The Ezra Klein Show
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2025–2026
1:23:30 · 733K views · Mar 18, 2025
Ezra Klein interviews Democratic pollster David Shor, who walks through survey data and charts explaining the 2024 election results. They discuss voter shifts, the education divide and what Democrats got wrong.
HN commenters recommend it as a data-driven explanation of the 2024 election and voter trends.
5 comments from Hacker News
If you have the time, I highly recommend this interview between Ezra Klein and Democrat strategist David Shor ( this video ). He goes into a lot of the details around the question you imply. Long story short, Republicans have done that, but also on the issues people actually care about. This has given them a large trust lead in topics like the economy, crime, immigration, the border, etc. If Democrats had also hyperfocused on kitchen table issues, they might have won. By the time Kamala was campaigning, it was far too late to convince everyone that she actually cared about important issues. She had four years to prove she did not.
Thanks for the clarification. The interesting thing about the 2024 election was that Trump's turnout was higher than 2016, and in addition, according to the polling and analysis I saw, this was one of the first times in a long time where if _more_ people had voted, he would have had _more_ votes. This is in pretty stark contrast to presidential voting trends for the last 30-40 years. So although I think you could paint 2016 as an "apathy" election (I would still argue that 2016 was more about two deeply unpopular candidates than anything else) I'm not sure that same analysis really applies to 2024. I'm basing a lot of this on this very interesting interview here -- this video -- so to the extent that I'm wrong or you disagree, this at least gives some context to my claims.
> "racist", "bigots" and "single-digit IQ yokels" One of the narratives I hear repeated a lot that is simply untrue is around white americans. Trump doubled his numbers for minority (male) voters vs. the last time he was elected. But rather than coming up with a new, more nuanced view of what's happening people would rather trot out old tropes like *republicans are white and racist and bad*. Even with all the anti-immigrant stuff Trump increased his share of non-native born american voters. The refusal of people on the left to update their world view was one of the big reasons why they lost the election. I thought this Ezra Klien interview taling about election polling data was informative: this video
Sorry! That was careless phrasing. Thank you for fuzzing the careless thinking behind it. It should have been "Trump is now seen (and wants to be seen) by the right+(white) center left as moderate" Is that more reasonable? Imho Ezra Klein explains it better here this video (Is he going for "Leto I Atreides"?)
It's a position some people in the Democratic Party would have but that it less likely to endorse at the national level and even less likely to act on. Number 4 is a position that is rising in popularity generally that is somewhat well articulated here [LINK] One simple story about the 2024 election is that college educated people voted for Harris and the rest voted for Trump which is the big takeaway of a conversation Ezra Klein had with a pollster. this video Jacobin has the problem that Marxism is something that appeals to highly educated systematizers, e.g. the college educated. The reason why the U.S. doesn't have representation in the fourth international is that in the 1980 the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, inspired by Castroism, thought that their college-educated cadre ought to "go native" in workplaces and it was something they didn't want to do. Marx himself said that the Labor movement would lead to the emergence of real working-class leadership, which it does, but the decline of unions means the decline of that pathway. (e.g. when my Uni hired non-union glaziers to put up glass for a building the glaziers set up a 12-foot high inflatable rat; maybe it makes a good image but that's not intellectual ; accept his ideology or not, but Marx was one of the founders of contemporary social science and very much an intellectual.) [LINK]