What Happens If Democrats Win the Midterms? — With Fareed Zakaria

I still have so much faith in America. I think there's a lot of anger and confusion and hurt, and it's easy in those circumstances to get people to blame somebody else and things like that. So I think it comes back. You know, people will say, 'Oh, if Trump gets elected or reelected or something happens, I'm going to go to Canada.' I've never had that feeling at all. I mean, I feel like I made my decision, and this is my country. I will try to work for it to be a better place. In the worst case scenario, I'm going down with the ship.

In New York, in my study in New York City.

I think that, you know, we are at a moment where this wave of backlash of right-wing populism is now thoroughly entrenched throughout the world. Right? You look at Australia — I was reading about this woman, Pauline Hansen, a kind of right-wing populist 20 years ago. She had a brief flurry, seemed like it was dead. Well, she's back. She's now turned into the AfD or the Marine Le Pen of Australia, right? And so we're seeing this movement almost everywhere. And we're wondering, is there a break? Is it peaking? It certainly seems as though in many places it is not providing many answers. You look at Brexit, and Britain is without any question worse off than it was before. You look at the Trump policies — by and large, they have not been successful. Manufacturing is not back in the United States. We were not able to somehow decouple the entire American economy from China. And yet there is this appeal for largely cultural reasons. So the question is, are we witnessing a break? Could this midterm be the first moment where people say, 'You know what, this tide has peaked. It is now more of a contest. It's receding.' Obviously a lot depends on how the midterms play out. But there is a potential cure, the first significant breach where you say, 'All right, maybe we're moving back to something else in this 10-year phase of right-wing populism.'

So 45% of the American electorate is now independents, highest number ever. And the most interesting new data is around exactly what you say — the sort of malleability of voters. You know, we have this picture of America as totally polarized, tribal, people are dug into their positions, they don't listen, they don't change their minds. And that is true, but it's true of a fairly narrow base on both sides of the spectrum. What you're now witnessing is this much larger group of independents who are beginning to shift. And in a way, Trump has in some ways made that happen by first bursting onto the scene, being this renegade Republican, attracting a bunch of Democrats who weren't that interested in the party, but then, you know, if I can be honest, screwing it all up. You know, particularly in his second term, massively underdelivering — Iran war, tariffs, cost of living, inflation, massive overdoing of the ICE immigration raids — and as a result, you're seeing people who had flocked to him move away almost as fast as they flocked. This is unusual, as you know, Scott. People often say about American politics: if you get a voter to vote twice for a party, they're usually locked in for life. Well, now what you're seeing is a huge — you saw a huge Hispanic surge toward Donald Trump in '24, and all polling indicates that has collapsed. That is why if Texas goes to Terrio, the single biggest issue will be the collapse of Hispanic support. It's something like he's down close to 20 points from where he was in '24. Also Asian-Americans, though they're not as significant. Black Americans — there was a small surge among Black men for Trump, that seems to have collapsed. Young people — small surge for Trump, no, not so small, maybe 10 points — completely collapsed. We're back with young voters to the split that we saw in '08 with Obama, when Obama managed to get this huge number of young voters. So you see what I'm saying — you had a huge wave of people going toward Trump, but that wave has almost entirely receded. So could this be the new pattern — a large number of independents in the middle, they, for idiosyncratic reasons, for ideological reasons, for God knows what reasons, they move back and forth, and so finally we get back to actual contestation in American elections. This is what I'm hoping for, because in this election, because of gerrymandering, there are only 38 competitive seats in the House of Representatives. It is quite possible that the Supreme Soviet — the legislature of the Soviet communist system — had a higher turnover in its legislature than the House of Representatives currently has among itself.

And you know, a lot of these — the gerrymandering could turn out to backfire. Again, we'll have to see how the results come out. But you see what happened with gerrymandering is they took a bunch of very solidly Republican seats — you know, seats Republicans would win by 20 points — and they turned them into two districts that Republicans would win comfortably by 8 points. But if you have a D plus 12 Democratic wave and it translates into 12 in that local district, well, all of a sudden you lost two Republican seats where you would have won the one. So, you know, gerrymandering also could backfire if you start to see genuine shifts and genuine malleability among voters.

That's a great question. So I think that the general trend we have seen toward right-wing populism is very much a global trend, as I was saying, and I think it's basically a reaction to 30 years of increasing acceleration — technologically, economically, culturally. I mean, this is what I wrote my last book, Age of Revolutions, about, and it's a backlash against that. It's a bunch of people saying, 'Stop, I want to get off this train. I don't want more globalization, I don't want more technological acceleration, I don't want more multiculturalism.' Tough to do, because all these societies have become what they have become, and you're not going to be able to stop the clock. But that is — and what the right does in situations like that, often this has happened historically, is offer a kind of politics of nostalgia. You know, 'I'll take you back to before all this turmoil, all this uncertainty. I'll take you back to a comforting place.' The most important word on Trump's slogan, on his hats, is 'again' — make America great again — because it's kind of hearkening back to some utopia. And what I am — I think there is nothing right now going on globally that suggests what might happen in America. America would be, I think, the trendsetter here, because it would be the first time you got a break from that. Lula in Brazil was a little bit of that, and it's by the way an astonishing election. He was down decisively in the first round. No Brazilian president has ever lost the first round and won the second round. He shifted 10 million votes in three weeks, and that was a whole bunch of different reasons, but that's the only precursor I can think of. But I think this one is much more important because it is really fundamentally about this issue. Okay, the right-wing nostalgia sounds great, but can it deliver? And what you're seeing, fascinatingly, is that the issues that we would wonder, Scott, why people are not more worried about — the corruption, the abuse of executive authority — they have finally started to bubble up, because in a way they get tied to people's personal situations and to practical issues people are concerned about. John Oliver has done this very well by linking the corruption to the affordability crisis. You can't afford groceries, but the Trump family and cronies are making billions. You know, that kind of rhetorical ploy where making these connections seems to have worked. The abuse of executive authority wasn't making much headway until people started to see ICE agents firing on people, arresting people with very dubious explanations for why those people were suspicious. So I think you're finally seeing a kind of human connection to the misgovernment that the Trump people have represented. And so in a way, it may be — you know, this would be the trendsetter. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens in the United States and you get a genuine blue wave. Does it make people at the center everywhere think, 'You know what, there is a path forward'? Now a lot will depend on what the Democrats do after — do they take advantage of this and fashion a kind of viable, energetic centrism, or do they go to the far left? Do they, you know, do they do identity politics? Do they kind of fulfill all these progressive fantasies, which in my opinion would turn people off? And there's fairly good polling data on this. A majority of Democrats think the Democratic Party should be in the center, not in the far left. Right now, there's an anti-Trump atmosphere. To translate that into a governing majority, you need to be able to fashion something that people can be affirmatively in favor of.

I think it is different this time. The Iran war is the most unpopular war in American history. It is the first war, really, in the modern era that has been unpopular from day one. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War were all popular when they began and then became unpopular as they dragged on, as they seemed to be reaching kind of inconclusive, unsatisfying finishes. The Iran War has been unpopular from day one — the most unpopular war in American history. And I think it's for two reasons. One, nobody really understands why Trump began the war, after having six months earlier done this massive bombing campaign, which rather effectively set back Iran's nuclear program by months, if not years — probably years, I would argue, and that is borne out by some evidence. But then suddenly, on a whim, it seems to be about regime change, fails within the first three days when it's clear the Iranian regime is going to survive. And that's one piece of it. And the second piece is there is such an obvious tie to inflation with this war, there's such an obvious tie to the simple pocketbook issues that everybody cares about, that it's very hard to deny. I mean, nobody — even the administration has not tried to make the claim that the Iran war has not directly affected inflation. Trump's only argument is, 'Well, it'll go away once the war ends,' but we're six months into the war and it hasn't ended. So I think those two things make this case different. And I think — I hope it also, again, this is where the Democrats can play a role — I hope it will make people understand that we have created a system in this country with just too much broad authority to the executive branch. This was completely the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted. Congress is the first branch of government. The phrase for the president is the president is meant to faithfully execute the laws that Congress passes. Faithfully execute the laws. He was really seen as a kind of steward trying to make sure that laws were appropriately implemented. He has become a kind of king, particularly with the way the Supreme Court has ruled. And maybe this Iran war gives the Democrats an opening to say, 'Look, we have to rein in this out-of-control executive that can do all these things without any congressional approval, authorization, vote of confidence, nothing.'

So on the right, there has been a fantasy that what we really need is for America to kind of stand up for what it is, and for the West to stand up for what it is, which was this great, mighty, imperial civilization that conquered the world, that reshaped the globe, and that that was the distinctive quality of the West that, you know, all these namby-pamby liberals are forgetting. And what's striking in that Marco Rubio speech that he gave in Athens is that he talks about all the strength, the courage, the resourcefulness of Western civilization and how we have kind of started to apologize for it. But what he's describing — strength, power, resourcefulness, might — Genghis Khan had all of that, the Russian Empire had all of that, the Germans had all of that. What was distinctive, as you say, about America was actually — and the West more generally — what sets the West apart from other civilizations is the Enlightenment, is the idea that all human beings have equal rights, is the idea that we have, you know, even a soul, the Kantian idea that you cannot, you know, use power to control individuals, that the individual is sacrosanct. I mean, there's a deep Christian belief that all human beings are children of God. All these ideas are what made the West distinctive. Every society practiced slavery, but it's only in the West that we came up with an anti-slavery movement and ideology and eventually freed the slaves. Every major great power was imperial, but it's only the West that began to reflect on that imperialism and ask, 'Well, you know, was this fair to the Native Americans who were after all also human beings, also children of God?' Those kind of questions are what made the West unique, and I think that goes directly — leads directly to the point you make, which is so important. After '45, what the United States did was unprecedented in human history. That is, it took its defeated foes and said, 'Not only are we going to welcome you back to the table as equal partners, as great nations, we are going to help fund your reconstruction, we are going to give you the money or loan you the money to make that happen.' And as you said, these are not trivial sums of money. This is something in the $200 billion range right now, the Marshall Plan, and there was much more. We opened up our markets to these countries because we wanted to create an ecosystem that was more stable. This was Franklin Roosevelt's dream. Having seen the collapse of Versailles in World War I and how it resulted in the forces that then produced another world war, he was like, 'We've got to stop this. We've got to find a new way.' And the United States did find a new way, which was mutually beneficial to everybody. I hope we can get back there. But it gets to a central question, which is: are other nations so burned by the two Trump elections? One could be a fluke, but two makes them think, 'Look, do we need to buy insurance?' Okay, you guys come in, some nice Democrat comes in, he starts saying all the right things, just as Joe Biden did. But what happens if 10 years from now, or even just six years from now, we get another Trump-like character? We get JD Vance, we get Don Jr. We need some protection, we need some insurance, and we are going to — So I see this, for example, with Canada. Canada made a fundamental decision decades ago, under Brian Mulroney and George Bush Senior, to bind the US and Canadian economies together, to almost create a North American economy. And the car industry, for example, is currently a North American car industry. The parts move 15 times across borders to make the most efficient North American cars. The Canadians are thinking: if that dependence on America has proved to be a vulnerability, because America will use it to squeeze us, to punish us, to bully us, we've got to get some leverage back. And so Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, is making deals with the European Union, with China, with India. Now I think he's going to keep doing that even if a Democrat is elected in '28. India was going to wean itself off its dependence on Russian arms, but then watching the way that Trump behaved towards India, but also the way he behaved towards Ukraine — I'm sure the Indians, I know the Indians are thinking, 'Well, you know, we'll wean ourselves off the Russians a bit, but maybe slower than we planned to, and we'll diversify.' The big order they placed this year was actually for French fighter planes, not American. And there had been a hope that India would essentially trade its dependence — 80% of Indian weaponry comes from Russia — we'd trade that for America, and there were many people in India advocating that. But the Trump administration's attitude has completely changed the way Indians at the elite level look at America in general. Indians are still wildly pro-American, but at the elite level it's changed. So this gets to the question you're asking. I think we have set in place a series of motions that people are going to buy insurance. So I think we can get a bunch of it back. I think we can stabilize the system again, but we can't go back to the way it was, because once you sow that level of mistrust, that doubt, that sense that we need a bit of insurance, it's hard to see how you get it back. We did the impossible, you know — for 50 years, the second and third richest countries in the world, Germany and Japan, said, 'We don't need to have major defenses, you take care of us.' We are basically subcontracting our national security policy to you, the number one country. The idea that the number two and number three economies in the world would subcontract their foreign policy to the number one country — again, historically never happened in the world. And it was American genius. And it has now been American stupidity and recklessness that has wrecked that system.

And it was totally affordable for us. It was the equivalent of what these founders do when they issue shares — to continue your point, you only have to own 20% of the company, but you can have 60% of the voting rights. That was the arrangement we had with the international system.