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…I don’t think it’s so bad at generating them. I think that it turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, as you mentioned back in February, 2023, I was somebody who came out and said, Biden can’t run again. This isn’t going to work. And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about, was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly going to win the primary, that there was still time for Democrats to do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. And you could structure the lead up to an open convention in a number of different ways. You could have something like a mini primary. But basically you’d have Democrats out in the media out giving speeches. And their ultimate audience would be the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And my hope was through that you would find the person for this moment. The thing for Kamala Harris, it was really difficult was she was for another moment. She’s picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst just a very different political equilibrium, a sense that you had a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic Party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past to these sort of lunch pail, blue collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But also Biden never has a chance if he’s not Barack Obama’s vice president. And so, you have this sort of weird set of historical factors operating at the same time. There’s a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump in the pandemic. There is Biden as Obama’s vice president who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama. I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, you know what? If Biden had been the candidate, he would’ve beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality. And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own, at least assumed weaknesses. He’s a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying. And when the view of how you win elections is you put back together the Obama Coalition. And the Obama Coalition is young people, it’s voters of color and it’s enough working class white voters and then college educated white voters. That’s the Obama coalition. And so, Biden picks Harris for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought he should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But there were different people out there. Biden picks Harris for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought he should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But there were different people out there. And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. First, she has a particular background from California where she’s tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor. But she runs in the Democratic Party at time when it’s turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don’t want a sort of prosecutorial character. So, she sort of abandons that and never I think really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running in 2024. That works. But she’s a talented debater. She’s a very talented performer on the stump, but she doesn’t really have a theory of politics and policy that she’s identified with. But she’s a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being in 2020, a 78-year-old white guy, he understands the future is not him, or at least not just him. And he’s sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that speaks to his own potential weaknesses. I think by 2024, you have two problems. He only steps down, what is it, June? They’re weeks from the DNC. They don’t have time anymore for an open convention. You know how the Biden position is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So, now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated. It’s a Biden-Harris administration. She doesn’t really have a lane on cost of living. It’s not something she’s known for working on in the Senate. It’s not something she has a bunch of great ideas about. It’s not something she could write a talking about. It’s probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election. And she’s had no time to build that out. Maybe if she had been running in a primary for a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would’ve figured out how to do it. Primaries or periods of education and learning for the candidates too, or they would’ve found somebody else who could do it. But she doesn’t get any of that. She’s thrown into the game with three months to go. So, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden’s inspiring or not, he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term, and he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn’t. And then the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn’t go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We’ll see what they do in 2028, but the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe. a candidate who didn’t go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We’ll see what they do in 2028, but the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe. There’s two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked one, why did Trump win? And two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured three-hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump’s victory in 2024 was over determined if there are a lot of factors here. Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents lost all over the world. They lost in the US, they lost in Europe, they lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven’t seen in 50 years. And that’s largely because the inflation crisis that came after COVID created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power. People couldn’t bring prices down. Voters were furious and they were destroying establishment orders all over the world. Democrats happened to be in power, and as a result, they got the brunt of it. That’s number one. Number two, if you look at elections over the 21st century, two things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close. For reasons that I’m not sure I entirely understand, the parties have gotten really good, historically, bizarrely good at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48% such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we’ve seen over the last few years, and there’s this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics, that says that what often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change, they become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled. That then the next out-group party says, “We have a theory of change and we’re going to throw out the bums.” And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose.…

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