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| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by John Nichols, who's executive editor of The Nation magazine, here to talk about the progressive movement and the politics of the day. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's great to be with you. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Now, you've just been named the new executive editor of The Nation, which celebrates its 160th anniversary this summer. | ||
| Can you tell us a little bit about the magazine and its history? | ||
| Sure. | ||
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unidentified
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The magazine was founded right after the end of the Civil War by abolitionists. | |
| And their goal was to provide a new journal of opinion and news in the country. | ||
| In its first issue, amazingly, they said that not a lot had happened the week that they came out. | ||
| They might have been wrong about that. | ||
| But over the last 160 years, the nation has sought to cover domestic and international affairs in a very intensive way, to look around the world and here at home at what's going on. | ||
| It's also offered a great deal of opinion over the years. | ||
| Folks like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. have written for the nation, many presidents, and in this contemporary area, in this contemporary era, we continue. | ||
| And it's certainly a tumultuous time, but when you're 160 years old, you've seen plenty of tumultuous times. | ||
| Now, you recently joined the nation's Katrina Vandenhoe for an exclusive interview with Zorhan Mamdani, the Democrats nominee for the mayor of New York City and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. | ||
| If elected, he will become the first Muslim and the first millennial mayor of the nation's most populous city. | ||
| We have there the cover of that story, which is going to be coming out later this week. | ||
| What did you learn in this interview? | ||
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unidentified
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A lot, I think. | |
| It was an interesting interview. | ||
| We tried to ask a number of questions that don't usually get asked and many forward-looking questions. | ||
| We interviewed him not that long after he won the primary by a pretty resounding margin. | ||
| And so in that context, we began to ask him some real questions about governing. | ||
| How would he govern as a very progressive candidate, a very progressive potential mayor in the era of Donald Trump, but also at a time when many Democrats are very cautious and he obviously is less cautious. | ||
| We asked him a lot about how he would relate to people that didn't agree with him on particular issues, but yet who are residents of New York City and he'd have to work with them. | ||
| We asked him a lot about his social media, which he's quite well recognized for as being somebody sort of something of a master of social media. | ||
| But we also asked him about how he would relate to legacy media, newspapers, magazines, and that that had been around for a long time. | ||
| And what we found through the whole thing was that he's a very nuanced thinker. | ||
| It was intriguing. | ||
| I've interviewed presidents and candidates and lots of folks in lots of different settings. | ||
| What was striking about him was that with each question, he would pause and think at least for a moment about what he was going to say. | ||
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unidentified
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And then when he said it, there were often many layers to it. | |
| And so I think that's one of the interesting things about this particular candidate is he's been caricatured a lot. | ||
| But what we, I hope, had a little success in was giving a picture of him as somebody who thinks a lot, not just about the issues, but about how he might serve in what is arguably one of the most prominent, one of the most well-recognized offices in the United States. | ||
| Speaking of how he's being represented across different platforms, he has been the focus of pretty intense criticism from Republicans who are calling him a communist for his views on taxes, the economy, on wealth redistribution. | ||
| His pro-Gaza views have also alienated some voters. | ||
| What did he say about that in particular? | ||
| I mean, for example, last month, Mamdani told a group of New York business leaders that he was not going to use the phrase globalize the intifada, which had been controversial during the campaign, that he would discourage others from doing so. | ||
| How is he framing his views on Israel and Gaza in particular? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, he has answered a lot of questions about this in broadcast and print interviews over the last few months. | |
| We asked him about how he would relate to people who really disagreed with him on that issue and a host of others as mayor, because that's the real challenge, isn't it? | ||
| If you come to a position of power, how will you relate to, connect with, interact with people who really do not agree with you, who may think you're wrong? | ||
| And what was striking about the conversation was the emphasis he put on maintaining a kind of a deep dialogue, a willingness to learn and to evolve, if you will, but also a clarity. | ||
| It's very clear that on the issues where he has taken stands, he's thought a lot about them. | ||
| He believes what he is saying. | ||
| That doesn't mean that he says, well, I'll never shift on something, but it does mean that I think he sees the relationship with people who disagree with him as one of dialogue and real discussion, and also a search for places where even if they disagree on a particular issue, they might find common ground on other issues. | ||
| And one of the striking things was that he spoke at some length about his desire to make sure that everyone in New York is safe, no matter what their ethnicity, no matter what their religion, no matter what their beliefs. | ||
| And that's actually a pretty important thing at a time when our discourse can sometimes become very intense. | ||
| And I think it's fair to say that in many instances, he sounded as if he was hoping to dial down some of that intensity so that you could actually have dialogue, so that you could actually have a real discourse. | ||
| Now, moving on to other topics, also in the nation, you've written that representative democracy will live or die in Texas. | ||
| A gerrymandering fight reveals how far Trump will go to avoid electoral accountability. | ||
| So you've written about this effort to try to get, as the Trump administration has asked Texas Republicans to do, five more seats in the House of Representatives by doing redistricting mid-census halfway through when it would normally be done. | ||
| And I wonder if you can talk about why you think this is so crucial as a topic in terms of whether or not representative democracy will live or die. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, it isn't just about Texas. | |
| One of the things to recognize is that gerrymandering is the national issue. | ||
| It has happened going back to the founding days of the Republic, a name literally taken from a former governor who drew favorable lines for himself and his party, or at least I think a former congressman. | ||
| I hope I get that right. | ||
| But the interesting thing about gerrymandering is that it's now been weaponized. | ||
| It's become such a tool of contemporary politics, winner-take-all politics, that what's happening in Texas becomes a very, very big deal. | ||
| And the idea that the president of the United States, who has just gone through a fight over a very challenging issue, his big, beautiful bill, and one that has some pretty rough poll numbers, and the president who himself is experiencing some reasonably rough poll numbers, would say to allied officials in a particular state, hey, we need to swing five seats in the middle of the period, right? | ||
| You know, we have a 10-year period. | ||
| We redistrict initially, and then in the middle of that period to upend that and to draw new lines that would benefit his party. | ||
| That's a big deal. | ||
| And it's why I say it's not just about Texas. | ||
| Obviously, there are concerns about the Voting Rights Act and there are cases heading toward the Supreme Court in that regard. | ||
| What Texas is doing has raised real additional concerns there. | ||
| Then there is this reality that we're looking at, which is if Texas acts, other states are saying they will act. | ||
| And we end up in a situation as a country where we could see our lines all over the U.S. altered, perhaps radically altered, with the purpose of producing political results, i.e. with the purpose of making sure that districts will vote a particular way. | ||
| And so, yes, I wrote about what's happening in Texas, but I have deep concerns about where we're headed in the broader sense. | ||
| As a country, if we're going to have representative democracy, we have to figure out a way to get beyond not just gerrymandering, but beyond systems and structures that can be abused or upended in the midst of a term or on the eve of an election. | ||
| Those are the things that really concern me. | ||
| At the White House last week, President Trump spoke about that redistricting effort in Texas and said the FBI may need to be involved to arrest some of the Texas Democrats that have fled the state to avoid quorum so that the vote could not happen. | ||
| If you look at what's going on with the redistricting or whatever you want to call it, the Democrats have done it long before we started. | ||
| They've done it all over the place. | ||
| They did it in New York. | ||
| They did it in a lot of different states. | ||
| But in Massachusetts, so somebody used this as an example today. | ||
| I was interviewed this morning and they said, you know, it's pretty unfair. | ||
| Trump got 40%. | ||
| I'm not proud of that, but I think I probably got more, but that's okay. | ||
| I got 40% in Massachusetts, and yet they have 100% of the vote in terms of Congress. | ||
| So there's no Republican, there's no anything. | ||
| So we should have 40%. | ||
| You know why they redistricted? | ||
| And they've done it all over the place. | ||
| And they've done it in California, by the way. | ||
| Before this, they've done it in California. | ||
| So we'll see what happens. | ||
| We have a wonderful governor in Texas. | ||
| He feels strongly about it. | ||
| It's going to be up to him. | ||
| I think there's tremendous support for it. | ||
| And, you know, we've watched the Democrats destroy our country in four years. | ||
| They've destroyed between their open borders that we talked about, transgender for everybody, all of the horrible things that they've done, high taxes, horrible medical provision for people. | ||
| We've watched them destroy our country. | ||
| for four years and people don't want that. | ||
| And people in Texas, as you saw, I got the highest vote in the history of Texas. | ||
| I love Texas. | ||
| Texas likes me, obviously. | ||
| But I got the highest vote and that was checked out on the show. | ||
| Did you see that where they checked it out? | ||
| They said he actually did get the highest vote in the history of Texas, which disappointed them. | ||
| They were very disappointed to hear that. | ||
| But Texas is a place that's done very well with a free enterprise kind of an attitude, with the exact opposite of what's happening in New York with a communist mayor. | ||
| And they know what they're doing, and they're doing the right thing. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Two questions for you. | ||
| Mr. President, thank you. | ||
| Texas Senator John Cornyn. | ||
| Texas Senator John Cornyn is asking for your help to force Democrats back to the state and hold them accountable. | ||
| Do you want the federal government and the FBI to help locate and arrest these Texas Democrats who have left the state? | ||
| Well, I think they've abandoned the state. | ||
| Nobody's seen anything like it, even though they've done it twice before. | ||
| And in a certain way, it almost looks like they've abandoned the state. | ||
| It looks very bad. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead, please. | ||
| Well, they may have to. | ||
| They may have to. | ||
| John Nichols, executive editor of The Nation. | ||
| What do you think of the president's comments and how different this is from any other redistricting fight, and especially given that states like California and New York are talking about doing something similar? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I think the president's comments illustrate how intense this fight has become and how it will very probably be central to a lot of our political discourse, not just this week, but perhaps for many weeks and months going forward. | |
| There's talk of all sorts of interventions. | ||
| A couple of things that I would put in the mix here. | ||
| First, the core message that the president brought there, although I happen to disagree with him on an awful lot of issues, the core message that the president brought there was an accurate one. | ||
| We have many states in this country where supporters of one party can win 35, 40, 45% of the vote and yet be dramatically underrepresented in the Congress of the United States. | ||
| He used the example of Massachusetts, but you can also use the example of many states in this country, smaller states especially, where the Democrats may get a third or even roughly 40% of the vote and yet not have any representation. | ||
| So you've got cases where Democrats and Republicans go to the polls in November, cast their ballots, definitely have candidates they support, have values, ideals that they support, and yet from their own state, they have little or no representation. | ||
| Now, there's ways to deal with this, and one of these is proportional representation, where you simply say to voters, you vote for the party you like. | ||
| If it's Democrat, check that. | ||
| If it's Republican, check that. | ||
| And then the representatives from the state will be assigned proportionally. | ||
| In that case, in a state like Massachusetts, you might get several Republican representatives. | ||
| In some of the Western states, you probably might well get another Democratic representative as well as a Republican, depending on the state and depending on its size. | ||
| But where it really becomes consequential and where this becomes a bigger deal is in a state like Texas. | ||
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unidentified
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Texas is a very competitive state. | |
| The Republicans dominate. | ||
| And President Trump, as he said, did very well there. | ||
| But we have had recent elections in Texas, when Beto Rourke ran for the Senate as an example, where the Democrats got 48% of the vote. | ||
| They don't have 48% of the House delegation now. | ||
| And if this radical gerrymandering occurs there, they will have dramatically less representation. | ||
| And so as a country, when we go into these gerrymandering fights, we really need to look at models that might assure that we have a deeper representation of where people are at. | ||
| And it's complicated. | ||
| We can go into many, many different models here. | ||
| I do want to get to our callers pretty quickly. | ||
| So folks who have questions for John Nichols can call in Republicans at 202-748-8001, Democrats at 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we get to the callers, I want to ask just one more thing about the fact that last month, President Trump unveiled his new initiative aimed at artificial intelligence, particularly accelerating the development and adoption of AI in the U.S. | ||
| He called it Winning the AI Race, America's AI Action Plan. | ||
| What are your thoughts on this initiative? | ||
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unidentified
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I was disappointed. | |
| And I've written a lot about AI over the years. | ||
| A number of years ago, now it seems ancient history. | ||
| A colleague of mine and I, colleague Bob McChesney, wrote a book called People Get Ready. | ||
| And it was a forward-looking book on automation, robotification, machine learning, AI, all of these things that were coming at us. | ||
| And one of the things that we came to believe, and that I still believe very strongly, is that AI, especially, will change everything about how we work, how we live, so many things about our lives. | ||
| And I found in the president's speech too much of a willingness, and this is, by the way, I see this in both parties and by a lot of political figures, but too much of a willingness to cede the direction of AI to a small number of corporations, to very, very powerful tech corporations, to investors, to people who want to make a lot of money off AI. | ||
| What worries me is that that sort of decision-making can often work the development of a new technology. | ||
| And where that's a big deal is it's just priorities. | ||
| I mean, is AI used for the most nefarious purposes or to help scientists cure diseases? | ||
| Does it become very aligned with our military? | ||
| Do other militaries develop their own AI? | ||
| Do we have kind of a global AI arms rush? | ||
| Or do we use AI as a tool to try and address the challenges of climate, the challenges of hunger and other issues around the world? | ||
| I would like to see from all of our leaders a much deeper and much more thoughtful approach to artificial intelligence because it's coming at us very fast. | ||
| Let's get to some questions from our audience. | ||
| Jimbo in Bakersfield, California, who's an independent voter, asks, can Mr. Nichols speak to the current polls on the popularity of the Democratic Party among registered voters? | ||
| How can they win in the midterms, even without redistricting, when Democrats are as unpopular as Republicans? | ||
|
unidentified
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That is a very, very profound and appropriate question. | |
| Democratic Party is getting very, very low approval numbers. | ||
| I think those approval numbers are particularly for Democratic leadership and folks in Congress. | ||
| And I think it is an expression of a twofold concern. | ||
| One, there are many Republicans who disagree with the Democrats, of course, and many Independents. | ||
| But there are also many Democrats who are deeply frustrated with their own party's approach to the Trump administration and to the issues that are in play right now. | ||
| What I would suggest to the caller is that if you look at generic ballot polls, these are polls that ask, which party are you likely to vote for in 2026? | ||
| The Democrats actually do quite well. | ||
| In many of those polls, they are leading the Republicans and showing some growth in areas where they had been weak. | ||
| So the Democrats have strength in a generic ballot, i.e., that people say, yeah, on balance, I would tend to vote for a Democrat. | ||
| But they're not impressed with what the Democratic Party is doing right now. | ||
| And I think this is one of the important things to understand about where the 2026 election is likely to frame out. | ||
| And that is that you're going to have people voting against one party or the other, not necessarily in favor of it. | ||
| And so, yes, the Democrats could do reasonably well. | ||
| In fact, they could win a lot of elections in 2026, not necessarily because people love them, but because people don't like what Trump and the Republicans are doing. | ||
| At the end of the day, though, as a country, we ought to be struggling toward a point where people actually go and vote for what they want. | ||
| Just to get some numbers on that polling that Jimbo was referencing, here's a story in Newsweek. | ||
| Democrat net favorability plunges to near three decade low, a poll shows. | ||
| And this is a survey from CNBC on Thursday that showed the Democratic Party's net favorability that low. | ||
| And that if you go down here in the new poll, the Democratic Party carries a negative 32 net favorability rating among registered voters. | ||
| The party has a 24% positive rating and a 56% negative rating. | ||
| Trump's approval in the same poll is 46% versus a 51% disapproval rating. | ||
| The president had a negative net approval rating on key policy issues like tariffs, inflation, taxes, and federal spending. | ||
| Now, to your calls, John is in Coming Georgia on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Morning. | ||
| I believe our representation or our republic as a representation of the people basically has already died because we've become a country of party affiliation. | ||
| And let me explain that. | ||
| Okay, so Trump carried Georgia. | ||
| And when his bill comes up in the Senate, neither Georgia's senators voted for it. | ||
| Yet if they're supposed to represent the people, how is it that they cannot vote? | ||
| And this happens across all lines. | ||
| No Democrat senator in any of the states that Trump carried voted for that bill. | ||
| Why is it that, you know, if the representations or the representative in the state is supposed to represent the people, shouldn't they consider voting for something that even though they may not agree with, but yet the people have voted for? | ||
| Same thing in the House. | ||
| What happens if Trump carries a district and yet those people in the district elect a Democrat representative? | ||
| What should that representative do? | ||
| The people have voted for Trump's policies. | ||
| Should he vote for them as well, or does he vote for his party? | ||
| Overwhelmingly, the representatives vote for their party. | ||
| They don't vote for the people. | ||
| And we have gotten so far away from the ideals of which the founding fathers set forth for our country that basically our representative government has died. | ||
| Thank you for your consideration. | ||
| Go ahead, Mr. Nichols, your response? | ||
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unidentified
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That is a very thoughtful commentary. | |
| I may disagree with some of it, but at a fundamental level, this is one of the great challenges of the American experiment. | ||
| Remember that at the founding of this country, many of the authors of the Constitution, as well as initial leaders of the country, no matter what their ideological or political band, warned about parties. | ||
| They warned that political parties could become incredibly powerful and, frankly, corrupt. | ||
| And so you end up in a situation where today we have very, very powerful political parties which take an immense amount of money from very powerful interests in this country. | ||
| So much of what the founders warned about has become a reality. | ||
| And then we get into this very difficult other aspect of the founding of the Constitution, which is that it imagined separated powers, i.e. that you would have a strong Congress, that you would have an executive, that you would have the courts. | ||
| And by the nature of that, there was clearly an understanding that there would be disagreements between these separated powers. | ||
| One of the concepts was that they would check and balance one another. | ||
| Now, that does become a real complexity in representative democracy because we have Republicans from states that voted for Kamala Harris voting with Donald Trump. | ||
| We have Democrats from states that voted for Donald Trump voting against Donald Trump's position. | ||
| And so as a country, we are, in fact, divided, not just at a national level or on particular issues, but we're divided within our own states. | ||
| And I think that the great power of the parties right now, that it's become so immense and that people have gotten so much into their camp that one of the traditional aspects of the American experiment that I've always found exciting and interesting was the ability of citizens to lobby for what they want, to say, look, maybe we thought one way at election time, but we've come to realize something else. | ||
| Or maybe this issue wasn't addressed in the election, but it should be. | ||
| Or maybe a president has gone a direction that we didn't expect him to go. | ||
| And so we do want to check and balance him. | ||
| Or frankly, a Congress is going a direction where we don't want to go, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And I think that as a country, one of the things that concerns me the most is that when citizens do lobby on an issue, be it Gaza, be it taxes, be it Medicaid and SNAP benefits and things like that, I'm not sure that our members of Congress are listening to what they're hearing from people as much as they should. | ||
| If they did, I think, yeah, we would have points where the Congress disagreed with presidents more and where people crossed party lines and didn't always vote as sort of a block, which is what we usually see. | ||
| Jeff is in Indianapolis, Indiana on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, everybody. | |
| How are you doing, Mr. Nichols? | ||
| Hello, I'm glad you're calling. | ||
| And Mr. Nichols, I just let you know I'm a huge fan of yours, and I do consider myself a progressive. | ||
| And I think part of the problem is that Democrats need to grow a backbone and address some serious issues. | ||
| You know, in this last election, we had a woman well-qualified, a U.S. senator, vice president, as well as an attorney general for the state of California. | ||
| And yet she lost to a convicted felon, a sex offender, and a racist and a bigot. | ||
| I mean, let's just be honest about it. | ||
| And people overwhelmingly chose him. | ||
| Hispanics, labor unions, white women. | ||
| This was an election where so many people voted against their best interests, and now they're finding out that, yes, we did vote against our best interests. | ||
| I'm going to ask you, Mr. Nichols, is it culture or is it policy? | ||
| Because I think it's more culture. | ||
| Until people get over their inner demons, their bigotry, their misogyny, Democrats are going to continue to lose. | ||
| Because right now, the Democrats are the Keystone cops and the Republicans are the Manson family. | ||
| Yes, we're dealing with fascism. | ||
| We are at risk. | ||
| Until we dress, you know, LBJ once said, if you could convince the lowest white man that he's better than the highest black man, you could take him to the bank. | ||
| That's MAGA right there. | ||
| So we got to address our cultural differences. | ||
| Well, that's a detailed call with a lot of elements to it. | ||
| First and foremost, I will say to you, as somebody who's covered a lot of Republicans, that I have met many Republicans who are humane and who really do care about a nuanced and thoughtful approach to our politics, just as I've met many Democrats who are the same. | ||
| And this is one of the real complexities of this time. | ||
| We've gotten so deeply divided into our corners that this possibility of reasoning with people and reasoning beyond their biases, their whatever is going on with them on both sides becomes complicated. | ||
| And I want to go to one of the core things, though, that the caller mentioned, because I think this is a really important aspect of it. | ||
| He mentioned that people vote against their own interests. | ||
| And we see a tremendous amount of this in America. | ||
| That's not necessarily wrong, right? | ||
| You may have many interests. | ||
| And so you may have a particular issue that drives you and makes you go one way or the other. | ||
| But as a country, what we've ended up with is in a system where there is massive campaign funding by very wealthy and very powerful interests. | ||
| And frankly, where we've seen a collapse of a lot of media as it historically existed, we've ended up in a situation where campaigns are often focused on issues that aren't central to our economics, aren't central to kind of the core question of can you afford where you live? | ||
| Can you afford transportation? | ||
| Can you afford all the things that you need? | ||
| And a deeper, more thoughtful conversation about that. | ||
| And I think that's a real challenge in America. | ||
| I do think it brings us back, by the way, to the conversation we had with Zorhan Mamdani, the candidate for mayor of New York. | ||
| Because one of the things that he did as a candidate early in his candidacy when his poll numbers were very, very low, was he went to neighborhoods in New York that had voted more for Donald Trump than in the past. | ||
| And he asked people directly, you know, what's up? | ||
| Why are you shifting your voting patterns? | ||
| What's going on with you here? | ||
| And what he found, what he heard from people again and again and again, was a sense that the issue of affordability, whether you can literally afford to live in a place like New York City, was very pressing for them. | ||
| And they felt the Democrats, to their view, had not done enough. | ||
| And so they took a try on Trump there. | ||
| Polling suggests that many of those folks are not as excited now. | ||
| But what Mondani did off that was to frame his campaign around the issues of affordability, really laser-focused on that. | ||
| And I think that's in many ways an answer, or at least a suggestion as regards the caller's question. | ||
| If people are, in his words, and I think in mine, voting often against their own interest, how do you get them to focus on what may be, at least economically, their interest? | ||
| Well, one of the answers is to speak much more directly, much more firmly about the issues that are at stake. | ||
| And again, I think in Mondani, you see an example of that. | ||
| In Bernie Sanders, you see an example of that. | ||
| Sanders was just in West Virginia yesterday, drawing huge crowds in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. | ||
| I want to get to a couple more callers before we run out of time. | ||
| Let's hear from Frank in New Ipswich, New Hampshire on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Frank. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you very much for taking my call. | ||
| I'd just like to get your thoughts on this. | ||
| Texas might not be so deep Republican as people believe. | ||
| And if they redistrict to add five more seats, potentially they're diluting those districts, and maybe there could be a Democratic surprise. | ||
| I'd just like to hear your thoughts on that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Our caller from Ipswich is very wise. | ||
| I had a friend named Fred Kessler. | ||
| He was a longtime legislator and judge in Wisconsin, my native state. | ||
| And Fred Kessler always reminded folks that when you redistrict, you redistrict in a moment. | ||
| But people move. | ||
| Districts change. | ||
| And so there are assumptions made by politicians based often on old information or even on information of the moment that's going to shift. | ||
| And so I do think that there is a real possibility in this flurry to redistrict, not just in Texas, but in states around the country, that you could end up with an unexpected circumstance. | ||
| That is, that you weaken incumbents who are in now gerrymandered or very safe seats and create a circumstance where they might be more vulnerable. | ||
| If we have in 2026 a wave election, i.e., if the pattern goes in a particular direction, that could see some incumbents get beat who otherwise would have won, but the redistricting, the gerrymandering, might have made them vulnerable. | ||
| There are two questions we receive via text that kind of relate to the same topic. | ||
| I'll read them both. | ||
| So the first says, this is from Mark in Linfield, Massachusetts. | ||
| I think if the 90 million people who never vote actually voted, it would nullify gerrymandering. | ||
| What say you? | ||
| And then Dave in Shiloh, Illinois says, what about expanding the size of the House? | ||
| Your thoughts on those two points. | ||
|
unidentified
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Great questions. | |
| It's one of the reasons I love C-SPAN. | ||
| First and foremost, if we had dramatically higher turnout, yes, would that affect our results? | ||
| Of course, because we know that a lot of people who don't vote are often folks who have historically felt disenfranchised or disconnected from the system. | ||
| Many of them might vote differently than those who are currently participating. | ||
| The second part, if you could remind me of that, just that was about expanding the size of the House of Representatives. | ||
|
unidentified
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Expanding the size of the House. | |
| I've actually written about this. | ||
| You may have one of the few journalists who has explored this issue. | ||
| Remember, at the founding of the American Experiment, the concept was that with each new census, you would have a greater population. | ||
| And in addition to drawing districts, you would expand the size of the House. | ||
| We stopped doing that a little over 100 years ago. | ||
| And the impact is that now our congressional districts are huge with 700,000, 800,000 people living in them. | ||
| It's very hard to have representative democracy when you have that many people in a district. | ||
| You end up using TV and a lot of campaign spending. | ||
| And so, yes, is there a model where you might expand the House? | ||
| It's notable that one of our previous callers came from New Hampshire. | ||
| New Hampshire has one of the largest legislatures in the United States. | ||
| Very small districts, a lot of legislators. | ||
| And one of the things that we found in New Hampshire is that it will flip control. | ||
| It will go back and forth quite often. | ||
| The other thing that's interesting is that often, not always, in New Hampshire, you've seen instances where people have crossed party lines because they really do come from smaller districts where they are more connected to their neighbors, the people that elected them. | ||
| And so at the end of the day, I think that some expansion of the House makes sense. | ||
| And it might be one way to make democracy more representative, but also to address some of these issues that we're wrestling with. | ||
| Thomas is in Springhill, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Thomas. | ||
|
unidentified
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My question is with the situation in New York City with this Mandani. | |
| We know that he's a face of the Democrat Party. | ||
| He wants to follow the Democrat policies, taxing the rich. | ||
| He wants to reduce law enforcement. | ||
| He can't backpedal this. | ||
| He's already made these statements. | ||
| He even wants to take grocery stores and make them government grocery stores. | ||
| My question is this. | ||
| Mayors like Mandani, and if you remember in the 70s in New York, the city went bankrupt when you had that mayor being with all the funding. | ||
| And I'm sure a lot of rich have left that city and went to other states like Florida. | ||
| At the time, California was a red state. | ||
| My question is, once these people that he chooses to tax, the so-called rich businesses and people that own homes, especially certain areas of New York City, once they start leaving and the city loses funds and it goes bankrupt, will the unions be able to bail him out? | ||
| Does he come crawling to Trump and ask for help? | ||
| So really quickly before you respond to Thomas's point, there was a similar question from Jay N. Shaw in Wichita, Kansas, who asked, is Mr. Momdani a communist? | ||
| If selected New York City mayor, what in practical terms would that mean for the future of New York City and nationally for the Democratic Party? | ||
| So very similar to Thomas's question. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're both good questions to answer. | |
| Zara Momdani is not a communist. | ||
| He's a Democratic socialist. | ||
| The United States has had Democratic Socialist mayors throughout its modern history. | ||
| Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which I grew up near, had three Democratic socialist mayors in the 20th century. | ||
| They served most of that century as mayors. | ||
| And Milwaukee did not collapse into Lake Michigan. | ||
| In fact, under one of the great Democratic Socialist mayors in American history, Daniel Hong, Milwaukee was frequently rated as the best governed or one of the best governed cities in the country. | ||
| And so when you talk about the ideology of someone who is coming to power, the important thing to look at is can they do what they seek to do with the best of intentions, i.e., can you make New York City more affordable so that working class people can remain there? | ||
| And frankly, also so that wealthy people who may be paying more taxes will continue to want to live there because it's a great place to live. | ||
| It is an exciting, interesting city. | ||
| Momdani thinks he can do this. | ||
| Obviously, the voters in the Democratic Party thought that he could do this. | ||
| Polling suggests he is doing quite well as a candidate. | ||
| So, I mean, I think that for the callers, the question is whether a candidate who seeks to make affordability, i.e. the ability for working class people to remain in the city, seeks to make that central to his or her governance. | ||
| Can that work? | ||
| Can that function? | ||
| We have seen it function in the past in many cities. | ||
| And it's also, that becomes the great test for Momdani. | ||
| He will be before the voters over the next few months. | ||
| And part of his job is to convince the voters of New York City that he can govern as a Democratic socialist in a way that is effective and, frankly, that serves the great mass of people in the city. | ||
| DNC Chair Ken Martin was speaking about Momdani's candidacy and left-wing candidates more broadly and said, at the end of the day, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is that we're a big tent. | ||
| We have lots of people in that tent from all different ideological wings, from conservative Democrats to centrists to progressives to these new leftists. | ||
| And the reality is, I've always said that you win through addition, not subtraction. | ||
| You don't win by putting people out of your coalition. | ||
| You win by bringing people into your coalition, and that includes people from all different ideological wings. | ||
| And your thoughts on Mamdani's sort of being brought into that tent? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| I mean, look, Mamdani, as a candidate, has proven to be very, very popular with young voters and with a lot of voters who have historically not necessarily had the highest level of participation. | ||
| So he is bringing people into the political process. | ||
| Now, if you're talking about the tent of the Democratic Party, yes, in the primary, they did come in and they voted. | ||
| A lot of them voted for him. | ||
| The question will be in the November election. | ||
| I expect that New York City is likely to have a very, very high turnout. | ||
| And obviously, for any political party, your goal is to have a high turnout and especially a high turnout of voters who are attracted to you. | ||
| I think that one of the challenges for the Democratic Party for a long time has been that it has tended to operate as a managerial party. | ||
| It hasn't been that exciting quite often. | ||
| And as a result, it's hard to generate that high level of turnout. | ||
| We'll see what Mamdani does as a Democratic nominee. | ||
| Can he draw more people out? | ||
| But I will tell you that when I look across the country, and I've written big stories recently on races for governorships in Virginia and New Jersey and contests in Omaha, Nebraska, and places like that, the Democratic Party is different in different places. | ||
| And frankly, although we're in a period where Donald Trump is a very dominant figure in the Republican Party, there's a lot of difference in the Republican Party as well. | ||
| And so I'm always interested in how parties make themselves more popular, i.e. drawing more people in. | ||
| And it's, in my opinion, it's rarely by being managerial or cautious. | ||
| It is often by taking bold stands that point to the future. | ||
| Well, thank you so much for your time. | ||
| John Nichols is the new executive editor of The Nation magazine. | ||
| I appreciate your time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm honored. | |
| And thanks for having me on. | ||
| And thanks to all the calls and all the really interesting issues they brought up. | ||
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| And past president nominee. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo class. |