The Ezra Klein Show

Tuesday night, a blue tsunami crashed across the political map. Democrats won control of the House and the Senate with room to spare, flipping seats in states that once seemed unimaginable: South Carolina, Kansas, Texas. Ezra Klein sits down with his editor Aaron Retica to survey the wreckage of Trump’s 2024 coalition, and what Democrats can learn from their victories.

Ahead of the midterm elections, Elon Musk has become the single largest campaign donor in any election cycle, giving about $450 million to Republicans. It is just a fraction of a percent of his near-trillion-dollar net worth. Musk’s control over SpaceX, Starlink, X, Tesla and Neuralink, on top of his riches, has given him power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that few human beings have ever amassed before. What does he want to do with all this power? What is he trying to buy with his campaign spending? What is the world he wants to build? Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at Boston University. He’s the author of “Globalists,” “Hayek’s Bastards” and, most recently, “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” which he co-wrote with Ben Tarnoff.

“If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era,” Nate Silver told me. The midterms are a week away, and it looks entirely possible that Democrats will win not just the House, but also the Senate. Democrats are polling competitively deep into red territory – Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Kansas – states that Trump won in 2024 by double digits. But Democrats have been burned by big polling misses before. So can we really trust what the polls are telling us? And what stories have emerged in the data that we might see play out on election night? Silver is an internationally famous elections nerd, one of the people who made election forecasting a core part of American political discourse. He edits The Silver Bulletin on Substack, co-hosts the podcast “Still Counting” and is the author, most recently, of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.” Mentioned: “Data centres are turning Trump voters into Democrats” by The Economist “We Gave Four Good…

Sarah Longwell has probably conducted more focus groups with Trump voters than anyone else in America — hundreds of them, starting in Trump’s first term. So she has a treasure trove of qualitative evidence of how voters have evolved in the Trump era and why many of the president’s voters are souring on him now. Trump’s approval rating has plummeted since the start of his second term, especially among the groups that swung toward him in the last election — young, Black and Hispanic voters. But I wanted to have Longwell on the show to hear what these people are really saying. What exactly has disappointed them about Trump’s second term? And what opportunities could that open for Democrats? Longwell is a founder and the publisher of The Bulwark, the host of “The Focus Group Podcast” and the author of “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.”

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Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike? Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.