Astead Herndon: Our Broken Politics

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is June 6, 2023. Lots of news today.
Critical dam destroyed on the front lines in southern Ukraine. We're seeing how that's playing out.
A lot of finger pointing. Of course, we're also on the indictment watch.
Trump attorneys meet with the special counsel at the Justice Department.

CNN reporting Mar-a-Lago pool flood raises suspicions among prosecutors in Trump classified documents case. So think about this as the 12-minute tape gap from the Nixon years, but it being done by the pool boy, I guess.
Trump clearly suggesting that he's about to be charged in the investigation.

We have lots of new candidates who are in the race. Cornel West, yes, is running as a minor party left-wing candidate.
Mike Pence is in. Chris Christie is in.
Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire is out saying, I'm not running for president. Beating Trump is more important.
rfk jr is still a dangerouson. He was on a Twitter event with Elon Musk and various other deplorables.
And this is the way the New York Times reports it. Kennedy said he planned to travel to the Mexican border this week to try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently, called for the federal government to consider the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Russians, and said that pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for the rise in mass shootings in America.
So a full spectrum crazy there. As we're waiting on what's going on with Jack Smith, I do think it's important to keep reminding people what we don't know.
We don't know whether Jack Smith is going to indict Trump in that document case. We don't know when he will do it.
We don't know the status of the January 6th investigations. We also don't know what the exact charges would be, obstruction, espionage.
But there are some things that we do know, and they're important. These are the known knowns.
Number one, federal judge has already ruled there's enough evidence of a crime to pierce the attorney-client privilege in the case, which is a very, very BFD, very unusual. Also, we know that Jack Smith sat in on yesterday's meeting with Trump lawyers at the Department of Justice.
We know that the grand jury is in session. Actually, we know there are two grand juries in Washington and in Florida.
And perhaps most importantly, we know that Donald Trump is losing his mind on social media. These all caps rants are really something, all of which suggests that shit's really gotten very, very real.
I'm not willing to go as far as Andrew Weissman, but Andrew Weissman is a much smarter guy than me. And he tweeted out a zillion stories about the Trump case, but bottom line is that he is going to be charged and it will be in DC.
And this week, the open issues are whether others may be charged and whether they will be in DC or Florida. So today, obviously we're going to do a lot of different things.
And we are joined for the first time on this podcast by Ested Herndon, who's national political reporter for the New York Times and host of its outstanding new podcast, The Run-Up. So first of all, good morning.
How are you? I'm doing well. I'm so excited to be here.
Thank you for having me. There is a little bit of paths crossing here because you got your degree from Marquette University here in Milwaukee.
You worked for a while at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. So you know my town.
I do. You know a legend in the streets long before you ever knew who I was.
I knew who you were. And I think that Wisconsin has been such a place of political formation for me, partially because of that experience.
When I got to Marquette, Wisconsin was going through that first Scott Walker election and really ends up on the path that really transforms the state. And watching that up close really informed how I thought about journalism, I thought about politics, and learned how state-level stuff worked.
And so I owe big debt to Wisconsin and feel like it really informed me both as a person and as an eventual political journalist. And love Wisconsin.
I'm having a flashback because the years that you're describing, 2010 through 2015, I mean, that was about as intense as our political environment has ever been. I mean, Wisconsin politics has always been interesting to me.
But during that period, it did feel like we were ground zero for a lot of things that were going on in ways that I will admit I did not see coming necessarily. But in terms of just the hyper intensity, the fighting for the sake of fighting, the polarization, I mean, it was all there with the Tea Party movement, the flipping of state government.
Then you had Act 10, you had the siege of Madison, then you had the, felt like the endless recall. So you got dipped into Wisconsin just about the time that things were really boiling.
Oh, it was crazy. I mean, I was a freshman, you know, this is going to be dating myself as a child here, but I was a freshman in college in that 2010 race.
And I remember how polarized the campus felt. I remember how the city felt.
And I was originally a poli-sci major with no intentions of being a journalist. And I was wanting to work more informally in politics.
And that experience made me hate that idea. I literally packed up and switched majors trying to be a sports journalist because I was like, this is crazy.
And it's funny because, you know, obviously I bring myself around to combining those two things and writing about politics, but it was really that year and Act 10, the Capitol takeover that really informed so much for me last year on the podcast, you know, when we were initially doing episodes, it was a must do for me, the kind of the way that, you know, understanding gerrymandering, understanding the power of state legislatures and doing it through Wisconsin, because that story for me starts the second I get on campus and really informs how I view the changes in the state and the rest of the country. You know, I can't say that I knew that Wisconsin was going to end up being so indicative of kind of national changes, but I definitely knew there was nothing like something I'd seen before coming from Illinois and Chicago, which like the political tenor was crazy, but different type.
Well, I did think that Wisconsin was going to be indicative of what was going to happen, but I was completely wrong about what was going to happen. So, I mean, and it's only in retrospect, you look back on it and went, okay, I didn't think it was going to take that direction.
But, you know, just in terms of the just red hot fury and the way that things broke down, because I do remember before then, and maybe this is ill placed nostalgia, that there was sort of a dialogue between the political parties before that back and forth, you know, when I did my radio show, which was, you know, I mean, it was partisan radio show, I acknowledge that. But, you know, I had Jim Doyle, the Democratic governor on, I would have Russ Feingold on.
But after 2010, 2011, the lines really hardened. And I can understand some of the stuff that happens now by just remembering how you get sucked into that, how you get sucked into the hand-to-hand combat.
And it becomes about the winning and about that whole sense of absolute tribal loyalty that now dominates our politics as i think back on that that's what was happening here and i acknowledge i was sucked into it now that's why i have to ask you this so you were there when i was there in like the before times could you ever imagine that you and i would be having this conversation today oh no, no, no, no, no. You were probably thinking what? I mean...
One of the things I remember really palpably getting to school was like in Illinois, there was a definite divide between urban, rural, city, suburb, the rest of the state, of course. But it felt so much more tangible in Wisconsin.
And the distinction between the state and city politics, the way I felt like the state legislature had it out for Milwaukee, I remember feeling like, oh, this is a kind of different tenor than state politics that I've seen before. And that was partially because I was understanding it in that kind of 2010, 2012 era.
I really didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know that would make me a journalist.
I definitely didn't know that would lead me to political journalism or national politics where states like Wisconsin become super important. Those were all steps along the way that I had not planned.
I really was trying to make sure that I was following what was most interesting to me. So that led me to do that teaching for a year in Milwaukee, which really informed a lot for me.
You know, when I was teaching, it became very clear in a tough neighborhood like North Milwaukee, like there wasn't one problem, right? It was an intersection of like 50 problems. And I remember the feeling of that leading me back to journalism, partially because we are professional haters, you know, we can just point out all of those different things.
And that felt like a more authentic version than when I was in kind of poli-sci, thinking more strict politically, where I didn't feel like it was really landing on all the nuances of what people's challenges were. And so I couldn't think that we would be having this conversation because I couldn't think that I wasn't even anywhere near the universe of saying that this would land this way.
But I did know is that it was informing me in a way that I think still really matters. Wisconsin taught me about political power as a distinction from just electoral politics.
It just taught me how, you know, just because you win an election by 1% of the vote doesn't mean that

you're going to get a 50-50 governing style. And because that was so clear in that state, it forced me to ask why that is, how that became true, and I think really allows me as a young person, I think, to be prepared for the Trump moment nationally in a way that I couldn't have had if I was in a different experience, because Wisconsin really created, I think, for me, an understanding of the kind of zero-sum nature of politics you're talking about that now dominates DC down.
Well, and also when you watched Game of Thrones, it probably felt familiar to you, right? You're a fan, right? Yeah, I am. I am.
And maybe that's why I enjoyed the series so much. You know, between having a pastor father and being into politics, I love a fight for the throne.
Okay. So you've got me off on this tangent here about the zero-sum game of politics.
One of the things that I remember after 2010, no state flipped as decisively from blue to red as Wisconsin. And suddenly everybody woke up and Democrats had controlled everything.
And then suddenly Republicans controlled everything with a super majority. And the sense that when you have that majority, you need to go pedal to the metal.
You needed to go absolutely to ramming speed. And you see this in legislatures around the country.
You see this in Tennessee. You see it in Florida, where you have these super majorities.
And suddenly, they realize, okay, this is our moment. It is not like reach across the aisle.
We don't have to compromise. We have to get everything in the moment that we can get right now.
And so, you see that. And I recognize it because I remember that mood developing.
Okay, we have the opportunity if we don't do everything 100%, if we don't wipe out the public employee unions, if we don't do these things. And there was that sense, you know, if not now, then when? I do understand this.
So you've gotten into this podcast thing, which, you know, I'm guessing is, you know, might actually stick around for a while. I noticed something that you wrote about your podcast because you've generated a lot of buzz by the kinds of people you have on and the kind of conversations that you have.
And you say, things can get spicy, but we're not trying to fight. And I want to leave interviews in a good place and make sure the audience hears things that land in a place of mutual respect.
That seems kind of countercultural in some of the things. So your most recent podcast had to do with abortion.
And you had back-to-back interviews with the head of Susan B. Anthony, Pro-Life America, and the leaders of Planned Parenthood.
And wow, this is not the kind of moment where you have mutual respect. So just talk to me about your approach to those interviews and where that fits into a political culture where I think the premium and all of the incentive structures are for punching people in the nose as hard as possible.
Absolutely. I think that there is a big incentive to just wear the flag of one team or another and really to feed that catnip as a means to drive audience.
And I really wanted to resist that. You know, when we were getting this started last year, I felt like there was this huge space that people were really yearning to understand how politics got this way, the disconnect between our political system and the kind of things people feel.
You know, a lot of this was informed for me from 2016 to 2020. I was basically on the road for the times throughout those four years, covering the midterms, covering the Democratic primary, covering Trump's re-election.
And so I had had all of these experiences where the biggest question I was getting from people was just like, what has happened? And also to, you know, kind of corollary to that is why does it feel like nothing in politics nationally is really responsive to what I feel is happening locally and on the ground, that things were kind of moving in two distinct directions. And so when I was setting out to do this, I wanted to really start with that question to speak to how people are feeling about the brokenness of political systems, and then also to try to help explain how things started to feel this way.
And that was the first thing we kind of did on our show. And that required going to people who I think, you know, maybe people wouldn't have talked to.
The first guest we had on our podcast was Kellyanne Conway. And not because we wanted to talk to her about alternative facts or her time in the White House, but we want to talk to her specifically about what the Trump campaign was thinking coming into the 2016 election, what they knew they could seize on in terms of democratic weakness.
And we wanted to give that kind of campaign a moment to really square the circle that I think starts a lot of people's feelings around this political moment. It's like, what happened in 2016? And how did that lead to this now? We wanted to start there.
And so once we do that, for me, it's really important that we go to figures on all sides of the aisle. We went to Jim Clyburn.
We talked to the leaders of evangelical movements. We talked to Stacey Abrams.
We also talked to voters because one of the things I think came up in our reporting was that there was a big disconnect between how kind of political elites thought the country was moving and kind of how regular people were feeling about those changes. And so for me, if you strip the question of who's going to win and you ask questions about what are the stakes of this election, you know, who are the players who are shaping this election and kind of what are the things that they might be missing? That's a different question than who is up and who's down.
But for me, that's a question that can get you to a lot more of a nuanced place to understand this political moment. And so for us, that was really the charge of what we were trying to do.
And the hope was that if we do it in a kind of journalistically honest way, where we are coming to people on both sides of the aisle with earnest questions, that we are not flattening the differences between the parties, that people can feel like they're on a journey with you. And it's really panned out.
And so when I get to something like last week, where I'm talking to one side of an abortion fight and another, I'm coming in with the same level of intention. I want clarity.
I want to force people to be honest about what they're trying to do in this election. I want to have a purpose to say, why are we talking to this person? And for the Republican side, there was a very live debate that's happening in the GOP primary about where they should fall on abortion rights.
And it's a place that has a lot of tension. And so I'm going to talk to that person to try to get real clarity and transparency about that.
And I'm not going to ask the Democrat the same questions, but there certainly is going to be things I learned from that that can bring to the Democratic side and can bring to Planned Parenthood and say, where's your plan to really combat a pro-life movement that's been decades ahead of them? And so we want to make sure we ask questions that are earned, but we also want to make sure that we're really going for honesty and clarity. And so when I say things like, you know, things can get spicy, that's because I'm down to push back on people.
I will ask and ask until I feel like I'm getting a clear answer, but at the same time, I'm going to move on once I get that clarity of an answer. And so I'm not doing it to really be rude.
I'm not doing it to come from an ideological position. You know, when I was having that conversation with Marjorie Dannenfelser from Pro-Life America, you know, I was trying to push her on whether she was going past the public and whether she was okay with that.
And she was saying, I know you're trying to drive fear and that's your cause. And I said to her very directly, like, my cause is transparency.
My cause is clarity from political actors. And I think that that is something that's necessary from both D and R.
And so because of that, I feel really comfortable with that pushing as long as it lands in a place where that is understood by both me and the person I'm talking to. Well, I mean, also, this is in some ways a luxury in the media to be able to ask those follow-up questions.
I do feel a little bit of sympathy sometimes for people who are on television who are in a constrained time where it is a live show and they're being filibustered or they're being bullshitted and they can't really do anything about it. So one of the conversations that you had that I found very, very interesting was the fight to define extremism.
And you did an episode about how both Democrats and Republicans are really trying to portray the other party as more extreme. And then you interviewed two congressmen, Byron Donalds from Florida and Jamal Bowman from New York.
And people might remember that they had a spicy exchange outside the Capitol. Byron Donalds has become more prominent as a Trump defender.
Jamal Bowman has become, how do you describe him? I mean, obviously progressive,

but he's sort of obviously is relishing kind of his, the performative aspect of the job. Yeah, yeah.
He relishes said fights. Yeah.
You're talking with Bowman, the progressive, and you point out that most people wouldn't agree with his view that America is based on plantation-based capitalism. He often will use very colorful language, right? And he concedes that he's far left, but not extreme in the way that, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene is extreme.
Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about civil war or secession. And you push back on that.
I want to replay this. This is from your May 25th episode.

I guess what I'm asking you is what the right wing does is use messages from progressives, from the left, from people like you, from the squad to gain a political advantage. They don't run against the Joe Biden that's in office.
They run against the fact that Joe Biden has relationships with people like Jamal Bowman, people who they think are easier avatars for them to run against. Even if you think you're speaking the truth to power, do you think, or should the Democratic Party think about the ways those messages are used by the other side? Are you making their job easier? Yeah, I think they're loud wrong on that.
I think they're loud wrong. And if they want to do that, so be it.
It's my job and the party's job to point out how loud wrong they are. The American people, they want to see themselves in us.
And that's what they're seeing when they've seen my engagement with some of my colleagues. They see just an authentic passion that's rooted in care for people.
That's who I am. So if they want to weaponize it, again, I think they're allowed wrong and we just have to call them out for being allowed wrong.
So do you think he understood your question? I think he understood it. I think he doesn't care.
I mean, to me, what I took from the interview is that he does not care that the other side is using him because he feels that that is a debate that he can win and morally should engage in. So this is one of the things about our politics that we have a lot of politicians who really don't seem to care about whether or not they are advancing their message to the general public or whether or not they might be undermining their case.
If you were to ask the same question of Marjorie Taylor Greene, she would also not care, right? Because she has no incentive to actually care what Democrats say about her. I mean, isn't that part of the problem, having politics of people who are in hermetically sealed bubbles who don't ever actually have to care about how they sound or how they look to the other side? I think it is a problem.
But for me, you know, one thing I like about our show is that it comes in the kind of series of conversations. And so it's important for me to connect the political structures to that reality.
We have gerrymandered state legislatures. We have a kind of unequitable distribution in Senate, which I think leads people to really be justified in not caring about said other side.
It's rational. Yeah.
Yeah. My colleague Shane did a great story, I think, last year about how because of the ways, you know, most districts are drawn, we have fewer and fewer, obviously, competitive districts when you even look at the House races.
And so for most members of kind of D.C., there is no political incentive to come to the middle. There is no political incentive to really engage honestly with the other side.
Your only risk of losing for most members is by you being primaried on the left or being primaried on the right. And so it creates a kind of political structure where your Bowmans, your Taylor Greene's don't have to care.
And much more so than that, they're actually driving individual fundraising,

small dollar donations,

by being the politicians who are speaking most ardently to the base.

And so not only are we asking them to do something that I think is harder to do

in a kind of self-selecting media environment,

an increasingly polarized country,

we also have political structures

that don't even create the incentives for them to do that. If anything, it creates an incentive for them to go further dig in their side, because that's the only means in which they're going to lose.
Okay, so you also did a recent episode about the no labels movement. And this seems very, very timely, because I deal with the no labels movement in my Morning Shots newsletter this morning, their claim that they have this electoral college plan that can actually whatever.
And you spoke to voters as well as leaders of the group. And clearly, you know, there's a lot of Americans, and I hear this all the time, who aren't happy of a possible Biden-Trump rematch.
Like I was talking to a woman today, said, we're not going to do this again, are we? Do we really have to do this again? So you talked to Joe Lieberman and strategist Ryan Clancy, because with Joe Manchin not ruling out the idea of running on some kind of a unity ticket, maybe with somebody like Larry Hogan, you wanted to see this would be a viable option for voters. Joe Lieberman, Ryan Clancy are smart guys, but Lieberman seems to think that progressive political movements influence the Democrats in the same way that Trump influences Republicans, and you weren't having that.
Yeah, I wanted to really dig into why No Labels comes up with, well, first they're identifying a problem, and then they have a solution. And the problem they're identifying is one that we see in our reporting all the time.
The majority of Americans, a unique majority of Americans, do not like the options for the 2024 presidential race that are presented in front of them. Do not want Donald Trump and Joe Biden to be the nominees leading the party going ahead.
That is a fact, and that's been consistent for years. And so the thing that they are isolating as a kind of bubbling public who feels really disconnected from the ways that this presidential election might go is a true one.
What I was asking them is, how do they then decide that the solution for that is a kind of centrist third party ticket that would have a unity of a Democrat and Republican on the same line? And for them, they are really saying that because they feel like the most Americans believe the parties are equally extreme and the path forward is to find a midpoint between them. And that's what I was really trying to dig in on, is the idea that the polarization in this country is symmetrical and not asymmetrical.
And because for all the ways the Democratic Party has changed, and it certainly has over the last 15, 20 years, I don't think that anybody can say that that's in the same ways the Republican Party has changed, if you're dealing honestly. And so what they were trying to kind of, you know, isolate was they were saying that Donald Trump in January 6th and all of these moments were really kind of extremism at its core, but they were also saying that the Sunrise Movement or Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren represent the same type of threat.
And I just couldn't take that seriously considering neither of those people are leaders of the party, much less Joe Biden beat those people in the last Democratic primary, specifically around a message on marginalizing those folks. And so it just didn't ring true to me that the left, even if you think they're as extreme as the right, which I think is a question, would still have as much power as donald trump has who's obviously taken over the republican party and reshaped it in its image and i think that was important thing to drill down on for a group that's really presenting centrism as the solution to people's concerns and that's why we try to talk to people on the ground for the episode too is because when you talk to people hate both sides, who hate the options of Trump and Biden for 2024, you get a real sense that they're not coming from a strict centrism place ideologically.
Some of those people think that they're too old and they want someone younger. Some of those people think that, you know, the structures are bad and they want some progressive.
Some people mentioned to me like the desire for a more like a political figure, a military figure, things like that. The purpose of us talking to them was to make clear that this isn't a monolithic group of people who all ascribe to the no labels type of solution.
And so when they're saying that, oh, the fact that 70% of people don't like Trump or Biden means the answer is Joe Manchin, that's something that doesn't reflect the diversity of the kind of electorate who doesn't like those options for a lot of different reasons. And that's what really we were trying to make clear is, yeah, they are really identifying something that's a unique feature of this upcoming presidential race, but let's not flatten those people to say that all of them are just centrist and waiting, because that's not what the evidence says.
No, that's right. And look, I mean, I understand the appeal of this, and I understand the conversations.
And over the last six or seven years, I've had dozens, if not hundreds of conversations about, well, what about a third party? Can we find something that will bridge the gap? And it's so much more complicated than that. And then, of course, you just have the question of realism.
In 2024, what would the actual impact of this third party candidacy being? And I'm just mentioning my newsletter this morning because folks from The Third Way put out a memo about their plan, about this plan that no labels has. And they said, look, even with giving them every benefit of every doubt, you can't get close to 270 electoral votes in a manner that doesn't violate every known law of political physics.
I mean, you don't have to believe that they won't win anywhere. You just have to believe they won't win in places where their victory would fall somewhere between highly unrealistic and impossible.
So it is one of those questions about, okay, yes, maybe your diagnosis has some merit, but then the plan, that's where the dots don't connect, the execution. And I guess the question is, you're trying to be a nice guy here, but I'm looking at them and thinking, how much of this is realism and how much of this is just a donor class grifter movement that is convincing people this is going to happen.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah, we're taking them at its face to take the argument that they're laying out in front of us. But there's another argument that says they're not trying to be intellectually honest to the evidence that says that, you know, that a group, no labels that was funded by a kind of billionaire class that represents a kind of donor DC community is really trying to put their own solution on the problem, regardless of what the public might say.
And so I think that that's the reason that you have so many people third way, Democrats kind of Biden ecosystem, really trying to hammer down the message that they think this is a spoiler attempt or something that is really going to only meant to hurt the Democratic Party. You know, you can convince me that a third party ticket, you know, that had the rock at the top is something that is more politically feasible than something with Joe Manchin at the top.
The core of their problem is that there's just no evidence that anyone who they're talking about activating, they're saying they need evidence of a movement of people who would be rallying behind them. That doesn't exist.
And, you know, we wanted to take them on their face, but there's also the bad faith kind of other interpretation, which I think you're isolating really clearly, which is that this is a kind of rich DC org that's not even trying to be intellectually honest. Right.
And even leaving that aside, you just look at their arguments and they just don't hold water. So if it's not a intellectually dishonest grift, then it is a deeply sincere but completely delusional approach to the election.
So I guess I divided it out.

Okay, so you wrote something very interesting last month.

So it's last month already.

Looking at Ron DeSantis.

We talk a lot about Ron DeSantis here on the podcast and over at the Bulwark.

And you did a breakdown on the Looking at Ron DeSantis. We talk a lot about Ron DeSantis here on the podcast and over at the Bulwark.

And you did a breakdown on the reality of Ron DeSantis, the challenges that he faces.

And you start off with the various narratives, which you then, I won't say knock down, but you question them.

So this was May 23rd.

So a lot of things have happened, including the disastrous rollout.

You know, the first narrative out there that DeSantis is toast, you weren't buying that. So that's the narrative.
What's the reality? Yeah, I mean, I think the narrative is in reaction to a very true thing, which is that the electoral position of Ron DeSantis, when we came out of the midterms, has come down to earth. And I think it's dealing with the realities that he has taken unpopular positions, and that the kind of way that Donald Trump has had a hold on the party has remained in a way that I think some people expected it to naturally fade.
So if the argument people are making is Ron DeSantis have a higher hill to climb now than he may have had three, four months ago, absolutely true. What I was saying in that piece is that we need to deal with a couple other realities too, which is that there remains a plurality of Republican voters who want an alternative to Donald Trump.
That is true. And so until that lane is closed, I don't think we should say that this is a formality that ends with him as the nominee.
And I think we are dealing with a Republican electorate who, you know, maybe like 2016, might be split through several candidates. Maybe these indictments or things coming have caused people to rally around him.
But there remains a slice of people and there remains a kind of donor class to our point that is looking for alternatives. And so I just think there's too many dynamic things in the race for me to write off.
And the other thing I should say in kind of DeSantis' favor is that when you look at comparisons to maybe, you know, Scott Walker, figure we know well, who ran for president in 2016, or others, DeSantis is in a better position. You know, he has been someone who has crossed the 40% threshold in polling or something, even if he has come down to earth.
So theoretically, this is something Nate Cohn, our pollster here at the Times, was telling me. He's like, so theoretically, we know that his ceiling is higher than the opponents of Trump's ceiling has been before.
And so for him, the onus is being on how are you going to combine a Republican electorate who's against Trump for different reasons. One thing I like about doing this kind of reporting process is, you know, people learn alongside you learning at the same time.
And one of the things that Nate told me when we talked for our podcast was that the Republican electorate that doesn't like Trump, say 60% of the party, if he has 35, 40%, they don't like him for different reasons. There's a kind of Ted Cruz, you know, kind of right-wing conservative principled stand stand against Trump who don't have any problem with the kind of ideological lane he's running in, but don't necessarily like him as a person, maybe.
And there's maybe a more moderate slice of Republicans who do feel like he represents a politics that's a little too far to the right. And the problem for someone like DeSantis is how do you unite both of those people under one common cause, one common campaign, under a common issue? And that's the challenge I think he's running up against is, you know, Donald Trump may not have the ceiling that maybe a coalition candidate can have, but he certainly has the high floor of this race.
You mentioned, you know, theoretically, yes, you could put together this coalition. But the reality is that as of today, we're seeing Chris Christie getting into this race.
You're seeing Mike Pence get into this race. There's some guy from North Dakota who's getting into this race.
Chris Sununu has said that he's not going to get into the race because he thinks it's too dangerous to split the field. But how is this any different from 2015, 2016, where you had all of these other candidates?

You have Tim Scott, who's a prominent candidate. You have Nikki Haley out there.
It is not as if you have, what did Raines Previous said? It's Bruce Springsteen versus the cover bands. Well, I mean, some of these cover bands have some cred to them.
So yeah, no, I think this is a great point. I would say the biggest difference if we're talking 2016 to now is that they went through 2016.
And so when we talk to people like Larry Hogan, as we did for the podcast, he's saying the time to coalesce around the candidate is not right now, but they know they would have to do that, but going into the next year and before Iowa. So to me, this can still be a Republican field that has learned some

lessons, and we just haven't seen those lessons yet. At this time, it's full vanity hours, right?

If you look in the mirror and you see a president and you have enough people who will support you

in doing that, there's basically no cost to getting in the race, getting in a Republican

presidential debate. And I think kind of seeing what we saw happen on the Democratic side in 2020,

where so many people were in there kind of testing the waters. The kind of truth time will come is, one, does Ron DeSantis maintain his status as closest Trump challenger, or do those other candidates diminish him? In that piece I wrote last week, I was saying, if I'm Ron DeSantis, my biggest concern right now is not how do I get 15 more percent to beat Donald Trump, but how do I make sure that I vanquish those other options who could be taking two to three percent from me over the next year? And so a big question I have for this year is not really the fight between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, but DeSantis versus the other candidates.
And does he come into Iowa making himself the clear Trump alternative and in coalescing support from some of those others? If he's going to be someone who's going to overtake Trump, that has to happen. And so I guess I don't think that it's clear that the Republicans haven't learned a 2016 lesson yet, but I do think it will be clear as of next year.
One, is that coordination happening? And two, is Ron DeSantis good enough as a candidate to make that coalesce around him? Because if that answer is no, it becomes much harder to see who that person is. And they have rested a lot in DeSantis being that person.
And so my question is whether that is true, and if so, will he be able to coordinate

with the other non-Trump campaigns so that heading into next year, he is the clear alternative? Okay, so let's pull back from the horse race to the 35,000-foot view, okay? Long-term view. And again, nobody knows the answers for these questions, but I want to get your sense of this.
So let's assume that it is 2024 or 2025 and Donald Trump is no longer dominating the political scene. And again, this is a big assumption that he's gone.
The divisions that you've been writing about and talking about that we've been talking about, this real toxic element in our politics, does it go away or does it take on different forms? No. Yeah, I don't think it goes away.
Give me your sense of the toxicity of the division post-Trump. I think Donald Trump is a reflection of American divisions that have been rising before that.
Also certainly a supercharger of them, but I think they predate Trump and I think they will outlast post-Trump. I think that that was clear in the midterm elections where you had a kind of Republican candidate base that was really having that sprouted up from a lot of places, not just Trump.
It's been clear to me over the last three months where even you have an America First movement that's pushing Donald Trump on some issues, independent of him. And so I really think that this is a thing that's here to stay.
And I largely think that's true because we have a political system. I keep

going back to kind of structures disconnected from public opinion. But until we have a political system that creates incentives for candidates to reflect public opinion rather than reflect the kind of needs of an activist base or the desires of the most ardent primary voters, until that is true, I think this

division stays. I think

we have a kind of locked in, deeply right-wing power structure, particularly at places like state legislatures, that is going nowhere, regardless of what happens with Donald Trump. I think that power is largely reflected in Congress and will be going nowhere, even outside of Donald Trump.
And so even in 2024-5, honestly, there's a version of Republicans we talked to that admit that they probably can't beat Trump in the nomination right now. But they secretly say, you know, people have told this to us on the show and have told this to me privately, that they think that ends with Donald Trump getting really beat badly in 2024.
And that

that kind of level of embarrassment is what is necessary for the party to kind of turn the page. That's like one expression, how we get to 2024 or five without Donald Trump.
Or, you know, the legal problems become too much to surmount. I don't think either of those scenarios roots out what has become known as Trumpism.

And I just think that people dealing in that prism had not recognized the deep roots of this and how the structures really lock in that view. And the political structures play a key role.
I mean, the fact that you don't have competitive elections, so nobody has to actually reach across the aisle or try to make compromises. But there's also the culture, the permission structure, what's happening in terms of the division of people who now look at one another with fear and loathing, the incentive structures now in the media and in fundraising that encourage people to play to the worst angels of our nature.
I mean, these things have always been there. And now I feel like we're going back to a 2016 conversation.
But pre-Trump, there were at least some adults who would stand up and say, no, we're not going to go in that direction. That's not who we want to be.
It would appeal to your better angels. That whole system seems to have collapsed completely.
And that's why when you talk to some of these politicians like Paul Ryan or Mike Pence, there is that disconnect, you know, that do you realize how much the world has changed, how much the culture has changed? Because you sound like you're picking up where you left off 2015 and that world is gone. Absolutely.
I think there's a version of these politicians that's completely wish casting. Yeah.
You know, they're hoping that the Republican Party, you know, we talked to Asa Hutchinson, and this is someone running a kind of 1% race for the Republican nomination right now. And he's saying what they need is a nominee that's focused on the economy and that Trump and DeSantis are not focused on the right things.
And that's the thing you'll hear often. It's the thing I hear on cable news all the time.
And I really think the onus is on those people saying that to really prove that that's even a priority for the Republican electorate right now. There is no evidence that economic concerns, quote unquote, kitchen table issues, are what's driving the voting priorities of Republicans.
I completely agree. There is a lot of evidence that grievance, anti-wokeness, that being an enemy to your enemies, that kind of thumbing your nose at the liberals is a voting priority for Republicans.
And I think what was seen is kind of an individual shift of the right wing, that it was just the CPAC crowd that went from economic focus to cultural focus. I think people are starting to understand that has become the dominant kind of conversation in society and culture.
And that's not just on the Republican side. You've obviously had a Democratic side that's embraced more explicit social movements than they have before.
And so it is a kind of reaction to the priorities of the society we live in. And one of the things that Byron Donald's told me in our conversation is one of the reasons he's supporting Trump as someone who initially came into Congress as a finance person is that he understands, that's what he said, that politics flows downstream from culture.
And so they have to act with that in mind. And I think we are basically getting to a democratic party that is coming to understand that is true.
That is a really, I think, interesting shift where I feel like there was a political class that was trying to see itself as distinct from culture, that that was a thing that was happening over there as we're dealing with a kind of serious political business here. But Donald Trump completely ended that distinction, which I would probably say was probably foolish for a lot longer time than people like to admit.
But any pretense of that existing is totally gone after Donald Trump, where those two things are clearly being blended. And I think you have a Democratic Party that's reacting to that, and you have a Republican Party that's been completely transformed by that.
Ested Herndon is a national political reporter for the New York Times, host of its

podcast, The Run-Up. He is also a political analyst for CNN and a former reporter with

the Boston Globe and with the Wisconsin Connection alum of Marquette University. Ested, thank you so

much for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me.
Really appreciate it.

It's always a good thing to have a podcast host as a guest.

That's a great life hack.

We're just professional blabber.

Exactly.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes.

We will be back tomorrow.

We'll do this all over again.

The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.