The Ezra Klein Show

An open convention or a coronation aren’t the only two options.  

Mentioned:

“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by The Ezra Klein Show

“What Is the Democratic Party For?” by The Ezra Klein Show

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are list...

This year’s Republican National Convention was Donald Trump’s third as the party’s nominee, but it was the first that felt like a full expression of a G.O.P. that has fully fallen in line with Trumpism. And the mood was jubilant. Speakers even made efforts to reach out to unions, Black voters and immigrants — imagining a big-tent Republican Party that could be far more formidable at the ballot box.

But if the Democrats were running ...

The Trump campaign isn’t just expecting to win this election; it’s expecting to win it in a landslide. And top Trump campaign officials were feeling that confident even before Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. So what’s their strategy to achieve the blowout they’re imagining? And is their confidence justified?

Tim Alberta is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republ...

When Donald Trump on Monday chose Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate it excited populists — and unnerved some business elites. Later that evening, the president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, gave a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention. “Over the last 40 years, the Republican Party has rarely pursued strong relationships with organized labor,” O’Brien said. “There are some in the party who stand in a...

It was once a fringe opinion to say President Biden should drop his re-election bid and Democrats should embrace an open convention. That position is fringe no more. But when the conventional wisdom shifts this rapidly, there’s always the danger of overlooking its potential flaws.

My colleague, the Times Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, has been making some of the strongest arguments against Biden dropping out and throwing the nomin...

If Joe Biden steps aside for the Democratic presidential nomination — still a very big if — the favorite to replace him is Vice President Kamala Harris. In recently leaked post-debate polling from Open Labs, Harris polled better than Biden in matchups against Trump.

In 2019, Dana Goodyear wrote in The New Yorker, “As a Black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance.” The profile Harris inhabited ...

After President Biden’s rough performance at the first presidential debate, the question of an open convention has roared to the front of Democratic politics. But how would an open convention work? What would be its risks? What would be its rewards? 

In February, after I first made the case for an open Democratic convention, I interviewed Elaine Kamarck to better understand what an open convention would look like. She literally wrot...

Top Democrats have closed ranks around Joe Biden since the debate. Should they? 

Mentioned:

“This Isn’t All Joe Biden’s Fault” by Ezra Klein

“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by The Ezra Klein Show

“Here’s How an Open Democratic Convention Would Work” with Elaine Kamarck on The Ezra Klein Show

The Hollow Parties by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find...

I joined my Times Opinion colleagues Ross Douthat and Michelle Cottle to discuss the debate — and what Democrats might do next.

Mentioned:

“The Biden and Trump Weaknesses That Don’t Get Enough Attention” by Ross Douthat

“Trump’s Bold Vision for America: Higher Prices!” with Matthew Yglesias on The Ezra Klein Show

“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” on The Ezra Klein Show

“Here’s How an Open Democratic Convention Would Work” with...

Donald Trump has made inflation a central part of his campaign message. At his rallies, he rails against “the Biden inflation tax” and “crooked Joe’s inflation nightmare,” and promises that in a second Trump term, “inflation will be in full retreat.”

But if you look at Trump’s actual policies, that wouldn’t be the case at all. Trump has a bold, ambitious agenda to make prices much, much higher. He’s proposing a 10 percent tariff on ...

The biggest divide in our politics isn’t between Democrats and Republicans, or even left and right. It’s between people who follow politics closely, and those who pay almost no attention to it. If you’re in the former camp — and if you’re reading this, you probably are — the latter camp can seem inscrutable. These people hardly ever look at political news. They hate discussing politics. But they do care about issues and candidates,...

On Tuesday I got back from an eight-day trip to Israel and the West Bank. I happened to be there on the day that Benny Gantz resigned from the war cabinet and called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to schedule new elections, breaking the unity government that Israel had had since shortly after Oct. 7.

There is no viable left wing in Israel right now. There is a coalition that Netanyahu leads stretching from right to far right a...

There’s something weird happening with the economy. On a personal level, most Americans say they’re doing pretty well right now. And according to the data, that’s true. Wages have gone up faster than inflation. Unemployment is low, the stock market is generally up so far this year, and people are buying more stuff.

And yet in surveys, people keep saying the economy is bad. A recent Harris poll for The Guardian found that around half...

After Donald Trump was convicted last week in his hush-money trial, Republican leaders wasted no time in rallying behind him. There was no chance the Republican Party was going to replace Trump as their nominee at this point. Trump has essentially taken over the G.O.P.; his daughter-in-law is even co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

How did the Republican Party get so weak that it could fall victim to a hostile takeover?

D...

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed.

D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With...

A.I.-generated art has flooded the internet, and a lot of it is derivative, even boring or offensive. But what could it look like for artists to collaborate with A.I. systems in making art that is actually generative, challenging, transcendent?

Holly Herndon offered one answer with her 2019 album “PROTO.” Along with Mathew Dryhurst and the programmer Jules LaPlace, she built an A.I. called “Spawn” trained on human voices that adds a...

“The Jetsons” premiered in 1962. And based on the internal math of the show, George Jetson, the dad, was born in 2022. He’d be a toddler right now. And we are so far away from the world that show imagined. There were a lot of future-trippers in the 1960s, and most of them would be pretty disappointed by how that future turned out.

So what happened? Why didn’t we build that future?

The answer, I think, lies in the 1970s. I’ve been spe...

The international legal system was created to prevent the atrocities of World War II from happening again. The United Nations partitioned historic Palestine to create the states of Israel and Palestine, but also left Palestinians with decades of false promises. The war in Gaza — and countless other conflicts, including those in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia — shows how little power the U.N. and international law have to protect civilia...

Drug policy feels very unsettled right now. The war on drugs was a failure. But so far, the war on the war on drugs hasn’t entirely been a success, either.

Take Oregon. In 2020, it became the first state in the nation to decriminalize hard drugs. It was a paradigm shift — treating drug-users as patients rather than criminals — and advocates hoped it would be a model for the nation. But then there was a surge in overdoses and public ...