Matt Yglesias: belief

Transcript context

…Now, you and I both know Donald Trump is not favored to win, but he does, in fact, have some chance of winning, even with very high unemployment, serious problems with the pandemic, a long history of being corrupt, other issues surrounding rhetoric I don’t need to tell you. What is your best account of why Trump is still in the race? I think there’s two versions of it. One is that polarization has created a situation in which there’s a lot of loyalty. If you were, broadly speaking, in agreement with the ideas of the Republican Party, you are now highly motivated and highly incentivized to back the leader, right? You can imagine a different kind of political system where you would say, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of this guy. We’re going to put somebody else up who’s going to stand for the same sort of general values, but have a different approach.” In America you can’t do that. The other thing is that progressive politics in the United States is very . . . I wouldn’t say it’s very unpopular because it was very unpopular, anywhere or whenever. But the public has serious doubts about putting the left in power in places in ways that a lot of people I know are a little bit in denial about, even though the facts are staring you right in the face. Why are there Republican governors in Maryland and Massachusetts and Vermont? Why is Andrew Cuomo so popular even though people on the left complain about him constantly? It’s because people don’t want to put left-wing activists in charge of the country. Democrats, I think, will probably beat Trump because people don’t think that’s what electing Biden would accomplish. But it’s out there, and it’s not a new fact in American politics, but an enduring truth. How should we attract more talent to state and local governments? I mean this in a purely nonpartisan way. Just smarter, harder-working people.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.