point when I took some students to meet a famous Washington lawyer who was Hillary Clinton’s sparring partner in preparation for her Senate debates. They used a fake audience and turned buttons from “extremely agree” to “extremely disagree,” creating an EKG of the entire debate and honing the message to the point where everybody sounded like Miss Universe. Authenticity in that process was utterly lost.
Voters instinctively, consciously or subconsciously, associate that with inauthenticity—and rightly so. Compared to these people, Hillary Clinton included, Trump really sounds authentic, even though we may be appalled by what he’s saying. It sounds unrehearsed.
The pendulum needs to swing in a different direction, where the Democratic Party must exercise authenticity. As you said, Newsom feels really inauthentic. Even publishing the name of the person actually writing his tweets—who turns out to be a “super cool” staff member—proves that it’s not him. I’m not saying Mamdani is doing it all by himself; there is clearly an incredible amount of production involved in the videos that seem authentic and simple. Those of us in politics know that.
Still, there is a level of spirit he brings to the table that people respond to. They are willing, in the same way they forgive Trump—even those offended by what he says—to forgive him on account of authenticity. In the same way, Mamdani once talked about “defunding the police” and now backtracks, saying that as a student or young politician he was very open to those progressive ideas but is willing to listen and learn. Increasingly, people want to hear that kind of humbleness and see politicians not as deities, but as people who make mistakes and take responsibility for them.
Aldous: I think that point about authenticity does key into the point about language in politics. This is where the whole cancel culture, woke agenda, has ended up being a poison chalice for the Democrats. You saw it in the last presidential campaign, where you had one candidate, Donald Trump, who could go on any old podcast, talk for three and a half hours, shoot the breeze on virtually any subject.
Then a candidate in Kamala Harris for the Democrats, who took several weeks before she would do a major interview. When she did do an interview, you could literally see her turning mental somersaults, trying not to say something that was going to give offense. That whole sense where within even that particular alliance, somebody would be scolded for saying the wrong thing, for not being woke enough, not being progressive enough, not being aware enough, actually created a political party that was unable to say anything because they were always trying to second-guess themselves.
Sabina, your point is right, and Yascha, you were making the same point, that maybe there is a new generation of politicians. Mamdani is one;AOC would be one. Pete Buttigieg, coming from a slightly different kind of tradition within the party, is probably another—people who can go on and can talk about things and have that sense of being able to discuss things in an intelligent, open, winning kind of way.
Mounk: Perhaps Barack Obama was an example of that too. He doesn’t quite seem like he fits into that list, but his instinct when the remarks by Reverend Wright came out during the 2008 primary campaign—highly negative about America, highly unpatriotic—was telling. He could have said, I distance myself from Reverend Wright, he’s a terrible person, and I never really listened, I was never there on those days, I had no idea. Instead, he said, no, I’m going to hold a major speech about race in America.
The tonality of it was different. It was still a time when the instinct was to hold a major speech rather than compose a tweet. He walked toward the fire rather than away from it. He said, let me actually share the deepest account—though I’m sure with some political massaging—of what I actually think about this topic so you can come to understand me, rather than running away from it in a superficial way.
Aldous: That’s another example of language in politics. Barack Obama followed a president who famously was not nimble in the use of language, George W. Bush. That’s a good example of how language was deployed against what, at that time, was the status quo in politics.
Mounk: There’s one elephant in the room here, which is the shutdown, and it’s kind of amazing. In previous times when there was a government shutdown, it was the major piece of news every day. At the moment, it’s receding into the background a little, except for those affected by it, which so far have included government employees, TSA workers, and others. At least as of the time of this recording, it may soon grow to include everyone who receives food stamps in the United States.
Are we ever going to get out of the shutdown? Is this the kind of thing that will lastingly harm Trump’s image? I could imagine a lot of voters who perhaps vote for Trump because they think he gets things done and prefer him to the alternative, even if they don’t agree with him on everything. But if they remember, hang on a second, it was under Trump that for a month or two I didn’t get those benefits I rely on to feed my kids, that could change things.
A lot of moments that people said would turn voters on Trump, I was skeptical about, but this feels like the sort of thing that, at the margins, could really erode his support. What do you all think?
Linker: I don’t know, because people’s memories in politics these days are so incredibly short. It’s hard to imagine that, assuming they reopen the government within the next month, people will still be thinking, yeah, I remember 11 months ago when this happened, by the time of the midterm elections. I’m skeptical about that.
It’s almost as if those narratives about things that will hurt Trump are overdetermined at the moment. The New York Times ran a piece this week with extensive reporting from Iowa about how many Trump voters there have been slammed by what he’s doing. Soybean sales for farmers have collapsed to zero. The Trump-Xi meeting today seems to have reversed that for now, but the tariffs in all directions—both the retaliatory tariffs hurting sales of Iowa-made products and the tariffs raising costs for manufacturing jobs that rely on imported inputs—have increased costs enormously. This is rippling throughout the Iowa economy.
Looking at that article, you would think, how could Trump or a Republican win in Iowa anytime soon, given that he’s hurting his own voters so much? Yet many people interviewed in that story said, yeah, it’s really bad right now, but I assume he knows what he’s doing, and it’ll get better. He’s making America great again. It’s just a rough patch on the way to things improving.
It’s all so muddled right now, and the messaging is relentlessly negative. You might not be happy about what’s happening, but the argument is that the other party is so much worse that you still have to vote for us because they would destroy your lives ten times worse than we already have. It’s a horrible dynamic for politics, but negative partisanship can work bizarre miracles, it appears.
Aldous: I think there’s always a mutually assured destruction element in these situations, where neither party really ends up coming out well. My guess is that they might be able to move toward opening the government fairly soon, because once the elections are out of the way and people have seen that their health contributions are going to go up, the Democrats will be able to say, there we are, we made our point, now let’s get the government open before things like food stamps and military pay are affected.
There’s always politics involved in these situations, but usually both sides end up taking a hit. Pragmatism will probably work its way through the system fairly quickly. But, of course, those will probably end up being famous last words.
Mounk: Sabina, you’ve said in the past that you get some satisfaction from watching the country that has so often lectured Bosnia and other nations around the world now being in complete political dysfunction. Is that satisfaction starting to run out now that this shutdown has lasted for weeks?
Ćudić: Let me start by saying that I don’t have science behind what I’m about to say, but I’m going into my fifteenth year of practicing politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I can easily beat any Jehovah’s Witness in the number of doors I’ve knocked on doing door-to-door campaigning. We are a party that relies on heavy street campaigning, and considering our budgets, we do it quite successfully.
I’ve noticed one thing in talking to people who voted for nationalists or right-wing parties or who are perhaps swaying in the direction of my party: people don’t like being wrong or admitting that they were wrong. You will rarely hear, I was so wrong. I was such an idiot. I voted for that party. I can’t believe what I did. Now I’m going to move in this direction.
We rely too much, in the context of the shutdown, on the idea that people will despise Trump for an outcome and, as a result, move in the opposite direction. People are more intuitively keen to vote for something than against something.
That’s part of Mamdani’s appeal. It’s not about anti-fascism or rallying against something; it’s about an optimistic, visionary alternative. People would rather support that. Even if they’re not going to go out and vote, even if they despise the person they voted for, it’s not enough for them to get out of bed and vote for the others.
We are overestimating the capacity of this mutual destruction approach—who people will hate more and reward the others for it. I don’t think it’s a good approach.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Richard, Sabina, and Damon discuss the recent meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, what this means for the U.S. economy, and whether reports of America’s decline as a global superpower are premature. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
