This past February, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein was at the White House, taking meetings, when he decided that Joe Biden wasn’t up to the task of running for President again. “It sort of all happened for me in one day, in a way that was really weird,” Klein said. The President, who had fallen behind in the polls to Donald Trump, was skipping a customary pre-Super Bowl interview for the second year in a row. As Klein made his way around the West Wing, the special counsel Robert Hur’s report describing Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” hit the news. Klein had planned to write a column wondering if the President had the capacity to run anything more than a Rose Garden campaign. But as he watched Biden give a press conference that evening—“clearly out of fury,” Klein said—during which the President confused the leaders of Mexico and Egypt, Klein had an epiphany of sorts: “I think I just sort of personally had this moment where I was, like, This is not going to work.”
A little more than a week later, Klein read an audio essay, “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden,” on his podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” in which he argued that Democrats still had time to pick a new nominee if Biden could be persuaded to step aside: “The people whom Biden listens to—Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, Nancy Pelosi, Anita Dunn—they need to get him to see this.” The piece caused waves of consternation among certain parts of the liberal commentariat. Writing in The Nation, Joan Walsh said that Klein could use his power in “so much more constructive ways.” Josh Marshall wrote a column for Talking Points Memo headlined “No. Ezra Klein Is Completely Wrong. Here’s Why.” “I always thought that was sort of funny,” Klein told me. “Like, ‘completely wrong’? There’s not a two-per-cent chance that I’m right?”
I met Klein last Friday morning at a brightly lit Brooklyn restaurant, filled with large plants and loud club music, where Klein is a regular. One-on-one, he is much as he seems on his podcast: a considerate wonk, someone who reads a lot more than you do but still wants to know what you think. He has salt-and-pepper hair, a bit of a beard, and maintains steady eye contact; his short-sleeved Henley revealed a tattoo on his forearm of the phrase “is that so?”—an allusion to a Zen parable. Klein, who is forty, was hired at the Washington Post when he was twenty-five and quickly built something of a policy-blog empire inside the paper, before decamping to launch the news site Vox. He cultivated a careful yet sincere persona: Klein was progressive but also curious about other points of view, exceedingly charming and undeniably good at climbing D.C.’s power tower. It all seemed remunerative, too; while other political writers lived in group houses, he moved out of his for a grownup’s apartment, a spacious place with an elevator that opened directly into his foyer. (Klein left D.C. for the Bay Area a few years ago and moved to New York last year.) “The Ezra Klein Show,” which began in 2016, is now among the top podcasts on Apple’s charts. I told Klein that, when he wrote his Biden piece, it struck me as someone strategically deploying political capital he’d spent years building up.
“Yes, that’s accurate,” Klein said. “I did understand myself as trying to open up a conversation that I thought was closed.” A week after his audio essay appeared, he interviewed Elaine C. Kamarck, the author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know About How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates,” an hour-long discussion that got granular on how Democrats could stage an open convention to replace Biden as the Party’s nominee. “My intention was to socialize the idea of these alternatives,” Klein said, “because I thought they might be needed.” Klein, in the language of think tanks, was creating a permission structure for Democrats—specifically Democratic elected officials—to challenge the President’s candidacy.
Outside of the recording studio, Klein had been speaking directly with many of them. “I’m not gonna say what my behind-the-scenes reporting was,” he said, when I asked for specific examples. “I was talking to a lot of members of Congress, because my sense was, a lot of the action was happening there.” Klein said that, whenever anyone “normal” in his life talked about Biden’s prospects in the election, the President’s age always came up first. “Then, in politics, it was like this thing, it’s not that you couldn’t talk about it—the Times ran a number of stories about it—but it didn’t know where to go.” What he realized, speaking to Democrats, “was that a lot of them believed everything I believed, but the place they had gotten to was, Well, this would have been a good conversation to have before the primary. Democrats had not really had a real primary and so Democrats were sort of in this there-is-no-other-option place.”
In June, after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, Klein’s much maligned take morphed into a prescient one. He capitalized on the moment, turning his podcast into a vehicle for considering the fundamental functions of political parties—“I understand parties as these quite vast, informal coalitional networks of overlapping influence,” he told me—and engaging with the figures in the Democratic Party who he thought were worth listening to. Once Kamala Harris emerged as Biden’s replacement, Klein aired interviews with two of the contenders to be her Vice-Presidential nominee: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. (The selection of Walz was announced four days after his appearance on Klein’s podcast.) Earlier this month, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is widely considered to have been a pivotal actor in getting Biden to step aside, came on the podcast to promote her new book, but her comfort with Klein was evident; in a video of their interview, she affectionately taps Klein on the hand to punctuate her retelling of the time that she persuaded “lefty” Democrats to vote for the Defense Authorization Act in order to secure the end of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.
Klein’s primary identity is as a journalist. But, in the past few weeks, his podcast has seemed like the smoke-filled back room of the President’s Party. “All of a sudden, there was actually a lot of space in the Democratic Party,” Klein told me. “One, for people to move up—including to the Vice-Presidential slot—but, two, for the Party to reimagine how it communicates, what it emphasizes, and what it talks about and who it is.” In another year, he went on, “you might have had a primary where that happened, and here you were having this sort of compressed media period. I understood my show as one of the outlets that could go a little bit deeper.”
Many of the unexpected twists of this election season have mirrored ideas that Klein has promoted on his podcast, but the unchallenged coronation of Harris was not among them. In another audio essay, released two days after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his Vice-President, Klein argued that Democrats should allow their voters to see some semblance of a mini-primary. “Let a few up-and-comers make their case against Donald Trump,” he said. “Let’s see some CNN town halls, some multi-candidate forums.” He added, “Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition.” Barack Obama seemed to similarly endorse a more open process when he put out a statement in the wake of Biden’s withdrawal, writing, “I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” Pelosi, reportedly, was also in favor of a more open process.
Klein’s own sense of the Democratic Party is that, despite high-profile figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “it’s a more reformist party than a revolutionary party.” The Democratic coalition is increasingly well-educated and suburban, made up of people who generally don’t want to interrogate the power structures of society, because, by and large, it’s working well for them. (The sorts of people who might be Times subscribers or regular “Ezra Klein Show” listeners.) “You could feel that the argument the Democratic Party wanted to make,” Klein said, “the argument it had been making in state after state since Donald Trump had come onto the scene, was, ‘Those people are lunatics. We’re the people who you can trust to fix roads, we’re the people who are not in here to burn the country down.’ ”
But, Klein went on, “Biden himself had become the reason the Democratic Party couldn’t make this message work,” because he “was not reading to people as a normal, competent person.” Running on competence and decent intentions and the ability to get the job done were what Klein observed as winning strategies in swing states. “It’s not the most inspiring form of politics,” he said, “but it has been helping Democrats win races.”
So, I asked, would Harris win hers? “I don’t know,” Klein said, with a diplomatic smile. “I don’t know.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misquoted a word spoken by Ezra Klein.
