I looked at him the other night in St. Cloud, Minn. Young women behind him. We’re going to provide reproductive care for them. I saw a group holding “Somalis for Trump.” We have a large Somali population. We’re very proud of that. Donald Trump has said, “We’re going to have a Muslim ban.” And he talked about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and the Somali community as being so detrimental rather than an asset to this. So we’re going to take care of those people, too.
He’s not going to do that. What do they have if they don’t have that fear? What do they have if there’s not a dystopian society? What do they have if only Dear Leader can come in and fix it?
If people are saying, “Actually, I’d like to have cheaper day care. I’d actually like them to quit talking about this. And I really don’t care who somebody’s married to” — because I believe the vast majority of people really don’t want to be in other people’s bedrooms.
And I use the thing of small town — this is where JD Vance doesn’t get it. You survive best by just minding your own damn business. Just stay out of people’s business.
I want to get at this distinction you’re making, between Trump or Vance and the crowds. Because one of the most dangerous emotions that Democrats sometimes let slip — the negative side of, I think, the liberal personality — can be a kind of contempt, a kind of smugness. This is why Hillary Clinton’s comment on deplorables was so damaging. How do you police that boundary?
This is where I take offense to JD Vance and “Hillbilly Elegy.” Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they’re not weird. I know they’re not Donald Trump.
The thing is, we have to get them away from what he’s trying to sell because that’s not who they are. Just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he’s a good boy. That’s what I do. And that’s what those rallygoers do. That is exactly who they are, and they’re going through the same things all of our families are.
He’s captured some of this. And fear is scary. I mean, the world is changing. We’re seeing, you know, conflict in the Middle East. We saw a global pandemic, which he did nothing to fix but seized upon.
And I think it’s kind of breaking that spell again of saying, “Look, he’s not offering you anything.” And then we dang sure better be ready to offer something.
Have you ever read “Hillbilly Elegy”?
I did, years ago.
I read it years ago, and I’ve been rereading it this week. I remember not thinking all that much of it then, but it feels like he’s predicting himself now. One of the big points early in the book is, he says: This is a story about people in a hard situation responding to it — and I’m paraphrasing — in the worst possible way. With anger, with resentment, with scapegoating of others without personal responsibility. A liberal would never talk about people and the places he’s from like that.
No, that’s why I take offense to it. Look, societal changes, you’re going to see a migration of population patterns. But you’re also going to see those that accelerated that, those that took advantage of that, those like Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are telling you, “We need to do school vouchers.” How are you going to get a private school in a town of 400? That’s not where the private school is going to be. The private school is going to be where it already is, giving tax breaks to the wealthiest.
The two things that are core to small communities: school and hospital. So I don’t know the irony or the masterful design of this. It’s guys just like him telling you that these people are just angry, bitter. That’s not who we are. That’s not who they are.
But I’ll tell you what. There are concerns. Economies have shifted. Young people leave those communities. My community felt thriving when I was there — two grocery stores, a couple of bars downtown and all that. Now it’s empty main streets. That vision of “Hillbilly Elegy” was true. But he doesn’t tell you the story why. And the bitterness, the cultural bitterness, whatever, that’s just not true. They’re just looking for “What are things to rejuvenate us? How do we get back?”
And I think about this: A town that small had services like that and had a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I’m at today. Those are real stories in small towns.
These guys, they talk about how evil the public schools are. For many of us, public schools were everything. That was our path. That’s the great American contribution.
You say there’s not a cultural bitterness, but there is a cultural frustration with the Democrats. If you looked at where people who didn’t go to college voted, they used to vote for Democrats. Now Democrats win college-educated voters nationally and lose non-college-educated voters. Those numbers are particularly stark among white voters. What do you make of that?
I think some of it is the alignment of economics. We’ve seen a migration to tech jobs, health care jobs in the cities. And then the cultural pieces — firearms start to get into that. You have long traditions that felt like they were being crushed.
We have got to figure out and see if we’re to some of the blame that we haven’t made the message clear enough. We haven’t delivered on those promises that people wanted to see.
The Affordable Care Act being one of those — it does a lot of great things, but people now have kind of forgotten that if we take away the A.C.A., you’re back to pre-existing conditions. And I don’t know if we built that into people’s thinking right now. So when Donald Trump says he’s going to get rid of the A.C.A., all right, that sounds good. I guarantee you those people at those rallies don’t want the A.C.A. to go away.
So I keep coming back to this: If they’re not voting for us, there’s not something wrong with them; there’s something that’s not quite clicking. So don’t assume they’re just not clever enough to understand what you’re selling them.
I do think that people don’t vote on policy as much as policy wonks would like to believe. That’s one thing. But the other thing is that we always think about whether or not voters like politicians. But my experience of voters is that they’re more sensitive to whether they think politicians like them. That’s a heuristic I think voters use a lot. Like, if you feel that a politician would like you, they’re probably going to look out for you. If you feel they would look past you, that they would look down on you, they’re probably not.
How do you explain Trump in that? You think they feel that he sees them?
I do. Look, I’m sure you have Trump voters in your family. I have Trump voters in my family.
I do.
And I think a lot about how unappealing he is to me and how appealing is to people I love.
Yeah, me, too. I spend a lot of time on that.
Well, what’s your theory of it?
I do think he’s entertaining to some. I think there is a sense, especially if you’re a little frustrated, that he’s not afraid to poke the bear. It feels like it’s empowering. And look, I think the world is complex. And if you don’t understand something, there’s a tendency that you might turn to the unexplainable, the conspiracy theories that caught on and things.
These aren’t stupid people. These are smart people. But there’s a frustration of: Why aren’t things working? Why are they so complex? So, I don’t know, I’m just theorizing on it.
But that district that I represented in 2016, I won that district six times. There’d been one other Democrat since 1890, but I won it in 2008 by 32 points. I sneak by in 2016. He wins by 17 points in that same district. They never see him. They knew me. I coached their kids. I was there. I delivered in Congress. I was a ranking member on the V.A. committee. Just six, eight years before, nearly 70 percent of them voted for me. I didn’t do any scandal or do anything to lose their support. But this guy came in and — even though I was of them or felt I was of them, that this was me, I was truly their representative — they identified with him. So I don’t know.
That meant there were Trump Walz voters for you to win and for him to win that big. So when you talk to them, what do they tell you?
They like me. They trusted me. They said, “Tim, I think you’re trying to do it right.” And they told me they didn’t like the status quo. They just thought he offered something else.
Now it’s less and less of that. I ended up being one of the last four districts in 2016 that Trump won by 15 points or more and the Democrat won. Three of them were in Minnesota. One was in Pennsylvania. Not surprising — swing states, traditional blue states now more in the red.
So I don’t know what it is. I think the Democrats’ way out of this is with optimism and a sense of grace toward folks. I want to be very careful. Like I said, those folks at those rallies, you insult them at great peril. Your neighbor is flying the flag, you insult them at great peril. Because they’re my relatives. They truly are, and I know them.
Let me ask you about political geography. There’s a sense of, particularly, the Midwest as “That’s where people are normal. Then they get weirder on the coast.” You’re a former Army guy, right? You’re a former football coach. You’ve got real good Midwestern dad vibes. And so you can talk about the weirdness of Trump and Vance in a way that I think a lot of Democrats would not feel they could and also in a way that they’re like, “Oh, right, maybe we’re not the weird ones.”
But I always think this is a very unhealthy dimension of our politics, a sense that there are sort of “real” Americans here, not “real” Americans there, beyond the coast. I’m curious how you think about this, both from the perspective of what it’s allowed you to say — maybe that would not have landed coming from others — and also just, like, what you do about it.
I started hearing this in 2006 and 2008, where people in the cities don’t know who we are — “We’re real American.”
And I’m like, “What are you talking about?” I never saw it that way. And now it’s just something like this, “You can’t go to Minneapolis.” It’s, “You can’t do this.” Well, the fact of the matter is, when you look at it, you have more population, you have more of these things happening. And there was this desire to just make these undesirable places.
They do it to San Francisco. And just to be candid, last week was my first time in San Francisco, and there I am driving around, and I’m like a kid again. I’m like, “America is so awesome. San Francisco is just the greatest.” And that’s the way people would feel. Go out to the boundary waters of Minnesota. Go to Northern Minnesota and look where the mining has happened for a hundred years. These were the beauty of America. And they’ve demonized these places.
But this is a place I do think where Democrats have failed a bunch of the people that they were hired to help, so to speak, which is, look, you can’t be a firefighter who protects San Francisco — as a friend of mine is — and live in San Francisco. Minneapolis has gotten real issues with high housing prices. There is a way in which Democrats have not made it easy to build in the places where they govern. And over time, people look, and they say, “Oh, you’ve got these huge homelessness problems.” People can’t afford to live there.
I know you’ve done a lot of work on affordable housing, but I also find Democrats typically want to do affordable housing through subsidizing rent. In Minneapolis they got rid of single-family zoning. There was a suit against it, in part by environmental groups. How do you think about this politics that’s more of a state and local politics about what you can build and where and what makes things affordable?
Yeah, this is real. And I think we’re getting some compromises on this.
We have good environmental laws in Minnesota, and that’s the way it should be. We’re protectors of 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. But we also have permitting that takes too long and makes more expensive doing renewable energy projects, things that we want to get done. I think that same thing applies on housing, that we put up barriers to making it more affordable.
I found it very striking that the longest and most serious policy riff in JD Vance’s convention speech was this riff on housing. And he says: Look, I’m going to tell you how it became unaffordable to buy a house. And he says: We had a housing crisis, and it was done by the bankers. And then there wasn’t enough building because all these builders went bankrupt. And then the Democrats let in all the immigrants, and the immigrants bid up that.
I thought, “That’s a wild description.” Look, it is completely true that if you have a supply-constrained housing market and you have a lot of immigration, that can raise prices. But your problem is you’re not building enough houses.
It did show the way when things are scarce, when people feel there’s not enough for them or for their kids, they’re going to close up. And I do think that’s part of the immigration politics we see.
It’s the scapegoat thing or whatever. Look, I reject a lot of the false scarcity. I’m not Pollyannaish. There is a scarcity of housing. But it’s because of our policies and, in some cases, the ability to get out there. The false scarcity piece then has us all fighting over the small piece of it.
And the Republicans do this very well. They get folks that could benefit from these programs advocating for tax cuts for the wealthiest. If we’re not offering something that’s the alternative that actually works for them, theirs is so much simpler to explain — “If we didn’t have these immigrants here ….”
We’ve got to have border control. You’ve got to know who’s coming in. You’ve got to modernize that. But especially a state like Minnesota, we’re aging, we’re white. Same thing’s happening in Japan. It’s happening in Finland. It’s happening in South Korea. We’re going to have to think about “What does that look like?”
So resentment is a strong one. Blame somebody else. But with Vance, what’s he offering? What is his plan to fix this housing issue? Just kick out everybody? So what they’re going to do is just deport everybody, and there’ll be these empty houses you’ll just move into? I guess that’s what they’re thinking.
I lived in D.C. for 13, 14 years, and crime when I lived there was really rough. But crime wasn’t that toxic a political issue there, because while people understood it was bad, they didn’t feel it was being tolerated. They just felt it was a hard problem to solve. In San Francisco, crime is way lower than it was in D.C. when I lived there, but it’s a much more toxic political issue because people feel or have felt there’s a tolerance for disorder.
And I think on the border, there’s a dimension to this, too. I think there’s something about this here where people get mad not because the problem isn’t solved but because they feel the problem is tolerated. And that’s been a problem sometimes for Democrats. I wonder if you think that’s a reasonable read.
I think it’s a reasonable read. You know, we have the right to control our border. The solution was the Lankford-Sinema bill. Trump didn’t want it. And Trump’s idea is so simple: Build the wall. That’s just so visceral that that’s going to keep people out.
That’s that type of thinking rather than “Look, we need to make the real fix here,” to make sure the electoral system in Venezuela does not create this type of geopolitical crisis that forces people out, making sure the investments in clean energy — and look, you don’t think people are going to be immigrating when climate change forces out coastal communities, over 20 percent of them? This is all going to start to happen.
Leaving it and saying it’s not a problem is a political detriment to Democrats. Just acknowledge it is. You’re not denigrating anyone, and you’re not helping them — being the immigrants — by saying it’s not a problem. Because they know better than anybody it’s a problem. Because they’re stuck at a border community with nowhere to go.
If a Democrat is president in 2025 and there’s a governing trifecta, what do you think Democrats should pass first? What would make the biggest difference for people?
I think paid family and medical leave. We’re the last nation on earth basically to not do this. It is so foundational to just basic decency and financial well-being. And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude — strengthen the family.
If JD Vance is right about this: that we should make it easier for families to be together, then make sure that after your child’s born, that you can spend a little time with them. That’d be a great thing.
Great way of also seeing who in politics is actually pro-family and who just likes to talk about it.
Oh, it separates people quickly.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.