Have Progressives Won The Economic Debate?
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Part of the story of the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020 was, you know, early on, a lot of the energy was around these left populist candidates. Warren led for a while. Bernie was very successful. And then you get to a period in February where I think voters looked in the mirror and said, whoa, wait a minute.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. You might remember back in early 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview that, quote, in any other country, she and Joe Biden would not be in the same party.

Yet by April of that year, after Bernie Sanders had dropped out, she, quote, absolutely threw her support behind Biden, saying, quote, the stakes are too high when it comes to another four years of Trump. Since Trump's victory in 2016, opposition to the former president has served as one of the strongest organizing principles for the Democratic Party.

And that dynamic has likely helped to paper over some of the progressive left versus establishment divides that were visible in the party in the 2016 and 2020 primaries. Now, while the 2024 Democratic primary is essentially uncompetitive, some cracks in that unity have still emerged. For example, since Biden took office, one of the steepest declines in support, according to polls, has been amongst young voters.

a cohort that backed Sanders in both 2016 and 2020. Differing views of the current war between Israel and Hamas have also further highlighted the generational divide in the parties.

So how should we understand those divides? What motivates the progressive left? How did it gain influence and appeal? How successful has it been? And what happens next? And perhaps most imminently for Democrats, will those voters back Biden in 2024 to the degree that they did in 2020?

Journalist Joshua Green addresses many of those questions in his new book, The Rebels, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the struggle for a new American politics. He's here with me today to talk about it all. Welcome to the podcast, Josh. Great to be with you. So in your book, you call this movement within American politics left populism. What do you mean by that?

If you go back and look at kind of the modern history of the Democratic Party since like the late 1970s, where I begin the story, there was a great shift when Jimmy Carter was president, where you see these incursions from Wall Street that kind of changed the nature of what the party is, what it stands for, and what its guiding principles are. A lot of people refer to this as the neoliberal era of the Democratic Party, but you saw a

presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama come in and operate with more deference, I think, to free markets than

than earlier generations of Democrats. And to me, you know, the great tectonic shift in our, in our politics was the 2008 financial crisis. And so the book is really about how that crisis and its aftermath gave rise to what I call a brand of left populism in the

tells this story in succession, beginning with Elizabeth Warren, who passed the baton to Bernie Sanders when he ran for president, and then moving on to the younger generation in AOC. But one of the striking things, I think, you mentioned the sort of the divide in the party between liberals and moderates. As somebody who's worked in political journalism for 25 years, that's really been the divide that's kind of defined my career as a journalist. And the most striking thing, I think, about Joe Biden as president

is he's taken up a lot of these left populist themes. And even though Bernie Sanders isn't president, Elizabeth Warren isn't president, he's gone a long way in instituting a lot of these policies. And so

I think one of the most interesting things about politics today heading into the election is there really isn't this glaring divide, at least not on the economic matters that I write about, between left-wing Democrats and centrist pro-Wall Street Democrats. They've kind of unified as Biden has begun to institute a lot of these big programs, whether it's

stimulus or industrial policy. And I think you see it clearest in his response to the COVID crash, which was just strikingly different than the response that Barack Obama and Joe Biden had after the financial crisis in 2008. This gets at maybe one of the big questions I had in reading your book, which is,

What is that divide based on the divide between the establishment and the progressive left or the populist left? Because if you look at polling and I'm going to cite some polling here from Democracy Fund and UCLA Nationscape, Democrats were asked if they supported several different economic policies back in 2020.

And the divides between Sanders supporters, Warren supporters, and Biden supporters were almost non-existent. So raising taxes on families, making more than $600,000 a year, the percentage who said yes, 86% among Warren supporters, 78% among Sanders supporters, and 79% amongst Biden supporters. You see a similar dynamic when you look at raising the minimum wage and some of these other economic policies that have gained a lot of purchase within the Democratic Party.

And you mentioned that now there doesn't seem to be this big economic divide. Was there ever a big economic divide or was it based more on sort of vibes, trust in government, trust of established figures and institutions?

I do think there's a big vibe component to it. But the way I think of it in the book is that politicians like Sanders and Warren really want government to take a much more active role than Democrats and Democratic presidents did in the 80s and 90s and in 2000s in setting the terms of the economy in a way that improves people's lives.

You know, a great example of that is Biden in the IRA. I'm sitting in a hotel room today in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, about to go visit a brand new steel plant that's being built today.

in place of an old steel plant that was shut down 40 years ago. It's sort of the iconic Western Pennsylvania town that was once ancestrally democratic, has since kind of gone to Trump. And yet Biden in instituting a lot of these big government stimulus programs and really being aggressive with industrial policy and focusing it on made in American steel, that sort of thing, is trying to

change the quality of life for people in a lot of towns that feel like they've been left behind. And so one of the interesting things, you know, that I'm looking at in my reporting that I kind of grapple with in the book is, you know, do these policies actually make a difference on the ground? And if they do, will they have an effect between now and November 2024 when Biden needs to win reelection? But I think in a broader sense, what differentiates

uh, the left populace that I write about and Biden to an extent now, uh, is that he's, he's putting this stuff into action rather than deferring to the free market and kind of letting that set the terms of who are the winners and who are the losers in American society. I think, uh, the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008, uh,

The biggest effect of which I think was the backlash that gave rise to Donald Trump has changed the minds of people like Joe Biden about what the government needs to do in order to help people, in order to revitalize the Democratic brand in places like Western Pennsylvania, where it really hasn't been popular for 20 years. Yeah, there's a lot there and so much of it I really want to dig into. But what's the answer to that big question that you're asking in Western Pennsylvania, which is,

Does the industrial policy of the Biden administration that is resulting in, you know, building new steel plants, for example, is it changing minds?

If you look at the economic statistics just over the last couple of years, it's definitely having an effect. You know, the county I'm sitting in right now had 10%, 9%, 10% unemployment. When Biden was elected, it's down to 3.5%. Aliquippa was designated a financially distressed municipality back when its steel plant closed in the 80s. Last week, after 35, 36 years, it shed that status.

As I mentioned, there's a new steel plant coming in. So if you look at the economic numbers, there's a lot of reason for optimism. But that's not something you see reflected in poll numbers when you ask people about Biden's handling of the economy. Now, maybe part of that is voters' frustration, short-term frustration with high inflation, that sort of thing. Definitely in talking to kind of municipal leaders, there's a positivity, a belief that things are finally turning in the right direction after a long time.

But, you know, as you drive through the streets here, there are not Biden-Harris signs out in front of everybody's houses. And this is a county that voted fairly decisively for Donald Trump in 2020. So I don't see evidence of a big turnaround. But as you know, like it only takes, you know, a few percentage points here and there to kind of tilt the scales toward Biden over Trump. I mean, I'm looking especially this cycle at Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania.

Michigan and Wisconsin, because those were three states that went for Trump's right-leaning brand of populism in 2016, went for Biden in 2020. I think we'll probably be decisive if either of those candidates carry the three of them again in November. And so the big question is, you know, has Biden done enough to convince people that he is turning the country around in a way that he promised to when he was campaigning in 2020? Yeah.

Does the dynamic that you're describing suggest that the progressive left or the populist left is wrong in terms of its electoral arguments about its policy? You know, if we focus on the economy and try to implement these policies, that this realignment of the white working class towards Trump will sort of reverse or abate. Is this a suggestion that that's not working?

I wouldn't say it's a suggestion that that's not working. I think, I mean, if you look at this against the broader sweep of history, I mean, Biden is an interesting president in the sense that he is making, he's taking a bigger swing at this than any recent president has in the past. But

By the nature of what he's doing, you know, instituting a U.S. industrial policy that's meant to kind of reassure manufacturing jobs, that sort of thing. This isn't sort of a quick tweak to the dial that you do to jack up your poll numbers in a swing state before an election. This is something that plays out over years, over decades.

So I think there's a genuine belief in the Biden administration and certainly speaking to, you know, Sanders and Warren, who've been very happy that a lot of these things have been instituted. There's a sense that directionally Biden is moving the country toward a better place and trying to help

groups of peoples who were really hurt badly after the great financial crisis, you know, in the years of austerity that followed that. But whether or not that's a kind of a political fix, it I think is unclear. I would be slightly dubious of the fact of any claim that it is. I mean, the Biden White House is very eager to get out and kind of point to these projects and show all the money that they're kind of dispersing around the country, specifically to places that, you know,

have been hurt the worst by the loss of manufacturing jobs, by deindustrialization. But all you have to do is look at a poll and see that Americans aren't feeling right now like it's morning in America. And so I think that's an electoral problem for Joe Biden and also for Warren, Sanders, and AOC in the sense that the 2024 election, like it or not, is really going to be a referendum on a lot of these policies.

Yeah, so we've dived right into current events here, and I promise we will get to some of the historical analysis in your book. But while we're here, I just can't help myself. The question I have in terms of the electoral sway of these policies in some sense is, you

The parties have merged a little bit when it comes to this approach, right? I mean, Trump also presented himself as more of an economic populist and interested in tariffs and industrial policy and didn't enact policy to the extent that Biden has, but still the messages are very similar. And so perhaps...

the biggest differences in folks' minds when they look at the two parties, because again, like no one, as you can probably tell by talking to folks in Western Pennsylvania, is aligning two candidates' policies and going through with a highlighter and saying, well, Biden enacted this specific part of the IRA and Trump enacted this specific part of the CARES Act. And which did I feel personally more? Was it the stimulus check I got from Trump or was it the industrial revitalization that was caused by

by the Inflation Reduction Act, right? So maybe in folks' minds, the biggest differences now between Trump and Biden are cultural and not economic. And in that case, what sort of does the populist left have to say about how to create a winning coalition?

Well, I think I think there is a lot of cultural differences between the two parties. I think I think one of the things that's interesting about Trump is when he ran in 2016, my last book, Devil's Bargain, was all about the rise of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, who I coincidentally spent a lot of time with before Trump.

before Trump was a presidential candidate. That campaign in particular really had two parts. I mean, one was kind of the right-wing, anti-immigrant cultural aspect of it. But the thing I think has been forgotten is that there was a big economic populist, anti-Wall Street element, too, that Trump essentially dropped as soon as he got into the White House. And one of the minor characters in The Rebels is actually Steve Bannon, who I was meeting with during the time he was in the White House.

and grew increasingly alarmed in 2017 that Trump wasn't following through on this brand of economic populism that he campaigned on. And his big worry was that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would steal this issue and use it to sort of

take away a slice of Trump voters. That didn't happen, obviously. But Trump, I think, by really neglecting entirely this brand of populism has sacrificed an element of his appeal, or at least the appeal that he had in 2016, and really left it to Joe Biden and to Democrats to take up.

If you look at anything from inflation numbers to unemployment, I mean, things seem to be trending in the right direction. Whether or not that is sort of felt among the population in a way that leads them to vote for Biden in November, I don't think we know yet. But, you know, in a sense, I don't think Democrats are going to win a culture war. And I think that's a problem for Democrats.

All right. So let's talk about what got us to this moment that you describe as a very unique moment for the Democratic Party compared with the past 30, 40 years, which is Biden embracing these populist left economic policies. And as you tell the story, the turning point is the 2008 financial crisis.

In some ways, it's a silly question. Like, why would the financial crisis cause sort of economic populism to emerge? You can kind of understand that. But populism in general is not unique in American politics. I mean, we could talk about the story of Ross Perot, who gained a lot of support, then dropped out and still even got 20% of the vote in the 1992 election when neoliberalism, you could argue, was at the height of its success.

And he was arguing against NAFTA and making a lot of these economic populist arguments. So on one hand, it's always been there and populists can emerge and gain purchase. But on the other hand, something very different happens in the wake of 2008.

What is unique about that moment? Yeah, it is unique, I think, to the left in particular. I mean, if you look at what Democrats have stood for over the years, certainly there was a lot of economic populism after the Great Depression in the 1940s, 1950s. But by the time you get to the 1960s and 70s.

What liberal Democrats care about and fight about changes and and issues on financial regulation and banking and economics get superseded by things like environmentalism, civil rights, women's rights. And, you know, by the time my story begins in 1978,

Democrats really don't have that kind of New Deal mindset anymore. Labor has gone into decline, the big engine of the Democratic Party. You see the rise of these kind of post-Carter neoliberals like Bill Clinton, like Barack Obama to an extent. The embrace of Wall Street is such that you can wind up with a Goldman Sachs CEO as Treasury Secretary, whether it's a Republican administration or a Democratic administration. And I think by the time the financial crisis hit in 2008—

And people saw the recovery. Another character in the book is Tim Geithner, who I spent a lot of time with around the crisis and saw how the response was geared toward banks and not so much to the middle class. It created such a rupture in the country and such anger among ordinary middle class people of both parties who felt as though they were being left behind that it gave rise to this new kind of

wave of Democrats, beginning with Elizabeth Warren, I think, who, if you remember, was the original TARP oversight cop. She was the one policing the bailout and was very public and very vocal and a real pioneer in her use of social media to rile people up against the idea that

All of this help is going to the banks. Not enough is going to middle class. And one of the things that kind of bookends my story in the book is that, you know, you have that financial crisis in 2008. And at the time, Warren, who was not yet a senator, but was obviously an expert on bankruptcy and become a minor kind of financial spokesman in her capacity,

as a Harvard professor went out and said that, listen, our crisis response ought to have things like stimulus checks for the middle class and enhanced unemployment benefits, small business loans, student loan relief, all that sort of thing. By and large, all of that was ignored. And yet, if you flash forward to the COVID crash a decade later,

all of those things were instituted, not just by a Democratic administration, but it was the Trump administration that started sending out stimulus checks originally. So I think that there was a recognition that while

People might not want Elizabeth Warren or AOC to be president. Even Republicans, even independents recognized that they wanted the government to play a more active role in helping people's lives, in directing that help specifically to the middle class. And I think the fact that the economy has recovered so quickly from the COVID crash—you know, we've recovered all the jobs in about two years rather than seven years with the last crash—shows that

This can be effective. Whether or not it's a kind of electoral elixir that can get Biden reelected in November, I'm not sure. But certainly it shows the capacity of a president and a party to make decisions.

important changes in the economy in a way that just really wasn't done during the neoliberal era of the 1980s and the 1990s, when both parties tended to want the government to take a back seat and kind of defer to the free market.

Question here. You've described almost this consensus when it comes to responding to the COVID crisis in that, yeah, I mean, the CARES Act that was signed by Donald Trump included actual suggestions that had come from Elizabeth Warren back during the financial crisis. Is this consensus true?

only something that will emerge during a crisis. Have left populists won the economic argument when it comes to bigger, broader, longer term spending on the middle or working class? I mean, to give you an example, the American Rescue Plan included an expanded child tax credit, but that was done away with within a year.

In part, a response to the inflation that followed the passage of the American Rescue Plan and the CARES Act. So is there a broader consensus or is this just about are we talking about crises here?

I don't think there is a broader consensus. And I think the fact that it was a COVID crash, it was almost like a laboratory experiment. And nobody is to blame. Neither party is to blame here. There's this sudden kind of pandemic that cropped up. I think it made it a lot easier for Republicans and even centrist Democrats to get behind the idea that, OK, nobody is at fault here. We need to flood the economy with aid. And that aid needs to be geared toward the middle class and people who are unemployed.

I think as a proof of concept, it worked. I think as a political plan, it might not have. And the response to COVID wasn't just an economic one. There were mask mandates and all sorts of other facets of that response that led to the big cultural fights that to an extent have happened.

have dictated American politics even more than the economic response did over the last three or so years. So I think to answer the question, it showed that if Congress is willing and if a president is willing to pass these big plans, that they can do things like speed the recovery from a deep financial crash. But whether

politicians are willing to do that in the future, given the fact of inflation remains to be seen. And I think that one of the reasons that the 2024 election is so important, not just to Biden, but to liberal Democrats as well, and especially the populists, is that

In a sense, it's a referendum on those policies, right? It's hard for me to believe that if Biden loses reelection, that the next time there's a big crash, the president is going to rush out and say, let's pass $2 trillion of stimulus. Let's send everybody checks. Inflation be damned.

So we're talking about an intra-party dynamic here to some extent. In the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, Republicans reacted quite differently to the way that Elizabeth Warren reacted. Also, Obama reacted quite differently than the way Elizabeth Warren reacted. And it was the beginning of the Tea Party movement, which actually made the complete –

opposite argument from the one that was made during COVID, which is the government is spending too much money and we need an austerity approach to the economic problems that the country faces. What's happened to that?

Has that left the Republican Party? Has it left permanently? Has it left temporarily? Because in some ways, what happens within the Democratic Party will depend on sort of the opposite goalposts between which it's trying to mediate its positions, right? Two things here. One, I mean, as 538 has covered a great extent, there is just enormous kind of thermostatic

uh, response now to economic issues based on who is in the white house, whether it's a Republican, whether it's a Democrat. So Republicans did not have any kind of an issue at all when Donald Trump was president and they were sending out big stimulus checks after the COVID crisis they did when Biden was president. So I think a lot depends on the situation and who's in charge. I don't think that these are like first principles. I think it,

a lot of it is just partisanship and negative partisanship. But having said that, one of the most striking things about Trump vis-a-vis the other Republican primary candidates is that

I think he alone has come out and explicitly said, we're not going to be cutting Medicare and we're not going to be cutting social security. That was an argument back in the tea party days, the Democrat or the Republicans were pushing very hard. And I think part of the reason Trump won the nomination in 2016 was that he was seen as more moderate than other Republican candidates. And even Republican voters don't want to cut social security and don't want to cut Medicare. So these populist ideas, whether you situate that on the right or the left, I,

I think have advanced in some sense in that back in 2012, 2013,

Barack Obama was talking about striking a grand bargain with Republicans, John Boehner, that would have cut Social Security. Now that sort of thing is unthinkable, not just for Democrats, but probably for a Republican president, too. Sure, you're going to find House Freedom Caucus members who want to kind of cut, cut, cut. But it just doesn't seem like a realistic policy that a president would implement, even a Republican president. And Trump has said so

explicitly. And I think that's one of the reasons why he's leading the primary field by 30, 40, 50 points. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

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I want to talk about the degree to which this left populist movement has been successful in the wake of the financial crisis. And there's several different ways we can measure that success. We can measure it in terms of policy, which we have talked about. And it seems that there's general agreement that the left has been successful at getting Biden to adopt many of its policies.

There's also electoral success, which is maybe a little bit more unclear the extent to which the populist left has been successful. And then there's maybe what the future looks like, which will help gauge that success. How would you gauge the level of left populist success within the Democratic Party?

Yeah, I think a lot of people have a tendency to measure success in terms of, you know, did my candidate get elected president? And the fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren haven't been elected president would sort of suggest that there's been a failure. I don't think that that's the case at all. I mean, I was talking to a Biden official for this book who said, you know, in the White House, there was a lot of eye rolling about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but none at all about Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. I think part of the reason is that Biden has largely and willingly said,

adopted their economic platform. And the fact that, you know, Warren, Sanders, AOC are all unified behind Joe Biden, there really wasn't a challenge to him in the Democratic primaries, at least not a serious one from a lefty candidate.

shows the success that they've had in getting their policies instituted. So I think that the story of the rise of the Democratic left over the last 10 years, the populist left, has really been a great success. Why hasn't that part of the party been more electorally successful? Because it hasn't been electorally successful in high-profile ways in that Bernie Sanders lost in 2016 and 2020, as did Elizabeth Warren.

I think because they're coded as radicals, basically, and because they don't limit themselves to the kinds of things that Joe Biden is implementing. Just for example, Warren was, at one point in September of 2019, I was embedded with her as she was running, and there was that brief month when she was leading the Democratic primaries. All the talk was about a wealth tax, the billionaire candidates.

had decided not to get in the race and things seemed to be kind of humming in her direction. But what caused her candidacy to fall apart, I think, was Medicare for All and the realization that these candidates were so radical in what they wanted to do that would really disrupt

people's lives in a way that most Americans weren't willing to sign up for. And at the end of the day, you have to be able to attract normie independents who aren't looking for a political revolution. And the fact that all three candidates to some degree are coded as such, I think explains why they don't get further and why candidates like them don't get further in

in anywhere but the most deeply blue Democratic primaries. But I don't think that means that their policies are unpopular or can't help lead the Democrats to electoral success, especially if they're carried forward by more broadly appealing candidates like Joe Biden or somebody like that. It sounds like you are saying that in part, the candidates weren't successful because of their support of Medicare for All, which was a policy position that was too...

Was it the policy position that people were rejecting or was it the perceived electability of that policy position? I think it was both. I mean, there's no question that, you know, the policy position was too extreme. I mean, there's, you know, as you know, all sorts of polling about this. But once you tell people we're going to take away your insurance and replace it with government insurance, it became very unpopular. But part of the story of the Democratic election

presidential primaries in 2020 was, you know, early on, a lot of the energy was around these left populist candidates. Uh, Warren led for a while. Bernie was very successful, um, for a time. And then you get to a period in February where I think voters looked in the mirror and said, whoa, wait a minute. We do not want to take this kind of a risk and, uh, run the chance that we nominate somebody like Bernie Sanders and he loses to Donald Trump. And at that moment, uh,

it was almost like a break glass and emergency kind of moment. Everybody coalesced around Joe Biden because what Democrat voters by and large wanted was to pick the candidate who would be the most effective lever at prying Donald Trump out of the White House. And it was pretty clear that Joe Biden was that guy. You've described a pretty close marriage between the establishment part of the party and the progressive left in Joe Biden's presidency.

The most high-profile probably disruption to that marriage has been because of the war between Israel and Hamas. And when you look in polling, particularly younger voters within the Democratic Party really disagree with older voters within the Democratic Party. Is this issue putting the marriage that you've described out?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, there is a lot of overlap between what younger liberal Democrats are eager to do economically, what centrists are. And even, you know, for the record, independents and Republicans support a higher minimum wage, that sort of thing. So if the election is fought on

economic issues like the ones I write about, I think that's probably good news for Democrats and good news for Joe Biden. But foreign policy is another matter. And as you say, the Israel-Hamas war with younger Democrats, very unpopular. If the election is sort of fought on that terrain and over these kinds of issues, then I think that bodes very poorly for Biden and very poorly for the kind of populist Democrats I write about who really need Biden

to be reelected, you know, in order for this trend, these big kind of longer-term changes in the party to take hold and to kind of gain an intellectual validity that I think has still not quite been solidified. What would it take for somebody, a progressive left candidate, to gain that sort of majority, that sort of support within the Democratic Party looking to the future?

I think that candidate would have to be someone who's not explicitly associated with the Democratic left in the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. It would have to be some version, some younger version of a Joe Biden, somebody who comes from the broad center of the party and yet is willing to adopt these populist policies. So, you know, in theory, it could be someone like a Raphael Warnock from Georgia. It could be a Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan.

I do think that, you know, when we get to 2028 and you look at the lineup of Democratic candidates, whoever they are, that they will be situated much more along the populist line than Democratic candidates were, let's say, in 2016 when they were running to replace Barack Obama, with the exception of Bernie Sanders. I

I think there is a broad realization in the party that it needs to be more focused on kind of the lives of ordinary middle class Americans and how they experience jobs, home purchases, inflation, paying education, college education for their kids, that sort of thing.

And that's something that I think fell by the wayside after the financial crisis in 2008, 2009, when there were these years of grinding austerity that led to a rise of populism in both parties. What do you think are the dividing lines within the Democratic Party going forward?

I think the big ones this year are foreign policy. It's the Israel-Hamas war. It's things like that. It's really not should we raise the minimum wage, should there be taxes on the wealthy. But the great hope for Joe Biden, I think, and the great unifying force among Democrats will be as it was in 2020 if Donald Trump is the nominee. If he isn't, it's hard to see

what unifies Democrats quite to that extent. Could be abortion, Roe versus Wade, but I think Trump looms so large in the minds of such a broad pool of voters that if it isn't Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, that Biden and Democrats are going to have a lot of trouble. But every poll that I've seen and everybody that I speak to on reporting trips on the ground confirms my suspicion that Donald Trump is very likely to emerge as the Republican nominee.

All right. Well, leaving things where we began. Thank you so much for joining me today, Josh. Thank you so much, Galen. I enjoyed it.

Josh Green is the author of the book The Rebels, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for New American Politics. My name is Galen Drup. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or wherever you listen to your podcasts or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.

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