‘We Have Created the Scarcity on Purpose’

Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party on all kinds of issues — trade, foreign policy, immigration. He has challenged, even upended, the old consensus by giving people a very different story about what was wrong in America, about why they were struggling.

To be clear, I think most of Trump’s policies and many of his stories are quite different, bad and often false. But to give some credit to the Republicans, they are having these big internal policy debates, and the people coming up behind Trump are having even more of them. The world has changed, their party has changed, their voting base has changed, and so they need to change.

On the Democratic side, you haven’t seen as much change. That would be normal for a party running an incumbent president. There wasn’t a presidential primary this year in which candidates hashed out their different visions in front of the voters. Biden has not been a strong messenger. Kamala Harris hasn’t had much time to build out an agenda of her own. The Democratic Party has been unified the past few years, but it has been unified against Trump, against MAGA. It’s not been — in its communications, in the way it runs elections — primarily about its policy vision.

Brian Schatz is the senior senator from Hawaii and one of the Democrats doing the most work on these issues. He’s been a very influential policy voice. Over the past few years, he’s had a bit of a political evolution trying to change the party on the issues that matter most to voters — particularly affordability.

Schatz joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.