michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, is Pete Buttigieg the new candidate to take on Trump?

michelle goldberg

I just am not sure that a management consultant whose base is highly educated whites is going to be a plausible nominee for a party that is still substantially people of color.

david leonhardt

Then, we talk about the California wildfires and what to do about them.

ross douthat

The fire problem is a problem of climate change, but it’s also a problem of public policy. And public policy in California is completely controlled by the Democratic Party.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

There’s a lot of optimism there, and I don’t think there’s a lot of optimism a lot of places. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

The New York Times published a poll this week that’s shaking Democrats’ confidence. Joe Biden is running only slightly ahead of Donald Trump in key swing states, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are trailing Trump. It’s just one poll and the election is still a year away, but the results are feeding a sense of anxiety among Democrats that Biden may be past his prime and that Warren and Sanders may be unappealing to swing voters. Those concerns seem to be one reason that Pete Buttigieg has surged in the polls of the Iowa caucus. Ross, you should go first here. Let’s start with the broad, and then we’ll get narrow. How weak do you think the Democratic field is right now?

ross douthat

I think the top of the field is weak, and I think that it is weak in part for ideological reasons. Elizabeth Warren has a lot of talents and good qualities, but she has run a campaign that is positioning her well to the left on a lot of issues of I think where a lot of voters are. And Bernie Sanders is obviously well to the left, as well. I think he may be a slightly underrated candidate in a general election, but neither of them are sort of the obvious standard bearer for a party whose primary goal is just to beat Donald Trump by as many points as possible. And then, you know, Joe Biden, for reasons that we’ve talked about over and over on this show, what Joe Biden represented would be a strong candidate against Trump. Who Joe Biden is now, a man who is pretty clearly a little bit too old for the rigors of campaigning, is not that strong.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what I’m interested in is you have really consistently said that all of us pundits obsess about electability, and we don’t really know what it is, right? Like, we thought Mitt Romney and John Kerry were electable and, well, they weren’t. When you see polls like this one, does it make you anxious?

michelle goldberg

No, of course it makes me anxious. I mean, it’s terrifying. But I also think that we bring to these polls a lot of preconceptions that maybe distort how we’re reading them. Like for example, I haven’t seen any conventional wisdom gelling around the idea that if you look at these polls, actually Bernie Sanders looks pretty electable. The headline has been this is terrible news for Elizabeth Warren. The headline hasn’t been, oh, look, Bernie Sanders actually doing better in Michigan versus Trump than Biden is. In the same way that people see these polls and they panic and they think that Elizabeth Warren is getting killed because of Medicare for All, when actually I believe the New York Times has also reported that, among non-college-educated white swing voters, Medicare for All is popular. So I think that we tend to look at these results and we have a lot of anxiety, but since most pundits are college-educated, upper middle class people, we bring the assumptions and biases of our own milieu to bear on results that might not reflect them. And full disclosure, you know, and I’ve said this before, my husband is consulting for the Warren campaign.

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean, I think Bernie Sanders in the primary has sort of underperformed relative to how well I thought he’d perform, but I agree with Michelle. I think the press really likes Elizabeth Warren and feels somewhat protective towards her. But I also think, you know, to Michelle’s point about Medicare for All, the challenge for the Democrats is that there are lots of ways to build a majority, but sometimes you do have to choose. There are voters who are swing voters who really like Medicare for All. Those voters are a little more culturally conservative, and so if you’re building a campaign around winning them, you want to balance your support for Medicare for All with some sort of signal on immigration or abortion or something out of that range of issues that you’re not just a Harvard, Massachusetts, New York Times liberal. And alternatively, if you’re trying to win the white upper middle class that’s a little more socially liberal or socially moderate, then you can’t build your campaign around Medicare for All because those are the voters who like their health insurance and are freaked out about it. I think this is the problem for the sort of leftward turn the Democratic Party is making. It’s a full-spectrum turn, and there isn’t a sort of strategic sense of we’re prioritizing this issue because we’re going after these voters or we’re prioritizing that issue because we’re going after those voters. There’s just a sense that we can move left on all fronts and succeed. And these polls suggest maybe you can’t.

david leonhardt

That’s my biggest wish for the Warren campaign. I mean, I think she has the best diagnosis of our economy’s problems and what to do about it. And I don’t agree with every plank of her campaign, but the total of her agenda I just think is a more serious attack on the stagnation of living standards than any other candidate. And I wish, Ross, to your point, I wish she would find some way to do what I think every successful presidential candidate that I can think of has done — Barack Obama did it, Ronald Reagan did it— which is to send a signal. I see voters out there who aren’t with me on all this, and I recognize you. And I wanted her to do that, and I just haven’t seen her doing that.

michelle goldberg

But the question is, do they do that in a primary when you’re still fighting it out for the most ideologically committed chunk of voters? You know, again, I’m trying to be clear-eyed about this. I don’t want to try to talk myself into the idea that Warren is a stronger candidate than she is. I actually think that Warren could potentially do that in a general election. Warren’s background is fairly culturally conservative, and a lot of her writing had very culturally conservative assumptions up until quite recently.

david leonhardt

Let’s just spend one minute on poll wonkery. The New York Times poll wasn’t the only poll this week. The Washington Post also came out with a big poll. And Michelle, I know you were mentioning this as we were walking in here. It was much better for the Democrats, right?

michelle goldberg

I mean, much better. And I’ve seen some people say, well, it doesn’t matter, it’s national poll. You know, what matters is the swing states. That’s obviously true. What’s not clear to me is how much these discrepancies are about just the fact that one is a national poll and one is swing state polls, and how much of it is about just kind of polling methodologies. I mean, I know that one thing that the New York Times poll has done is to really overweight white working-class voters because they tend to be undersampled. But my understanding is that when you have a relatively small sample size and then you weight it out, it becomes like more volatile, right? So you’ll sometimes see polls that show disproportionate black support for Trump or something. And it’s usually because it was kind of just a handful of voters and you had to extrapolate from that. In that kind of case, one or two outliers can end up really influencing the result.

david leonhardt

That’s right. I mean, I guess what I would say is I understand— look, I would rather believe the Washington Post poll than the New York Times poll.

michelle goldberg

No, and I don’t think we should do that.

david leonhardt

Right, exactly. And I know you’re not saying that. But here’s what I would say. Nate Cohn, who helped oversee the New York Times poll with Amanda Cox and others, Nate has been obsessed with the fact that the polls missed Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2016 because they didn’t get enough white working-class people on the phone, right? When the Times have designed these polls, they’ve really tried to avoid that mistake. That doesn’t mean they got it right, right? And their sample size is much bigger. The Washington Post is a national poll, it’s a smaller sample size, and it’s of registered voters rather than likely voters. So I guess what I would say is we don’t know which is, quote, right and which is, quote, wrong, but at this point, if you’re a Democrat, I would be very, very wary of saying who knows what to believe, let’s just kind of for now assume the Washington Post poll, which you’re not doing at all.

michelle goldberg

No, I don’t think people should do that, but my real fear is that I see a lot of people saying, like, yes, Democrats, Trump can win re-election in this kind of really strident tone, and it just seems so off to me because I don’t know any Democrat who feels complacent. And I actually think that most of the people I know— and I wrote this on Twitter the other day— are almost paralyzed with terror and despair, to the point that it’s demobilizing. But I actually think that Democrats have to kind of think that they have some sort of agency in what happens a year from now.

david leonhardt

So let’s imagine — and we don’t have to imagine, some of our listeners, I’m sure, fit into this — let’s imagine there are Democrats out there who on principle disagree with the Sanders, Warren agenda, right? They don’t agree with Medicare for All or they don’t agree in the scale of tax increases, or maybe just strategically they’re worried it can’t win. And they also look at Joe Biden on stage and have the same reaction you do, Michelle, which is, oh my god, every time he opens his mouth I’m uncomfortable that he’s not going to finish a sentence or he’s going to start talking about record players. Who is the right person for those voters to go to? The answer in Iowa seems to be Pete Buttigieg. In another New York Times poll, just of Iowa caucus-goers, likely Iowa caucus-goers, Buttigieg is kind of in this big top group with Biden, Warren, and Sanders. By the tiniest of margins, he’s actually ahead of Biden. I’m interested, Michelle, do you think that a millennial mayor of a medium-sized town, if we’re rounding up, is a plausible presidential nominee?

michelle goldberg

I don’t think it’s so much about the millennial mayor or medium-sized town, right, because I do think that American politics kind of loves a new face and a good story, and there could potentially be kind of a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington quality to that story. I just am not sure that a management consultant whose base is highly educated whites is going to be a plausible nominee for a party that is still substantially people of color. And so I think Buttigieg could do very well in Iowa, and I just don’t see how that translates when it gets to states that are more representative of the actual Democratic coalition.

david leonhardt

And the problem there, I guess, is that he’s not a natural to win over the white working-class voters who’ve flipped from Obama to Trump and he’s not a natural to reanimate the Obama coalition of voters of color.

michelle goldberg

Right. And so this is where I think, again, that kind of our own biases, you know, as kind of journalists and pundits tends to distort the field, right? Because I know my own parents love Pete Buttigieg. And this is something a lot of people I talk to, you know, oh yeah, my parents love him. My parents are maybe less ideological than me. They think he’s great. And so we tend to think of college-educated retirees as our informal focus group of moderate voters, but that’s not really who the actual moderate voters are.

david leonhardt

Ross, what do you think of Mayor Pete phenomenon?

ross douthat

I mean, I guess if I want to play Buttigieg’s advocate, I would say that, yeah, he’s not the right guy for Obama Trump voters, he’s not the right guy for big black and Hispanic mobilization, but he is a pretty good candidate for an upper middle class suburbanite strategy that is a version of what Hillary Clinton tried to do in 2016. And Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote and almost won the Electoral College, in the sense of coming close in all the Midwestern states. So it’s not that there isn’t some Buttigiegian path in the general election. Whether there is such a path in the primaries is another question. He’s really good at talking. And his facility at talking is why basically he is a viable top-tier candidate right now, and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet and a whole run of other moderate Democrats are not. But fundamentally, I think those other Democratic candidates are just much, much, much more plausible nominees if you want a moderate who’s not Joe Biden. My wife and I were talking about this last night. You know, we live in Connecticut, and we were like, well, what is South Bend? It’s Danbury crossed with New Haven, in some sense.

michelle goldberg

As my husband said, it’s not even the whole bend. [LEONHARDT LAUGHS]

ross douthat

And it’s not like he has some amazing record as the mayor of South Bend. He did some sort of conventional get-a-tech-firm-to-move-in things. African-American residents of the city are mad at him over police brutality incidents. It’s still a struggling Midwestern town with a big university attached that hasn’t figured out how to make these things fit together. It seems daft that Iowans would prefer him to Amy Klobuchar as a moderate alternative to Biden.

david leonhardt

I want to express some disappointment about Amy Klobuchar and that whole class of candidates. So I would put Kamala Harris there, although it didn’t seem like she was going to be there at the beginning, I would put Cory Booker there. I wish their campaigns showed some more energy, meaning I would like to see Amy Klobuchar be putting out— the same way Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything, the same way that Barack Obama developed a really detailed agenda as a candidate — and Hillary Clinton, in fairness, did, as well — I would like to see some of that energy. Booker has a couple of plans that I really like. Klobuchar and Harris each have slightly fewer, but also some good ones. But none of them have developed like a real animating sense of this is exactly what I would do in each of these areas and this is what my campaign is about.

michelle goldberg

But I mean, I think that those are two different things, right? I think it’s different to say why don’t they have a bunch of plans and this is what my campaign is about, right? And I actually think that that second thing is more visceral. It’s more just that like this sort of, I mean, brand, if you will, right, that you can’t say in a sentence or two what Amy Klobuchar is about besides being a nice Midwesterner. And I don’t think Kamala Harris has really managed to articulate the kind of driving rationale for her campaign and, you know, kind of the direction that she would want to take the country. I keep hoping that she’ll make a sort of comeback, and she’s given some really phenomenal speeches lately, but you know, who knows if that’s going to be enough.

david leonhardt

Look, there are still almost three months to go before the Iowa caucus, so if you are one of those Democratic voters who’s somewhere between dissatisfied with this field and anxious about it, take a look around. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] California is often seen as the future of America, but lately, that future has been looking pretty bleak. Over the last few years, wildfires have become much more common, and this year they have ravaged thousands of acres of land, pushing many people out of their homes.

news recording All of California now under a state of emergency. Powerful new winds could bring more devastation to parts of the state already ravaged by wildfires. ^News RECORDING^: The fires have burned a combined total of more than 30,000 acres. California’s largest utility plants have shut off power to nearly a million customers in an effort to prevent more wildfires from sparking.

david leonhardt

Michelle, I find this story really depressing and alarming.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, no, I find it terrifying. And you know, I feel like for a long time we all were reading about what the horrors of climate change were going to bring, right? That there was this precipice that we were on the edge of. And now we’re sort of here. We’re sort of in this apocalyptic world, and we’re not all the way in it, it’s going to get worse, but we’re in this apocalyptic world of internal climate refugees and people walking around major cities with gas masks because there’s ash falling out of the sky. I have a feeling that, if the Eastern Seaboard was suffering from rolling blackouts and droves of people left homeless, I think just because of the concentration of the media there would be much more of a sense of national crisis, as opposed to just this thing that’s sort of happening over there.

david leonhardt

One of the things that I find frustrating is what feels to me like this pretty vague case that, because California’s liberal, it is somehow responsible for the fires there, as opposed to climate change and what California is. It’s got a lot of forests being responsible. Ross, I mean, do you think I’m just being too dismissive of that? Is there like an actual case that California deserves blame for these fires, and that specifically progressive policies deserve blame for these fires?

ross douthat

I guess what I’d say is that the fire problem is a problem of climate change, but it’s also a problem of public policy. And public policy in California is completely controlled by the Democratic Party. And there have, in fact, been many pieces written arguing that California represents the glorious golden political future for the United States once we get rid of Trumpian revanchism and reduce the Republican Party to 40 percent of the electorate. And in that sense, I think it’s kind of understandable that outside observers, especially conservative observers, would say, well, here’s the political situation and the political system that you want. You don’t have any more of those annoying Republicans fouling things up. Why can’t you figure out how to thin your trees and bury your power lines and build denser cities so that sprawl doesn’t run out into forests? Because this isn’t all a climate change problem, it’s also a way California’s built problem. And the way California is built reflects, in some sense, the political priorities of a state that is sort of a laboratory for liberalism.

michelle goldberg

So I would say two things. I mean, you know, I lived in San Francisco for a while, and there is this NIMBYism, this resistance to density that is really gross and a big problem. And so in that sense, it’s not so much a consequence of liberalism as much as a consequence of not living up to your putative liberal ideas. And the way that density impacts this is that, because housing is so incredibly expensive in California and there’s not enough being built, people are sprawling out into these areas that are more prone to wildfires, and thus there’s more destruction of homes and property. One way that California is sort of a vanguard for the rest of the United States is that, even if the United States follows in California’s wake, as demographic change making it more liberal and reducing the Republican Party to a sad rump it deserves, there’s already kind of structural things that conservative Republicans have been able to build in that are going to take generations to overcome. And so in the country at large, that’s the courts. In California, it’s Proposition 13, this 1978 law that caps property taxes at these often really absurdly low rates, and that a lot of people who’ve looked at this say is partially responsible for the extremely high cost of new residential construction in California. Total liberal control in California is actually relatively new. And a lot of these problems— the incredible corruption of PG&E, the way the public utilities are structured to provide maximum value to shareholders, and again, Proposition 13— these are things that pre-date liberal control of California. And the problem isn’t that this is kind of liberalism instantiated, it’s that liberalism hasn’t been able to overcome these conservative obstacles to the sort of governance that the people who vote people into office want to see.

ross douthat

Now, I — look, I take your point, I’m just suggesting that the unified control that the Democratic Party has in California is such that I think it’s reasonable to suggest that they should be able to, at some point, overcome the hurdles and impediments set up by prior Republican administration. And more than that, I mean, I think what conservatives often argue about California is that it reveals a difference between liberalism in theory and liberalism in practice, right? Liberalism in theory, it’s open borders and welcome immigrants, and liberalism in practice is driving along the Malibu coastline and seeing all of the walls built to keep out everybody but the rich Hollywood producers from enjoying the beaches along there. And liberalism in theory is really good at managing the environment, and liberalism in practice is dominated by NIMBYism that creates sprawl, which is supposed to be this evil Republican problem, that then leads to forest fires. And I think that’s a — it’s not a critique of liberalism’s ideals, but I think it’s a totally reasonable critique of liberalism’s governance. And that seems to be a very characteristic Californian problem, that the best of liberalism is constantly being defeated by the worst of liberalism.

michelle goldberg

I don’t see it as the worst of liberalism, I see that as the worst of rich people. And so the cure for that, it seems to me, is not just to say we need to accept Texan levels of deregulation, and I don’t see any reason to believe that if California were run like Texas, you would have less wildfires and less climate change-related calamities. It’s basically to say that the cure for imperfect liberalism is more liberalism.

david leonhardt

Ross, what I find interesting is the argument that liberalism is better in theory than in practice. I actually think the fires in climate change are the weakest plank in that argument for California because liberals in America and the Democratic Party and most conservative parties around the world want to take on climate change. I know you say they don’t always do it as much as they say they want to do it, but they really do. And the Republican Party is trying to stop them. And so it’s a little bit hard to blame progressives for that. I think the stronger argument is all the other stuff, which is I do think there is a version of progressivism that is not adequately grappling with the extent of the living standards problem in this country. That’s what I find appealing in Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, for the other criticisms I have of it. And Michelle, I agree with you, I the solutions to it tend to be progressive solutions. But I also think California is an example of a certain kind of elite liberalism that is common in many places and that does include too much NIMBYism.

michelle goldberg

I guess I just don’t see that as liberalism, right? It’s that it’s people kind of being hypocrites. You know, and I see this in my own neighborhood, too. In my own neighborhood, we have a huge amount of new construction. There’s like a huge amount— you know, there’s a lot of new people coming in. And there’s this very intense and, to me, sort of unforgivable opposition among some longtime residents to doing things like building new schools, which is one reason why my son didn’t get into our zoned school next door to our house for kindergarten. And so the problem when you’re faced with hypocrisy, the answer usually — and I think Ross would agree with this when you talk about conservative hypocrites, of which there are many— pointing out someone’s hypocrisy is not an argument generally for giving up on the underlying values that people are failing to live up to.

ross douthat

No, but I mean, I think that there does reach a point, which I think you think the Republican Party has reached, Michelle, in the age of Trump, where hypocrisy on a certain scale makes you assume that the underlying values aren’t that real. David, just to sort of bring this back to our own long-running debate about climate change, don’t you think the Californian situation, in some sense, makes a case for my ongoing argument with you that mitigation is ultimately just going to be way more important than regulation? Right? Don’t you look at California and think, maybe mitigation is more important than a carbon tax?

david leonhardt

No. Look, it’s a fair question, but I find the future where we just keep emitting carbon and make this problem worse and worse and worse so frightening that, for me, the first-order policy answer, human answer needs to be what do we do to emit less, because otherwise this is just going to keep getting worse. And I don’t think the mitigation is going to keep up with the damage we’re doing if we don’t try to deal with carbon emissions. Now, the place where I agree with you is if we do that, and I guess even if we don’t, we should also be doing things toward mitigation, because you are right that some of the damage that we’ve done is now undoable. And so we have to think about mitigation. But when you’re dealing with a really serious problem, whether it’s a sick person or climate change, you shouldn’t just sort of say, well, it’s going to be bad, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s horrific or merely very, very bad. There’s a huge gap between horrific and very, very bad, and we should care about that gap.

michelle goldberg

And I just want to say quickly that I feel like Ross is making the case for a Green New Deal, which does involve substantial spending on things like upgrading the power grid and doing a lot of the things that you both need to have an economy and an infrastructure less reliant on carbon, but also kind of more resilient in the face of the destruction that kind of can’t be undone.

ross douthat

I’ll say, in the interests of bipartisan committee I agree with Michelle that my arguments about mitigation overlap with some of the arguments for the Green New Deal. And I think that there are pieces of the Green New Deal that make a lot of sense in a kind of green industrial policy mitigation strategy that I think is more plausible and maybe a better place for the left and the center to end up than the cap and trade debate. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Well, now it is time for us to turn to our weekly recommendation, when we suggest something to help take your mind off of the news. Michelle, this week is your turn. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

So you know, I was in Ukraine last month for the news, but one of the things that really struck me when I was in Kiev is just what a remarkably beautiful and interesting and vibrant city it was. And I’m not sure I really would have known to go visit Kiev if I hadn’t been there because of the news, but I think that people should just go there generally, like go on vacation to Kiev. It’s incredibly picturesque, and it’s also incredibly exciting right now. You know, people would take me to streets full of cafes and restaurants and they would say, you know, none of this was here 10 years ago. There wasn’t really a cafe culture in Soviet times or under kind of Russian domination. And there’s a lot of art galleries, there’s just a huge amount of cultural vibrancy. Just by wandering around, I sort of was wandering into these, you know, street fairs that put any Brooklyn locavore street fairs to shame. It’s just beautiful, and it reminded me a little bit of Prague in the ‘90s. You know, when they were sort of just coming out of the Cold War and people were still really excited about cultural liberalism. There was a lot of optimism there, and I don’t think there’s a lot of optimism a lot of places.

ross douthat

Because people have realized cultural liberalism is bad. I’m just kidding.

michelle goldberg

Well, you’re not, though, but.

ross douthat

No, I mean, I’m not. I guess I’m not, right.

david leonhardt

Well first of all, you definitely have made me want to go to Ukraine, but second of all, we have a loyal “Argument” listener who reached out to me to tell me that more weeks than not, you teach her a new vocabulary word simply by using it on the show. And now you’ve taught me a pronunciation, apparently. So I’m supposed to be saying Kiev instead of Kiev?

michelle goldberg

I believe so. And I think I’ve always pronounced it Kiev in the past, but you know, I just sort of picked up on how everybody that I talked to was pronouncing it. And now my understanding is that actually that is the Ukrainian pronunciation, as opposed to the Russian pronunciation.

david leonhardt

In Kiev, they say Kiev.

michelle goldberg

Yes.

david leonhardt

That’s our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also send us an email an argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Sara Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. Special thanks to Kaiser Health News. We’ll see you back here next week.

michelle goldberg

I mean, not you personally, but there’s like an element of spite like, oh yeah, look what you got for all your liberalism.

ross douthat