The Ezra Klein Show · 11/7/2026 · 67 min

How the Democrats Did It

Transcript (14 segments)

0:37

unknown

But to get over the finish line in so many places, Democrats had to run the right candidates and they had to run in very, very different ways in very different places.

3:40

Michelle Goldberg

You know, that people were so tired of being angry all the time.

4:36

Michelle Goldberg

They're loud, like you talk to people who can no longer sleep at night, who say that the noise is like killing their livestock.

8:53

Michelle Goldberg

And she said, because this time we have a ticket.

12:21

Michelle Goldberg

Believes it's kind of sinful and he's in a state where it's so preeminent.

14:26

Michelle Goldberg

Well, and it's interesting because there's two dimensions to this.

18:12

Michelle Goldberg

she would say, I still believe what I believe, but like we're not going to get consensus on this, so we're going to do the the things around the edges that we can all agree on, like making sure that women who are having miscarriages are treated in hospitals.

21:43

unknown

And in the border counties of Texas, the swing versus like the 2024 presidential election, it just name a couple of these, Cameron County, plus 44 swing to the Democrats.

22:54

Michelle Goldberg

And it's another thing to have masked men grabbing your relatives off their job sites.

30:22

unknown

What happened was Ossoff was the one who was able to weaponize the insight into like consistent viral, almost unanswerable clips.

33:02

Michelle Goldberg

Right, it's like hard to build a drama out of like Tungsten mining rights in Kazakhstan.

36:07

unknown

What has happened is the South has become unreliable now for the Republican Party.

38:23

Michelle Goldberg

But.

40:20

Michelle Goldberg

It was that she was a team player.