Democrats, the DSA, and the Working Class

A conversation with James Hohmann.

Last month, I sat down for an interview with the Washington Post’s deputy opinion editor, James Hohmann, for a wide-ranging discussion about the Democrats, the DSA, working-class voters, the culture wars, the 2026 midterms, the 2028 election, and plenty more.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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James Hohmann: Ruy Teixeira, great to have you here. You wrote one of the most influential political science books of the 21st century, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Here we are, a quarter century later. I guess just to start our conversation, have socialists taken over the Democratic Party? Are socialists hijacking the Democratic Party?

Ruy Teixeira: I wouldn’t say they’re hijacking it or really taking it over. I actually just wrote a piece on this…which was titled, “DSA: Vanguard of the Radical Professionals.” I think that’s what they are. Professional-class people have been taking over the Democratic Party for a long time—they’ve been hegemonizing it.

They’ve also become more radical as they become more influential, and I think the DSA is a logical terminus of that. I think these radical professionals have been further radicalized by the Trump administration, by their view of the Democratic establishment as feckless and failing to stand up to Trump, failing to do what they were supposed to do.

That puts the DSA in a good position to absorb all these people, which they are. Obviously, they are having some success. They may have as many as ten House members, by my count, in the next Congress. And as people endlessly say, they’ve got the energy. Whether they actually have the votes in the big, big country sense of America is another question, a very different question. But clearly, they’ve got energy within the Democratic ranks.

So my view is that is true, and it’s going to continue for a while. They’ve caught the imagination of a lot of these young, radical professionals who loom large in a lot of blue areas of the country. I think the main thing that will do is not so much that they’ll take over—run the DNC, be the arbiters of what rolls forward in the Democratic Party—but they are going to make it even harder for the Democrats to correct some of their brand problems that we saw emerging in a big way in the 2024 election.

How does a party lose two out of three times to Donald Trump? Well, start with the idea that they’re out of step with big sections of the American voting population, particularly working-class voters, who just don’t share the cultural priorities and some other things that the Democratic Party stands for. How easy is it going to be now to backtrack on those or to move to the center? Because the DSA people—famously, they’re for whatever they mean by “socialism”—they also deeply believe in every single culturally radical stance that the Democratic Party has become associated with in the last 10 or 15 years.

Defund the police, trans rights, open borders, abolish ICE.

Right. Race, immigration, climate, you name it. Famously, their ridiculous program calls for not only eliminating the Electoral College but eliminating the Senate.

And the presidency.

And the presidency. And the Supreme Court [will be] subservient to Congress. I think this is maybe a little bit unconstitutional, James, but it doesn’t seem to stop them. So they are pretty radical.

Now, I think some of them try to pass themselves off, like Mamdani does, as, “I just want to fix the potholes. I’m a sewer socialist.” Famously, I think it was Milat Kiros in Colorado who was asked about some of this—you know, “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection, and we just care about healthcare.” So this is an attempt to sane-wash their fundamentally very radical positions, both in economics and on cultural issues.

Let’s hypothesize that the Democratic Party needs to move to the center to do better over the medium to long term with working-class voters and [vanquish] a right-populist Republican Party. Obviously, [the DSA] now stands in the way. Instead, politicians are being crowded to the left to not be totally outflanked by the DSA and to respond to the so-called energy in the party.

We already see it happening with some relatively moderate Democratic politicians who refuse to denounce the DSA. They just say, “Well, you know, kids will be kids. They’re just for healthcare in a different way. We’re a big tent.” But these people are nuts, many of them. And they stand for a number of things that are anathema to the median voter in America.

So if you aspire to be the working majority in American politics, you don’t want the DSA identified with your party. You want it disidentified as much as possible. As Karl Rove correctly argued today in the Wall Street Journal, you need a Sister Souljah moment where you disassociate the Democrats from the kinds of things the DSA stands for. Just say it loud and say it proud. But it’s the reverse. People are walking on eggshells when they’re asked about the DSA today.

I think that’s quite remarkable, and frankly I don’t expect it to change for a while.

So, we have the governing test that’s ongoing. You mentioned Zohran Mamdani in New York. We have a big [one] coming up in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, who doesn’t identify as a democratic socialist but is of that ilk and is of that wing of the party…

Yeah, he’s cheating them out of their dues.

It is interesting. I want to talk about Michigan, but Francesca Hong in Wisconsin and Zohran Mamdani, who is DSA, have both in recent interviews I’ve listened to tried to distance themselves a little bit from the national brand, especially because this latest program does just call for a list of insane ideas. But on Michigan, if Abdul El-Sayed wins the primary on Tuesday, then I think it will be a much more competitive race in the fall than it would be if Haley Stevens wins the primary. But it’s going to be a very big Democratic year. I was talking to a Republican senator recently who thinks they’re going to lose the Senate. It does feel like it’s just going to be a Democratic wave.

So it’s easy to imagine someone like El-Sayed, despite his considerable baggage and flaws, who wouldn’t be able to win in many other environments, potentially winning in this environment. And then you’re going to have progressives, if that happens—this is a bunch of ifs—in 2027 saying, “Look, Abdul El-Sayed could win in Michigan, and that’s one of the presidential battlegrounds. Trump won it twice. Why can’t we put up a socialist? Why can’t we nominate AOC?”

So I do feel that no matter what the results are—even if Abdul El-Sayed wins the primary and loses the general—they’ll still somehow blame the establishment for not being supportive enough. It feels like this is going to take a while longer to play out.

Absolutely. Look, the good news for the Democrats is, yes, Abdul El-Sayed may be a flawed candidate, but given the right political environment, which we may very well have this November, he could still win. He could still beat the Republican candidate. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, yeah, he could win. And when he does that, it will have a really big effect on the discourse, discussion, and strategic analyses that become prevalent in the Democratic Party. Yes, the left of the party will absolutely claim, “This proves socialists can win anytime, anywhere, including as a national candidate for the Democratic Party.”

That will put the wind in their sails, and all the people in the party who are already cowed trying to stand up to the DSA and the more radical people in the party and saying, “We actually need to change the party brand so it’s more moderate, particularly on cultural issues,” they’ll be on the back foot. I think that’s bad news for the Democratic Party because it will not be the probability-maximizing approach for them to take the presidency in 2028 and build on that.

So I think they’re walking into a world of trouble. But it’s easy to see in the short term—the long term is made up of many short-term decisions, and the short-term decision now is, “We’ll just play it as it lays; the energy is with the left of the party; at least they’re Democrats; they just want more healthcare; maybe the guy will win anyway, and if he wins then we might get the majority in the Senate. We’ll figure it out after that!”

But that is short-term thinking that’s going to interfere with the long term in terms of repositioning the Democratic Party to be the default governing party of America, and particularly to do something about their continuing hemorrhaging of working-class voters.

And when people say “working class,” I think some people think “working-class whites” because that gets a lot of attention in a state like Maine where we had the Graham Platner stuff. But really, working-class voters includes a lot of Hispanics and a lot of African Americans.

And a lot of working-class Hispanics and African Americans voted for Donald Trump, including in 2020 when he lost the election, which is one of the reasons the battlegrounds were as close as they were. Historically, working-class voters don’t really show up in midterm elections.

So it will be interesting to see, do they feel like there’s someone for them if Trump’s not on the ballot? But I do think, whenever you see pictures of these DSA meetings, I’m always blown away by how white they are. A lot of times it’s a candidate who is a racial minority, and then there’s a pan shot of the crowd and virtually everyone is this kind of Brahmin left, as you call them—college degrees or post-graduate degrees, and they get behind these candidates.

Yeah, they’re the educated precariat. They’re mostly white, and they love, in many places, candidates like [Darializa Avila] Chevalier and Mamdani and so on. But actually non-college, working-class people of all races tend to be conspicuously absent, certainly from DSA activism.

But even if you look where their voting strength is, where DSA candidates have run in primaries and also in general elections, typically their greatest strength is among white, professional-class areas, not among working-class Hispanic or black areas, who tend to be more moderate or traditional in their Democratic loyalty.

It is interesting that they try to pass themselves off as the new party of America’s working class, and of course anybody who’s even remotely familiar with the organization—has looked at a few photos—these are not working-class people! These are educated people; these are mostly white people; these are mostly very left-wing people on a variety of cultural issues from which many working-class voters run screaming in the other direction.

And as you pointed out, a lot of these working-class people, hey, it ain’t just white people anymore. It’s Hispanics and blacks and so on. We saw that in 2024, where the movement from 2020 just accentuated in terms of moving toward Trump.

That said, it’s probably going to be the case in this election—both because of how poorly the Trump administration is doing in the public eye, the whole issue of affordability, the fact that the electorate that shows up in 2026 is going to be somewhat different and more Democratic-leaning than in 2024—if you compare the working-class Hispanic Democratic support in this coming election (probably) to what it was in 2024, [Democrats] will make gains. I just have no question about that.

But will that presage a real shift back toward working-class Hispanics to shore up all the weaknesses they’ve been developing in the last ten years? I don’t think so. I think a lot of these voters will still be up for grabs in 2028. Moreover, there are a lot of peripheral, working-class Hispanic voters who aren’t going to show up this time, but who are the most susceptible to moving in another direction other than toward the Democrats—whose loyalty toward the Democrats, such as it is, is very, very light at this point and getting lighter all the time.

So I still worry a lot about that as someone who has generally been supportive of the Democrats and tried to diagnose their problems and urged them to think a little bit about some of these problems and move in another direction. I’m very worried because I think they’ve basically already concluded that it’s not a problem.

You could see that in the first couple of months after 2024. There was a brief, shining period when it seemed like Democrats might be open to a real, serious rethink. But that vanished so fast under the press of resistance to Trump. The generic congressional [ballot] moved so quickly in the direction of Democrats. And as we’re talking in 2026, they’re going to do much better among the voters who do show up. And I think that’s just going to tank whatever interest people had in rethinking their approach.

It is interesting, you look at someone like Seth Moulton, who’s running in the primary against Ed Markey in Massachusetts, who made some pretty mild comments about transgender women in sports.

Yeah, he’s taken it all back, basically.

He’s taken it all back, and he got killed for it.

He didn’t vote for the Laken Riley Act. He now doesn’t talk about it at all. This is what happens to anyone in the Democratic Party…

Angie Craig would be in a similar spot in Minnesota.

Yeah, it’s interesting. A standard line from the Democrats right now, including a lot of Democrats on the left and others who aren’t that far left—[they] think the Democrats need to be more heterodox or more welcoming to certain people who don’t share all the Democratic Party commitments.

It’s still the case that that openness, that “big tent-ism,” seems to apply more to the DSA than it applies to someone who would question the whole “trans rights agenda.” That’s still verboten. You still can’t get away with it.

But you can get away with calling for nationalizing the means of production, having open borders, defunding the police, abolishing the police and prisons—this is much worse! Or it should be considered much worse than apostasy on the issue of trans rights.

It is interesting because society has changed. The Democratic Party looked like it might be moving, but then, I was struck recently when Sophie Cunningham, the star WNBA player for the Indiana Fever, was critical—this is like an 85/15 issue—so it was a pretty mainstream position of trans women in women’s sports.

And there were days of backlash. A lot of anger, a lot of demands for apologies. She did not apologize, and the story moved on. And that does feel different…

Well, did it move on?

…from six years ago, [when] she would have felt compelled to apologize.

I think that’s right.

So you have the country moving one direction and the Democratic Party the other direction.

Right, and refusing to back down, even if they don’t prosecute the dissenters as vigorously as they once did. But is it really going away?

There was an Indiana Fever game in Seattle, where two girls were courtside with signs that indicated their support for Sophie Cunningham and for protecting girls’ sports, and they were screamed at—not only by patrons, because they’re probably all Democrats in Seattle—but the co-owner of the club came up to them, and they’re sitting there with their signs, watching [the game].

And one of the girls was quoted as saying, well, I thought she was going to come up and say hello. Instead she starts screaming at them, like, “How dare you say this? This is the worst thing in the world. This is garbage. Jesus should forgive you for your sins.” And [the girls] were like, “What?”

This is an example of how hardcore a lot of these cultural issues are for partisan Democrats. They’re still not interested in backing down. They’re still not interested in moving to a more moderate stance.

And right now they don’t have to go down with the ship, which is one of the things that makes this so dangerous: they can probably get away with this in the short term. But in the medium to long term it’s a big liability for the party, and those kinds of professional-class, cultural radicals are really going to prevent the Democrats from doing anything much different from what they’re currently doing.

When you think of the medium term, I think next year. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, but stipulating Democrats win the House and maybe the Senate, you’re going to have Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both from New York, where you had all these socialist victories. Schumer, I don’t know if he runs again, but in theory is up for re-election in 2028.

It’s very hard to see the Democratic leaders—they’ll be against Trump so they’ll have Trump as a foil to sort of rally their party against—but it’s hard to see Schumer or Jeffries showing leadership because they’re going to be afraid of their own.

Yeah, I think they’re going to be walking on eggshells. I think they’ll probably both survive.

Partly by winning over the left.

Yeah, because they’re going to cave. They’re going to basically accommodate themselves to the energy in the party, the fact that “we’re a big tent, and we include communists and people who believe in open borders, and that’s cool. So long as they’re Democrats!”

I think that is going to be the dominant response. I think there will be some House representatives who will dissent from this, but they’re going to be the exception. The leadership is going to try to keep the big tent from falling down around their ears. It’s all going to be coalition management. There’s not going to be much leadership shown.

That’s going to have a big effect on the race for the nomination as well because the candidates who throw their hat into the ring are going to have to negotiate that mood in the party. In a way, it could oddly enough wind up being more like the lead-up to 2020 than one might have guessed a while ago. Everybody’s going to try to out-left each other and speak to that mood in the party.

Will there be a Joe Biden waiting in the wings to stand up and say, “Hey, I’m a moderate, and moderation actually isn’t such a terrible idea”? It’s hard to see a figure looming over that race who would be able to move in and even try to do that. I guess you could say Rahm Emanuel. But he doesn’t have the juice of someone like Biden [or] the reputation.

It’s also not clear it would work at this point. The first time around, “Okay, this is how we’re going to beat Trump. This is going to be a game-changer.” But it didn’t work; he came right back. So I think the mood in a lot of the party is, we can’t afford to trim our sails. We should just barge straight ahead.

Do you think AOC has a realistic shot at being the presidential nominee?

Absolutely. I would hesitate to put a point estimate on it. But I think she’s got a serious shot. She hasn’t committed yet to doing it—most people haven’t at this point. But yeah, if I’m her, I’m thinking about it. And if not now, when?

Right, there’s not going to be a better environment.

Probably not. An open primary, the DSA’s on a roll.

No clear leader. There’s not an obvious establishment candidate.

Right, and one thing—this was a point made by Astead Herndon in Vox—is that it’s not just that the DSA is rising, it’s that the center is falling. They’re so disorganized. They’re like a deer in the headlights: they don’t know what to do, they don’t know how to adjust, everybody hates them. And if you’re someone like AOC, you say, well, we’re on the ascendancy. The establishment is completely disorganized and on the verge of panic.

And in that way it’s like 2016. It is like the Republican establishment was sort of wheezy by 2016. And they wanted to stop Trump but they couldn’t.

I think if you’re someone on the left, you say, hey, that’s optimistic, right? Because Trump won. Why can’t AOC or someone like that play a similar role—and we’re going to, against all odds, against all the conventional wisdom, we will win.

The average Democratic favorable/unfavorable view right now is 38 percent of Americans have a favorable view…55 percent have an unfavorable view. Republicans basically exactly the same: 39/56. And some of that is people being angry at Democrats about Joe Biden. Some of it is the left being mad at the establishment. A lot of it is the working class looking and seeing these radical left figures and thinking that’s the Democratic Party, that the Democratic brand is the DSA.

So the 55 percent isn’t all one side or the other. But it’s amazing because—I do think Democrats are going to have a huge midterm, but that’s a very bad brand. So you think about 2028, and, like, is Barack Obama really going to come out and try to stop AOC? No.

It’s like a badly played baseball game: someone has to win. It could be the Democrats, could be the Republicans again, but it’s not going to be because they’re riding a wave of popular support. It’s going to be a lot of negative partisanship.

My colleague at AEI, Yuval Levin, and I wrote a piece before 2024 called “Politics Without Winners.” And our basic argument was that this is an unusual period in American politics in the sense that neither party is conducting itself, or is maybe even interested in building a dominant majority and trying to occupy the center of the country. So we toggle back and forth between different, short-lived partisan regimes, and nobody really likes either one of them. Democrats aren’t really thinking, “How can we be the party of the center?” And Republicans are doing the same.

We wrote it before 2024. Obviously, the Democrats were in bad shape, as we predicted, and Trump won. But what does he do once he gets into office? Does he act—do Republicans act—like they’re going to realign American politics and take over the center of American politics and really dominate for a while? Not really, no. They basically responded to their base and to their own idiosyncratic priorities.

And probably, not to be too cynical about this, but if the Democrats get back in in 2028—very possible, obviously, even the betting markets at this point favor them—it’s going to be the same damn thing. They’re going to overreach their so-called mandate, which won’t be much of a mandate. The same political actors and tendencies and factions will still mostly be in control of the party with the same priorities. And they’ll very quickly run out of goodwill.

And then a rough midterms in 2030.

Yeah, and then back to the future, right?

It does feel so circular and cyclical.

You’re just wondering, where is the entrepreneur who can break through this? A political entrepreneur.

Where is he or she?

It’s hard to see at this point. Just in a practical sense, how do you break through in either party with that kind of politics? And who’s even willing to try? You can look at Rahm Emanuel and say, “Well, maybe he…”

He’s playing an important role. He’s helping move the Overton window toward the middle.

One hopes. I mean, he could be in the debates. Somehow he could occupy so much attention and challenge the other candidates, and maybe that would be, in a mild sense, a game-changer.

You mentioned the Sister Souljah moment. I went and rewatched not just the clip, but the whole speech. It really is something to watch. Jesse Jackson just being so angry—it was incredible content. And I was like, what would a Sister Souljah moment look like today?

We hear it, it is cliché, we say it all the time. But I do wonder what that would be in 2026—and the extent to which it could or would work. Does the moment change? Do the coalitions change? As you said, “coalition management.” But 1992 feels so far away.

A long ways away. At that point the DLC was on the rise and had already prepared the ground. There was also a significant base among electeds for that kind of politics. They had a lot of politicians in the Midwest and South who were on their side.

And they had lost in 1980, 1984…

Right, but it’s a different situation now. It’s hard to see where the political juice for a candidate who’s willing to have a Sister Souljah moment, and evidence and push forward that kind of politics—where is it? I think if you’re going to do it, though, it would be a target-rich environment. There’d be a lot of lines that could be drawn. I’ve been urging Democrats to do this (to no avail) for quite a while now.

But there’s a new opportunity to do it: the DSA! And the crazy things they’ve done and said. Why not?

I think Josh Shapiro should be doing that. You’re the governor of Pennsylvania, critical battleground, the left already doesn’t like you—some of it because of Israel. Shapiro is being interesting in some ways. He’s trying to claim the moderate lane, but he’s also more supportive of data centers than any other Democrat, even though that doesn’t poll well. His Republican challenger, Stacy Garitty, is attacking him for being pro-data center. Which, I understand…

The politics of AI are so weird.

It is really weird. In Michigan, we’ve been talking about the Senate race, but one of the most interesting House races is MI-07. Mike Rogers held that seat, the Republican Senate candidate, and then Elissa Slotkin. It’s now held by Tom Barrett, a Republican who won two years ago. And there’s a Democratic primary where you have the union guy who has all the labor groups—he’s pro-data center because he’s a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. And then you have the lefty candidate who’s anti-data center. It’s a weird coalition.

Is he a DSA guy?

I think he is DSA-adjacent. I think in the internal polls, obviously the national Democrats prefer the union guy, but the lefty may win. And that means Barrett is going to get re-elected. That’s leaving a seat on the table. He’ll have plenty of resources. If El-Sayed is at the top of the ticket—we’ll see what happens. It’s going to be a big Democratic year, but you can see it having a down-ballot impact.

Absolutely. There’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of the moving parts aren’t going to move in the direction that’s most salubrious for the Democrats. But if I’m a DSA member, I’m very happy.

What should Democrats be doing—putting aside Sister Souljah moments—to win over the working class?

I think you would start out with some attempts to move to the center on cultural issues. There are some obvious ways you could do that. We’re talking about one: biological boys in girls’ sports, biological men in women’s sports. People really don’t like that. And the fact that it’s so difficult to do that in the Democratic Party means that it would get huge coverage—everybody would hear about it. Working-class people would hear about it. And as we know from 2024, it was one of the main issues that convinced working-class swing voters that the Democrats were kind of nuts.

Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you.

Incredibly effective. So that would be a big deal.

There are other things you could do and say around the immigration issue, for example—a Democrat who said, actually, I don’t think we should be unkind to immigrants, but on the other hand, illegal immigration is illegal. And if you’re here, and you’re not supposed to be here, you’re susceptible to deportation. And maybe people who have been here for five years or less should be considered for deportation, whether they’ve been an axe murderer or not.

That would really be breaking from the Democratic consensus, and that would send a message you’re a different kind of Democrat. To me, that’s the general theme: do and say some things that are breaks from Democratic Party orthodoxy, that would indicate to the median working-class voter that you are a different kind of Democrat.

That was the theme of the DLC way back in the day. They argued, using people like Bill Clinton, that we need to send a message to the American people: we are different kinds of Democrats.

The way you do that at this point is in some of the issues I’ve just mentioned. I think climate’s another issue. People really—for years and years and years, climate change is a third-tier issue for most Americans, particularly working-class Americans. And Democrats have placed a huge bet on it. But people don’t want to be told to drive an electric car. They don’t care that much about solar and wind. They just want cheap electricity bills. They want abundant energy, and they’re not that concerned about how “clean” it is.

So I think breaking from that consensus is saying that we really want “all of the above.” We don’t think we should penalize wind and solar, but we don’t think we should reward them, either. We just want America to be an energy superpower.

Unfortunately, you end up saying a lot of stuff that sounds like Chris Wright and the Trump administration, but that’s the problem. You have to be willing to say some things and take some positions that actually significantly overlap with things that Trump and people around him have said because they’re actually extremely popular. And I think they’re correct in policy terms.

So you have to be willing to do that, and it’s another way you show you’re a different kind of Democrat: you’re willing to be generally heterodox in your positions. Take things that are conservative, take things that are liberal, and put them together in a commonsense program.

And on economics, the AI thing they’re definitely going to have to think about because AI is a big deal. And if all you’re associated with is “I hate data centers,” and “I think we should stop AI,” and it’s all because of the billionaires, I think that’s not really responsive to the way the world’s changing and the potential job implications of AI. It’s the most mindless sort of populism.

There are definitely things that can and should be said about how AI should be regulated that are quite popular. But the idea that you’re going to lay down on the railroad tracks to stop data centers and stop AI is neither a responsible position nor, I think, in the end will it be that popular. Because people live in the real world, they know this is changing their world, and they probably don’t think it can really be stopped, but “how can I find my place in it?” How can me and my kids make our way in this new world—have jobs that are decent-paying and all that stuff.

I think that’s part of the problem. The economic program at this point Democrats are pushing boils down to “down with the billionaire class” and “we should make things affordable.” Okay, great! But how are you going to do that? It’s fundamentally empty. It’s a slogan. And yes, it’s a popular slogan and a smart slogan, but it’s just a political slogan. It’s not an economic program.

It’s fascinating because you mentioned talking about immigration and illegal immigrants. There’s this perception among Democratic elites and among the college-educated base of the party that that’s something you can’t say, and that that’s offensive to Hispanics. And then you go talk to Hispanic working-class Democrats, and they have no qualms referring to illegal immigrants.

The same thing with energy. I was really struck by the new Democratic calendar for 2028. One of the early states is New Mexico, which has become the second-biggest oil and gas state after Texas. And the biggest employer is oil and natural gas. Most of the workers are Hispanic. And it is going to be fascinating because two of the first four states are majority-Hispanic-electorate Democratic states: Nevada and New Mexico.

But in both cases, they’re not “AOC voters.” And I don’t think they’re going to be as tied to identity politics as a lot of the elites in the DNC Rules Committee might think. So it will be interesting if that plays any kind of moderating role, or if that does give an opening for someone to compete in a place like New Mexico as a Democrat in 2028 by saying, look—they won’t say “drill, baby, drill,” but drill, baby, drill!

The association of the Democrats with being against resource-extraction industries has been a terrible liability for the party for many years. And it has just been accentuated by being associated with being against fossil fuels and [for] the so-called clean energy transition.

It hurt them in Texas—there’s a ton of oil and gas in Texas, and a lot of Hispanics involved in that. Of course, they were also hurt by the open-borders stuff because a lot of them were Border Patrol agents.

So as a Democrat, being associated with being against the jobs and the economic growth that helps Hispanic people in a given area of the country is not a good look. But is there a candidate who’s going to be willing to take advantage of that, or are we just going to leave these voters to Trump’s successor?

Ruben Gallego is an interesting example. He’s obviously been tarnished by some of these recent developments in terms of the company he kept, so to speak.

Eric Swalwell.

But he has been more willing than a lot of the other potential Democratic candidates to say things that are actually more or less sensible. Not only on the border but on resource extraction. I could see him trying to occupy that lane. And as a Hispanic guy, you’d have increased credibility with Hispanic voters.

But I do worry that they’re all just going to be herded in the same direction, and that’s going to include the Ruben Gallegos of the world.

We talked about Josh Shapiro. I’ve always had a soft spot for Shapiro, as I think he’s a good, smart politician who has good instincts. But he’s also a very cautious politician. For example, didn’t he recently say, “Democrats haven’t had a real debate about who they are since 1992”? Okay, and Josh, what is that debate? Are you going to tell us now?

He tiptoes up to the line, but he doesn’t really go over it. Now, he’s got plenty of time to go over it between now and when things really start getting going in this presidential cycle, but I worry he’s just a bit—I’ve heard him speak a number of times…I don’t know. He’s very carefully calibrated, let me put it that way.