Miles Bryan | Vox

A cautionary tale about tax cuts

2026-04-14T18:05:48-04:00

A man in Van Nuys, California, holds a sign encouraging motorist to express their anger at IRS on their final day to file 2005 income taxes on April 17, 2006. | David McNew/Getty Images

Americans are getting crankier about paying taxes.

Most people don’t enjoy paying Uncle Sam, but for much of the 2000s and 2010s, a sizable percentage of Americans thought that the amount of federal taxes they paid was “about right,” according to Gallup. But recently, the share saying their taxes were “too high” has been climbing; last year, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they pay too much.

Call it the Great American Tax Revolt, or maybe the Third American Revolution. Whatever we label this anti-tax wave, its effects are already rippling out across the country. Republicans in red states are slashing property taxes, or threatening to eliminate them entirely. Even some Democratic lawmakers are proposing massive tax cuts to be paid for with tax increases on only the very richest.

All of this reminds Isaac Martin, a professor of urban studies at University of California San Diego, of the battle over Proposition 13: a 1978 California ballot measure that capped property taxes statewide, setting off a chain of fiscal and social consequences that the state is still grappling with.

“I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free,” Martin told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

King and Martin talked about the history of property tax in America, the story of Prop 13, and what California’s experience suggests about where the rest of the country may be headed.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What was going on with taxes in the 1970s?

There was what we call now the property tax revolt, a major grassroots movement of protest against local property taxes. It was a nationwide thing. It happened in communities all around the US, but people really remember the events in California because Californians at that time, in 1978, amended their constitution to limit the property tax. And that tax limitation, which they called Proposition 13, then became national news and had all kinds of impacts in and outside of California.

I lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and I remember Proposition 13 being a big topic of conversation, but not everyone will know of its history. Why does Prop 13 matter? Why is it such a big deal?

Proposition 13 is a big deal for a few reasons. The first is that it very dramatically changed the state’s tax structure. It said local governments cannot levy any property tax in excess of 1 percent, so it capped the property tax rate at 1 percent.

“It’s a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don’t think carefully about what to do with that anger.”

The second and more important thing it did is it put an annual cap on the amount that the assessed value of your property for tax purposes could increase from year to year. Even if your home was appreciating in value very rapidly, as far as the local tax assessor was concerned, it wasn’t actually going up more than 2 percent per year in value. And that, among other things, constrained the finances of local governments in California.

It also gave property owners a tax break that grew over time, the longer they stayed in their homes. It was the beginning of a real cascade of similar changes to California law, including later initiatives in the 1980s that said that the tax break you have on your home because you got in early, you can pass that down to your children. You can pass that down to your grandchildren. That’s one reason why Peter Schrag, who was the [opinion] editor of the Sacramento Bee for many years, said in the 1990s, Listen, we now have a hereditary aristocracy of property in California.

The story of Proposition 13 in California matters for at least a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is that it’s a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don’t think carefully about what to do with that anger. As I understand it, it’s a story of the simplest, worst solution to a real crisis.

Where did [Prop 13] come from?

First off, property taxes have always been a mess in America. Property taxation is the oldest tax we have in the United States. It predates the republic. And until the middle decades of the 20th century, the property tax was still being administered as if we were in the horse-and-buggy era.

The people who were in charge of figuring out how much your house or your business was worth for the purpose of taxing it were political animals, and they didn’t tend to have much expertise in actually appraising property. Instead, what they would do is just kind of write down from year to year, Oh, we wrote down this number for your home last year. Let’s write it down again this year.

They were giving away these kinds of informal tax breaks to people in a way that was often also very political. They might trade a low assessment for bribes. They very commonly traded low assessments for votes. And in the 1960s, led by California, many states then began to reform how they administered the property tax. They brought in computers, they professionalized assessment, and suddenly for the first time, many, many property owners, especially homeowners in the United States, started to get taxed on the actual values of their homes for the first time. And it turned out they didn’t like that.

It was a cause of an incredible freak-out — people petitioning to abolish the property tax. One of the most colorful figures in the movement was a real crank named Howard Jarvis, who was a Los Angeles entrepreneur, a kind of serial entrepreneur, who first in the late 1960s campaigned to abolish the property tax and got nowhere with it, but did get enough traction that he decided it was worth continuing to try.

He teamed up with a used car salesman named Paul Gann, and took inspiration actually from the Los Angeles property assessor, who was also arguing for property tax reforms, a guy named Phil Watson, and wrote a limitation — a state constitutional amendment to limit taxes — that became Proposition 13. They collected more signatures than any ballot initiative in the history of California. And in June 1978, a majority of the voters went for it.

Why did a majority of voters go for it? Was it hard to convince people?

Jarvis wrote later in his memoir that the best argument was simply to go up to people and say, Sign this, it will lower your property taxes.

All right, so the upshot is what exactly? What happens after voters say, Yeah, this is what we want.

Quality of services in many cases declined. It’s clear, for example, that there was a shift in fire protection away from professional fire departments and toward volunteer fire departments in some parts of the state.

It hurt the schools. School finance has continued to, of course, increase in California as it has elsewhere in the US, but California used to be at the top in terms of quality of education in primary and secondary education and in terms of school spending. And now it’s definitely not.

“The lesson here is that we really value, and should value, a lot of the public services and public goods that our governments provide.”

It has hurt the quality of infrastructure — potholes in the roads, response times of first responders. It has shifted the state tax structure onto income taxes, which means that the tax system in California is really swingy — in a boom, a lot of money might flow into the state’s coffers, and in a recession, the state budget really suffers. During the financial crisis, this meant that local governments that could no longer rely on a lot of property tax revenue were especially vulnerable to bankruptcy.

It has also created all kinds of unfairness — new unfairness, rather unlike the old system. Now you might actually pay a lot more tax than somebody else in your neighborhood who has an identical home worth the same amount of money, just because they bought their home earlier than you did. And they might agree that that’s unfair, but they might not vote to change it because it’s an unfairness that allows them to stay in their home.

You’re aware that Americans are growing irritable about paying taxes, and I wonder whether you think it’s fair to look at California and see a warning about where the rest of the country might be headed?

I do. I mean, I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free. The lesson here is that we really value, and should value, a lot of the public services and public goods that our governments provide. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t operate efficiently, but it does mean that when you think about how much you’re willing to pay for them, you also have to pay attention to what you’re willing to give up.

Is the Iran war turning into Trump’s Iraq?

2026-04-07T14:14:40-04:00

Iranian flags are seen amongst debris at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, which was hit by US-Israeli strikes on April 7, 2026. | Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

How closely does President Donald Trump’s war in Iran compare with America’s last conflict in the Middle East?

Both the Iran war and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have paired conventional American military dominance with shifting, ambiguous objectives. And both feature an American president desperate to declare the mission accomplished.

“I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu,” Dexter Filkins, a staff writer at the New Yorker who was the former Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Filkins talked to King about America’s quick conquest of Iraq in 2003, the chaos that followed, what the Iraq War did to the American psyche, and where the similarities between that war and Trump’s war in Iran end.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

President Bush claimed to have won the conflict [in Iraq]; about six weeks in, he gets on an aircraft carrier, he’s got this banner behind him that says “mission accomplished.” What was the moment for you that it became clear that the mission had not been accomplished?

It was clear the moment that the US military entered Baghdad, and it’s April 9, 2003. The chaos and the looting and the bloodshed began immediately. By the end of the day, after the US military marches triumphantly into the capital; by nighttime, the capital is on fire. And there’s total anarchy.

When President Bush flew on the aircraft carrier and said, “mission accomplished,” it was absurd then. But then of course it became a cruel joke because the anarchy that we witnessed in the capital that day just spread far and wide across the country and engulfed the country and stayed that way for a very long time.

What allowed it to keep going? The anarchy starts in Baghdad and then it spreads. And there’s a world in which the US is there. We’ve got good troops, we’ve got good weapons, and so we just win. But that’s not what happened.

The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.

The US military is really good at what they do, and what they do is destroy their enemies. But that is not enough necessarily to make a just and lasting peace that will endure and that will, say, allow the United States to leave.

“The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.”

The United States had plenty of firepower, but it wasn’t enough to hold the country together. This was a very traumatized country that had been torn apart in many different ways, including by its own government, for many, many years. And so all these things kind of spilled out in front of us.

The overwhelming fact was that the United States military, after it destroyed the government, was unable to keep order. And until you can have order, you can’t build anything that will last. And it took many, many years for the United States to figure out a way to make that happen.

By the time we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, how had the region changed? What did that war do to the Middle East?

The Iraq War was like a magnet for every lunatic — and I mean it, every lunatic — not just in the Middle East, but across the world. It was drawing people, particularly from across the Islamic world, into the country to fight the Americans. And so it became this kind of self-sustaining firestorm.

You could hear, you could see the propaganda, you could hear it on loudspeakers: Come to the fight, come and fight the Americans. And so we got ourselves into this kind of terrible situation where we saw ourselves as the saviors. But many people across the region saw us as invaders and as occupiers.

I wonder if you can reflect on what you think the Iraq War did to Americans. Because I remember the torture memos, I remember Abu Ghraib…I just remember — and again, I was young, but I remember these things where it was like, Oh shit, this is who we are now.

I would say it’s a bit of a sad ledger because I think when the Americans went in and couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, didn’t find any nuclear weapons, people felt like they’d been lied to, that the government wanted this war, that they wanted to go to war no matter what and they made up this intelligence to go in.

Whether that’s true or not, I think there was a huge sense that people felt betrayed. We kind of lost our bearings, lost our way. I think, correctly, there was a feeling like, Oh my God, we embarked on this gigantic ambitious, bloody, expensive venture, and what did we get out of this? And I think the first and foremost, for a lot of people, it was a lot of pain that we got out of it.

As you’ve told the story of the war in Iraq, I am definitely hearing parallels to the war in Iran. What do you make of the comparisons? What is appropriate and what is going too far at this moment?

I’d say any war is horrible and terrible things inevitably happen. For instance, in the Iran war, it’s pretty clear that the United States bombed a school for children and killed 150 kids or so. That kind of thing happens, and it’s not to excuse it in any way — those things are kind of terrible across the board.

But I would say there’s a sense that I have, having lived through, and seen up close, the Iraq War — that the government once again is having a hard time speaking clearly about its goals and its justifications for being there.

That’s disturbing because we live in a democracy and the government should only be able to do what it is sanctioned to do by its people. President Trump has given out so many different justifications as to why we’re there. And so in that sense, I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu.

One of the takeaways we hear is that America never learns its lesson. America is going back into the Middle East. America’s going to fight another stupid, forever war.

You clearly have a more nuanced perspective on this, and you were in the region, and that counts for a lot. What is the big lesson here for you after the last 25 years of US interference in the Middle East?

I think maybe that there isn’t a big lesson, but in the case of Iran, in the Iran war, I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I don’t like the way the war started. I’m very disturbed by it, but we’re in it and it’s too late to turn back now.

I think the best that we can hope for and that we should hope for is that we can get to a satisfactory resolution. At a minimum, I think that means for the Strait to be open so that the world economy doesn’t tumble into recession. My main hope is that we can somehow extricate ourselves from this war in a way that doesn’t leave the region in even greater chaos than what we have now.

The rage-bait candidate who wants to govern Florida

2026-03-19T09:56:34-04:00

It can be hard to make sense of James Fishback. The longshot Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate is the son of an immigrant and fiercely nativist, a self-proclaimed finance success story turned economic populist, and both pro-Trump and running against President Donald Trump’s chosen candidate. He’s also openly racist and antisemitic.

But one thing is for sure: He’s getting a lot of attention.

Fishback is “someone who I think typically couldn’t be elected for dog catcher. But he’s kind of catching on,” Will Sommer, a senior reporter at the Bulwark, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram recently. “He’s gaining in the polls, and while he still probably won’t win, I think he’s offering us a face of one potential future for the Republican Party.”

Sommer spoke with Sean about Fishback’s history, the movement he represents, and what could be next for him in Republican politics. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Where did this dude come from?

Just about nowhere. He was in finance. He was, apparently, according to court documents, a pretty low-level employee at a hedge fund. And then, he styled himself as this real hedge-fund expert.

They claim he made up his title, and that kind of became a meme in the finance community, because it was just so ridiculous. But through that, he managed to get on Fox Business a lot and leverage that into appearing that he’s this expert financier type.

And to further complicate the shape-shifting identity of this white supremacist candidate: He’s not…super…white.

This is one of the fascinating things about him. He’s extremely racist to Byron Donalds, the congressman who’s been endorsed by Trump, who’s the frontrunner in the Florida governor’s race.

At the same time, his mother is Colombian, and so he’s half Colombian. This is something we’re seeing more of, I think: this racial extremism in Florida among Hispanic people.

There was recently a leak of young Republicans who are Hispanic in Miami being extremely racist, and he’s become the face of, or one of the faces of, the white nationalist — the so-called groyper — movement that surrounds the podcaster Nick Fuentes.

Remind people who don’t pay attention to Nick Fuentes and the groypers what they’re all about.

Nick Fuentes is a young man in his late 20s who marched in Charlottesville. [He’s an] avowed racist and antisemite who has styled himself — particularly after the murder of Charlie Kirk, which created a vacuum — as the racist face of young Republicanism.

What does the Venn diagram look like between Nick Fuentes, and the racist groypers, and this longshot candidate for Florida governor, James Fishback?

I would say that the Venn diagram is just about a circle.

James Fishback has really welcomed the groypers’ support. Nick Fuentes has been very complimentary towards him. Fishback will pose for pictures with people in Nick Fuentes merchandise. He’s very close with this right-wing media figure who said she’s going to have some more kids and make some more young groypers.

They’re very closely aligned, and I think Fishback is interesting, because he is probably the closest we’ve come to a Nick Fuentes/groyper-type political candidate. And his relative success suggests that that kind of candidate has some runway among Gen Z Republicans.

Nick Fuentes is interesting to talk about this moment because he’s a white supremacist, but he also says he wants to vote for Democrats in the next election. How does that affect someone like Fishback? Where does he sit in the ideological spectrum?

Fishback represents this growing discontent among young Republicans with the Trump administration — particularly over support for Israel and the war with Iran, but more broadly this sense that Trump isn’t doing anything about affordability to help young people own homes and start families.

It’s this populist — to be frank, quasi-fascist — kind of government stepping in to control families, to control businesses. One of his proposals is that, in a marriage, if someone cheats, they should lose all of the marital assets, which, to me, I think would just incentivize spousal murder, if you’re going to be a pauper if you get divorced.

He has these ideas where people go, Oh, yeah, that’s true, even though it’s crazy.

To underline one more, he talks about housing affordability in Florida, but a lot of his ideas are either onerous taxes on anyone who moves to Florida or somehow banning people from moving to Florida. [It’s a] really heavy-handed government vision that he’s proposing.

The New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg went and hung out at Fishback events in Florida. She met a registered Democrat, a Zohran Mamdani fan, who said that she was thinking of changing her registration to vote for Fishback in the primary.

Who is he speaking to? How big is his tent?

Fishback is benefiting from a couple of things. One is you do have people who are legitimately alienated from normal politics, and because he’s this unusual candidate, they’re latching onto him.

On the other hand, he’s also benefiting from this poisoned information ecosystem. Someone else in the Michelle Goldberg piece says they got into Fishback because they saw Kanye West post a graphic about Jews controlling the media.

There’s just this crazy online ecosystem that favors seeking attention, and Fishback certainly does that. He has these mobs that go to Waffle Houses for events. He’ll say these eye-catching ideas like public executions for anyone associated with Jeffrey Epstein or taxing OnlyFans creators at 50 percent of their income, and this then creates a feud with some OnlyFans stars.

He’s been able to get attention in a lot of different ways despite running sort of a shoestring campaign.

You said earlier he doesn’t really have a shot, but he’s getting enough attention to be worth talking about, because he appears to have some influence here. What does he parlay that into, if not running Florida?

These days, being a right-wing media figure is in many ways better than being a politician — maybe not governor, but we’ve seen someone like deputy FBI director Dan Bongino quit to go back to podcasting.

If you want influence, in a lot of ways it’s better to be someone like Candace Owens or Megyn Kelly with a huge YouTube platform than a random congressman.

In some ways, James Fishback is trying to play on that. And he’s young; he could run for office in the future. There’s this sense that he, despite being frankly just a big-time charlatan in many ways, is harnessing this discontent among young people.

Do the young people think he’s genuine? Because hearing you talk about his experience, or lack thereof, it seems like he’s just someone who’s taken advantage of whatever zeitgeist is in front of him to increase his own popularity.

Some people you’ll meet, they’re just weeping. They’re meeting a huge celebrity. They just love Fishback.

On the other hand, I think a lot of these groyper-type figures, they’re very cynical about politics in general. They would love to see a fascist America, but they see Fishback as a useful vehicle.

He’s a guy who has a certain amount of charisma that appeals to some people, and they see him as someone who’s able to capture some energy and also show this discontent within the Republican Party.

How Democrats — and even a few Republicans — in Congress are moving to rein in ICE

2026-01-26T16:39:00-05:00

ICE officers and federal agents in Minneapolis after Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal agents in the area. | Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images

Federal agents’ killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday has strengthened Senate Democrats’ resolve to force changes to Trump’s immigration forces — even at the risk of shutting down the government.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement after Pretti’s death saying that Senate Democrats would not support a key government funding bill without changes to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, both of which are currently deployed in Minneapolis. Without Democratic votes, the government will partially shut down at the end of the week.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief congressional correspondent for Puck News, about how Pretti’s killing has changed Senate Democrats’ political calculus, growing divisions within the Republican Party over the immigration crackdown, and whether President Donald Trump is feeling the heat.

The Senate is back in session this week and will vote on a package to fund transportation, health and human services, and the Department of Homeland Security. It passed the House last week — and then what happened?

There was another tragic shooting of a US citizen in Minneapolis. What’s interesting is that this bill, including DHS funding, was expected to pass. It only got a little more than a handful of Democratic votes in the House, but the Senate was most likely going to move forward. It only needed about eight Democratic senators, and it looked like it was going to get that. Then the shooting happened — the second in a matter of weeks — and Democrats in the Senate nearly unanimously came out adamantly opposed to giving the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE, more money on the heels of this shooting.

Before the shooting this weekend, some Democrats in Congress had introduced a bill called the Melt ICE Act, which would defund ICE. Where does the conversation around defunding or abolishing ICE stand right now?

For the most part, the majority of Democrats do not want to go there. They think it’s counterproductive and plays into Republican talking points, especially since this was a big movement back in 2019 during Trump’s first term. What they would rather do is try to rein in the agency. There are also growing conversations about impeaching DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, which has become overwhelmingly popular among House Democrats. Even a few Senate Democrats are saying the same. Democrats are obviously in the minority with little power to do this, but that’s where they would rather focus the conversation than on defunding or abolishing ICE.

Let me ask you about Republicans. Are any Republican lawmakers changing the way they talk about ICE in light of what happened this weekend?

Republicans have mostly been very publicly in lockstep with this administration. But after this weekend, we’re starting to see some signs of discomfort. You have Representative James Comer, who heads the Oversight Committee, essentially suggesting that ICE should leave Minnesota and that it should be up to local officials to decide how to address immigration. It wasn’t very graceful, but that’s the substance of what he was saying.

You also have senators like Dave McCormick saying this was a tragedy and calling for some sort of investigation. Andrew Garbarino of New York, who could face a difficult reelection, is the chair of the [House] Homeland Security Committee and has called for top DHS officials, including Kristi Noem, to testify. That’s the first time we’ve seen any real attempt at oversight from Republicans in this Congress. [Editor’s note: On Monday, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, also called for the heads of ICE and CBP to testify.]

What does it mean that divisions are forming in the Republican Party?

“Many of those vulnerable Republicans are the ones growing most uneasy, because this issue is becoming a serious problem for them back home.”

It means this is becoming a significant political liability for Republicans. Speaker [Mike] Johnson has been in lockstep with the president and has defended him consistently, but he also wants to keep the speaker’s gavel, which means protecting vulnerable Republican colleagues. Many of those vulnerable Republicans are the ones growing most uneasy, because this issue is becoming a serious problem for them back home. These divisions are notable, and the question is how far Republicans are willing to go to address them, if at all.

President Trump said on Truth Social that he’s sending Tom Homan, his “border czar,” to Minnesota and that Homan will report directly to him. Is there any significance to that?

Yes, there is significance. Tom Homan has been at odds with Kristi Noem. He’s a longtime DHS veteran, and some of my sources inside DHS were initially pleased when he got the border czar job because they saw him as the right person and someone who was widely respected within the department. This could signal potential trouble for Kristi Noem and suggest that she’s being sidelined.

Ultimately, we’re talking about the potential of a partial government shutdown. We had one not so long ago. What were the lessons of the last shutdown for Democrats, and do any of them apply here?

The last government shutdown was over health care, and even though it proved to be politically beneficial for Democrats — because it shifted attention to health care — Democrats were still very nervous and unsure whether it was the right strategy. Many were uncomfortable but went along with it.

This time, Democrats are so outraged that even members who traditionally oppose shutdowns want to push this issue, even if it leads to one. They believe that masked federal law enforcement agents operating with what appears to be total immunity and no accountability is unacceptable and worth using whatever leverage they have. The internal dynamics within the Democratic Party are very different now. And unlike last time, when it was unclear whether public opinion was on their side, the level of public outrage now gives them confidence that they are.

If Democrats do shut the government down until they get what they want on ICE or Border Patrol, does that fix the situation? Does that mean the masked men leave the streets of Minneapolis?

No, it does not. Republicans already provided ICE and Border Patrol with three years of funding through a separate bill outside the normal appropriations process. So even if the government shuts down, ICE funding would not be halted. In that sense, this is largely symbolic when it comes to ICE. That said, the best possible outcome may be forcing some form of accountability or agreement from the administration. The politics and optics matter here — who has leverage and who can extract concessions. And at this point, it may not be politically advantageous for Republicans to defend a shutdown in order to justify ICE’s current tactics.

China is wielding a new kind of power in the world now

2026-01-19T09:39:07-05:00

An inflatable Labubu in Victoria Harbour on October 25, 2025, in Hong Kong. | Hou Yu/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

To say that China had a successful 2025 would be an understatement.

According to President Donald Trump’s campaign agenda and early months of his second administration, the United States was going to be tough on China. Trump went heavy on tariffs, limited chip exports, and tried to assert dominance over the country.

A year later, you’d have trouble finding evidence of it.

Instead, China has prospered by exercising hard economic power over the US — by wielding its newfound soft power. If you didn’t catch the blockbuster Chinese movie Nhe Zha 2 or play Black Myth: Wukong, you likely caught wind of a Labubu.

But why did these cultural exports finally leave China now? And how might it impact China’s growing hard power over the US?

To find out, Today, Explained senior producer and reporter Miles Bryan spoke with Don Weinland, a China business and finance editor for The Economist based in Shanghai.

How would you define [China’s] soft power?

The first thing to say is that China massively underpunches on its cultural exports. This is the world’s second biggest economy, an incredible manufacturing power unparalleled elsewhere. And yet on cultural exports, it is really not doing very well on that front.

This is something that’s actually changing. For many years, I don’t think you would’ve known most of the movies or video games or toys that are being made in China, especially not by name. But China did much better on cultural exports in 2025 than it has in previous years.

I feel like we should start with Labubu. I don’t have any Labubus, to be honest, but I do see them everywhere, and I was surprised to learn in researching for this story that they originated in China. Are you a Labubu guy?

I’m not really a Labubu guy per se, but I am very interested in Pop Mart, the company that makes Labubus. It really started getting a lot of attention in 2024, and then in ’25, it just blew up. If you haven’t seen one, they’re often described as being “ugly cute.” And they come in these things called blind boxes. You don’t know what Labubu you’re going to get. They’re collectors’ items. It’s kind of like baseball cards in a way. You don’t know what baseball cards you’re getting, and you might get a rare card.

So what else? You mentioned movies.

Nhe Zha 2 really blew up at the beginning of 2025. It’s an animated film. It tells a traditional Chinese myth story. It’s the highest grossing animated film ever. That’s quite amazing in itself. And most of that happened domestically, but I know people in the US that have seen it as well.

Chinese films don’t get a lot of screen time in the US traditionally, but this one seems like it did break through in some places. You would hear senior leaders citing Nhe Zha 2, which is very odd to hear them referencing this animated film. And really, they were pointing to what they see as a cultural success. So that tells you something about how important this movie was.

You also mentioned video games. I was looking into one game that looks like it broke through: Black Myth: Wukong. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Incredibly popular within China, but also overseas. I think it’s one of the most popular video games of this style ever. It’s also based on a traditional Chinese myth. It was so popular that the areas in China that it takes place in started getting a bunch of tourists visiting them. This type of cultural product can generate economic growth, not just in the selling of the product itself, but also in areas like tourism.

What do these products have in common that contributed to their breaking out of China as cultural exports in the past year? What do you think is happening here that’s different?

I’ve kind of narrowed it down to two really important things. One is that a lot of the creators behind these things are in their late 30s or early 40s, and they are people that went to university in China just as the education system was changing. A lot more students were going to school at the time. It’s a time when the internet was relatively free. It was quite easy to get online and look at foreign websites. I think they absorbed a lot of foreign culture.

Another thing is that these types of products are being funded quite a bit better than in the past. The Communist Party has its priorities. It wants to be strong in manufacturing; it wants to be strong in areas like electric vehicles and batteries, solar power. It hasn’t really focused that much on its cultural products and its soft power, and we can kind of see that changing in areas like animated film or video games. It’s a lot easier for these types of companies to get funding now, and that just means that it’s going to reach a lot more people in China, but also overseas.

There’s another factor that has really held back cultural exports in China, and that’s just rules and regulations here that make it very, very difficult to make raunchy, sexy entertainment, the type of stuff that we’re used to in the US. Sometimes even broaching the topic of divorce is difficult in sitcoms. You can’t even really have haunted houses in Chinese entertainment, because the Communist Party doesn’t like superstition.

What’s your bet on the next big Chinese cultural export? Think we’re getting a Labubu 2.0 in 2026?

I don’t think Labubu is going away anytime soon. Pop Mart is going to keep cranking out these strange, ugly, cute dolls. But I would say one area that American consumers might see in 2026 is they might see more Chinese products, well-made products, popping up in America. We’ve been talking about entertainment, but products have a big impact on soft power as well. If you start buying well-made Chinese products, it could change your mind about China.

It does seem like China’s making progress on entertainment and cultural products that are more geared towards children. I think that’s kind of a safe space for Chinese cultural exports. You don’t need things like violence and sex and the raunchier bits of entertainment in this space. That might make it easier for more of these types of youth-focused things to reach people outside of China.

7 predictions for how MAHA will change how Americans eat

2026-01-16T18:18:55-05:00

Uncle Sam thinks you’re probably eating wrong, and he’s got some advice.

Out: processed carbohydrates and added sugar.

In: fat and protein, especially the animal-flesh kind.

Those are some of the biggest takeaways from the new — and newly inverted — food pyramid announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this month.

While the Make America Healthy Again movement is one of the biggest drivers of change in how we eat now, it’s not the only one. Today, Explained recently spoke with Liz Dunn, author of the newsletter Consumed, about her predictions for how we will eat in 2026. Some trends are MAHA-approved (more supplements) while others would give RFK Jr. a conniption (sugar-laden drinks are going to get even sweeter).

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

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Prediction No. 1: What comes after peak protein will be…more protein.

The question that I get more than any other as the year came to a close is: What’s next after protein? What’s the next protein? And I really feel like we’re not ready for what’s next yet for a few reasons.

One is that the supermarket has sort of reinvented itself for protein delivery. So, whether it’s zero sugar yogurts, or meat sticks, or protein boosted waffles, the protein is out there, and it’s everywhere calling to us, people really continue to associate protein with fitness and with strength and power — all great, positive things.

And maybe, most importantly, the new federal dietary guidelines up the recommended allowance of protein. So this is just going to add fuel to the fire.

Prediction No. 2: Sugar-loaded drinks will get even more popular.

This one does seem a little paradoxical, because there is a lot of sugar hating out there, but the country is not a monolith. And so, there are a really sizable number of people who are drinking and enjoying soup or sugary fast food and coffee chain beverages.

Drinks like this have been around since the Frappuccino, but I think, probably, the best example of how they’ve really grown is a chain called Dutch Brothers. It’s a coffee chain. It’s one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America. And its growth is being driven not by coffee, but by these big, sweet, cold coffee drinks. And at the same time, we’re seeing the dirty soda trend. I don’t know if you’re familiar with dirty sodas.

Everybody from Taco Bell to McDonald’s is experimenting with what they call beverage innovation — how to add more of these drinks to their menus — and that is for two reasons.

One is consumers are really tightening their wallets, and they’re looking for ways to have an indulgence without maybe ordering an entire fast food meal. So a sweet soda, a sweet coffee drink is a great way to get that kind of fun pick me up without spending a ton of money. And then, on the business end, these drinks are really, really profitable.

They’re cheap to make. You can charge a fair amount for them, and especially at a time when coffee and beef are two commodities that are more expensive than they’ve ever been. These drinks make really good business sense for fast food chains. And so, I expect to see fast food chains to continue to really push them.

Prediction No. 3: The supplement market will see its biggest year ever.

So, supplements are a $70 billion market in the US.

There’s a few reasons why this market has been exploding, and again, why I think it will really continue to explode in 2026. One is the Make America Healthy Again movement, which really buys into supplements as a concept.

I like to say that it’s pharma, big wellness. So there’s a lot of faith in the idea that the right mix of supplements in your diet could cure really anything. I mean, you may remember Robert F. Kennedy suggesting that Vitamin A was a good alternative to vaccination for measles. So, this is an example of this kind of thinking.

And then, social media has just been a real accelerant for this industry. If an influencer that you follow says that she swears by magnesium to help her sleep, that’s probably really going to encourage you to give it a try.

Prediction No. 4: The grocery business will continue its V-shaped reinvention.

When I grew up, my family shopped at Stop and Shop; we went once a week. It was something for everyone — grocery store carried all the big packaged food brands. The prices are good, but they’re not great. But they’re kind of your main-street grocer.

Now, those mid-price grocers like Kroger, or Stop and Shop, or Albertsons, they’re really losing share to discounters. So Walmart sells about a quarter of the groceries in America today. Costco, Aldi, Dollar General, all of those discounters are really growing as people are willing to sacrifice name brand groceries or having a deli counter or maybe a larger selection for really, really deep value. And then, the other end of the V is the very premium end of the market. I’m thinking about places like Erewhon.

And Erewhon says it’s going to be expanding into as many as 20 cities in the coming years. And not quite as high end as Erewhon, but also in the more premium space, there’s brands like Sprouts, which is a natural fruits grocer, which is also really expanding rapidly. And so, that’s sort of the other end of this V where you see people seeking really deep discounts on one end, then, on the other end of the spectrum, splurging on sort of high-end premium grocery categories.

Prediction No. 5: Phones will eat first.

Listen: It’s not new that people choose where they eat in part based on the Instagramability or they’re taking pictures of their food or pictures of the interiors.

But I was really shocked to see a recent trend report released by the online bookings platform, OpenTable, which had a little tidbit that I just thought was staggering. 77 percent of Gen Zers and 79 percent of millennials said that they consider a restaurant’s Instagram or TikTok worthiness when deciding whether to eat there.

That’s a lot, and I think that it will likely be reflected in the types of decisions that restaurants make if a person is choosing where they dine based on what kind of content they can make out of it. I mean, I would expect to see really sort of viral appealing menu items and, I guess, decor touches that really lend themselves to photography.

So this is going to continue to be a really important factor in how people think about where they’re dining.

Prediction No. 6: Restaurants will need to adapt to GLP-1s.

The latest estimates are that about one in eight Americans has tried a GLP-1 drug, and we’d expect to see that number grow, because they’re going to be some pill based versions of these drugs coming out in the coming months. So we think that this will probably spread adoption.

Now, if you’re a restaurant, and something like one in 10 or one in five, potentially, diners are on a drug that cuts their desire for big portions, that’s something that will have to really influence how you design your menu, because restaurants need to continue to try to make the same amount of revenue — even if people want smaller portions.

Prediction No. 7: Big Food will be in big trouble.

Over the years, the big packaged food companies have really been able to reformulate their way out of pretty much any diet trend — low fat, low carb, gluten-free. There’s a way to make a very profitable packaged food that fits all of those trends.

What we’re seeing now in terms of how people are thinking about the food they’re eating is that they’re really skeptical of highly processed foods. And again, on the GLP-1 front, they also are just potentially eating less or, at least, a sizable share of the population is eating less.

So that’s a really new and different challenge. If you’re a packaged food company, how do you continue to make profitable products that are not processed, which is sort of the whole engine of how you made them profitable to begin with. I think that there’s going to have to be a real reckoning at these companies to figure out how they continue to perform for shareholders and remain profitable as these eating habits are changing dramatically.

How the US shut the door on asylum-seekers

2026-01-09T17:18:33-05:00

Asylum-seekers gather outside a US customs office in Tijuana, Mexico, shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025. | Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

When he first emerged on the political stage more than a decade ago, Donald Trump made closing America’s borders and remaking our immigration system a central plank of his agenda.

A year into his second administration — and as this week’s events in Minneapolis underscore — the issue has defined his presidency and changed America’s trajectory.

Perhaps one of the most consequential moves on that front has been his dismantling of our system of asylum: the process by which immigrants can legally enter the country if they fear violence or persecution. Trump has moved aggressively to curtail asylum-seekers’ entrance into the US, as well as to force ones already in the country to leave.

Today, Explained guest host Miles Bryan talked to ProPublica immigration reporter Mica Rosenberg about how the Trump administration has made life harder for asylum-seekers, how the system broke under Joe Biden, and what the changes in the US might spell for the rest of the world.

What was the Trump administration’s mindset about asylum coming into 2025?

Under US law, people are allowed to show up at our border and request asylum if they fear returning to their home countries. But that actually triggers a very long court process in the US that can take years to resolve.

Trump and his advisers really view this system as kind of like a giant loophole. They believe that most people who are coming into the country this way are not legitimate asylum-seekers, and they’re maybe coming for economic reasons. They’ve really come into office with a blitz of policies to try and shut that system down.

And that includes things that they’re doing at the border, which is quickly turning people back to Mexico — and, in some cases, sending them to third countries like Panama or Costa Rica or even farther, locations that they’ve never been to, and not giving them a chance to seek asylum here.

How important are those “third country” deportations to the administration’s overall policy?

This is really one of the most novel and surprising things that the Trump administration has tried.

For years, multiple administrations have struggled with a particular issue of countries that have refused to take back their own nationals as deportees. During the first Trump administration, he forged agreements with some Central American countries to take back some deportees from different nationalities — mostly regional migrants, and they didn’t really get very far.

This time around, [the administration has] really ramped up this strategy significantly. They’ve signed these types of agreements with around 20 countries, including really far-flung ones like South Sudan and Uganda.

In one of the most audacious and consequential deportations so far of Trump’s presidency, he sent close to 230 Venezuelan nationals to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. He accused them of being the worst of the worst, gang members. Our reporting at ProPublica and with Venezuelan reporting partners found that the government knew that the vast majority of these men had never been convicted of any crimes in the United States, but they were rounded up and whisked away to this prison, where they were held for months before they were released in a prisoner exchange.

This is something that has never really been tried before at this scale. And it’s being challenged in court. But it’s very difficult to challenge because once these people are outside of the United States, they’re mostly outside of the jurisdiction of US courts. So it’s leaving a lot of people in very precarious situations.

I think it’d be helpful to kind of remind everybody, including myself, what this system and the process looked like before Trump started blowing it up. Can you paint us a picture of how this was working under the Biden administration?

During the Biden administration, this phenomenon of people arriving at the border and turning themselves in to border officials to claim asylum really exploded under the Biden administration. The people that were coming and asking for refuge were overwhelming border stations, and many ended up being released into the country to make their claims in immigration court.

What qualifies you for asylum is a really sort of narrow band of reasons. It’s granted to people specifically who fear persecution because of their race, their religion, their nationality, their political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The system’s really been set up in the past acknowledging that those things can be very difficult to prove (especially if you’re fleeing out of fear, you might not have all of the proof that you need).

That’s why the court system was set up in this way. It was supposed to give people time to gather evidence, to make their claims. I think there are a lot of people who were arriving at the border who really did have legitimate asylum claims. They’re fleeing for their lives. They’re facing political persecution. But mixed in there, I think, are people who are coming for other reasons. They’re facing serious economic hardship or violence or political and economic breakdown in their home countries.

What the Trump administration has done, by believing that almost all of the asylum claims are fraudulent or not legitimate, they’re really sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And advocates are saying that these changes have made it nearly impossible for legitimate asylum-seekers to really get protection.

How do people in countries far from the United States find out or come to believe that flying to Mexico and then trekking to the border and then waiting at the border and then maybe turning themselves in was going to lead to a better life?

I think it’s very different for every nationality and every group. There were WhatsApp groups, there were TikTok influencers who were advertising different routes for making it to the United States.

People from countries deeper in South America, in India, and parts of Africa started understanding that they could come to the border and claim asylum and potentially be released to pursue their claims. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were making a perilous trek on foot through the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama.

African and Indian migrants were going into debt for tens of thousands of dollars to pay for commercial and charter flights into Nicaragua and then to make their way through Mexico.

Is anyone still getting asylum? Is this still happening at all, or has Trump just turned the tap off completely?

Well, the Trump administration’s goals of sealing off the border are really being accomplished in many ways. Border crossings have dropped to record lows, and releases of people into the country to try and go through this court process have also really dropped. There has really been a reduction in the ability for people to seek protection here.

So you’re telling us this story of huge swings in our asylum policy. It seems like a big reason that those swings are possible is because the policy is being set with executive orders. Do you think there’s any possibility that Congress is going to actually make any meaningful changes to our asylum system?

Well, everyone says that we are where we are right now because Congress for decades has never gotten around to passing any really meaningful, comprehensive immigration reform. We’re working with an outdated system. Each president that comes in basically makes immigration policy through fiat and executive actions. And those can be challenged in court. They can be quickly overturned if a different party comes into office.

This is something that would take real, meaningful, bipartisan action. There have been efforts that came really close in the past where there were groups on both sides. I think it really doesn’t look good for congressional action at this point.

How should we think about all these people who have historically sought out the United States for asylum who now cannot? Are they going to other countries? Is there going to be another nation that becomes the shining city on the hill?

All of these changes are happening at a time where there’s really an unprecedented explosion of people fleeing conflicts all over the world. Trump is part of a wave of politicians who have capitalized on concerns about rising immigration. Politicians in places like Europe or even Canada have embraced some of the views that the Trump administration has about tamping down on migration, limiting access to asylum.

Many countries in the past have really felt compelled to follow the US lead on issues of human rights and protecting asylum-seekers. But now, these countries may end up following the US lead in the opposite direction.

Ezra Klein’s year of Abundance

2025-12-23T17:57:49-05:00

A suburban neighborhood in Elmont, New York, in July 2019. | John Keating/Newsday RM via Getty Images

Key takeaways

The abundance agenda means figuring out how Democratic governments can follow through on their promises to voters.
Runaway housing costs and housing shortages are key issue for Democratic-led areas.
“Abundance” doesn’t align with any particular lane of the Democratic Party. Both California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have talked abundance — but the real test is whether they can deliver.

Do you remember where you were when you first heard about “abundance”?

In some circles, 2025 was the year that abundance became inescapable. The political framework — which essentially argues Democrats need to focus less on process and more on delivering for constituents — provided the title of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book in March. For, seemingly, the rest of the year, an endless stream of podcasts, X posts, and articles followed its publication.

The discourse has elevated Klein into something of a spiritual leader for the Democrats, a position he finds a bit uncomfortable.

“I see my job as trying to create good ideas built on an honest assessment of the world that will lead to things being better,” Klein told Today, Explained host Astead Herndon. “I would love it if that at this moment did not seem quite so partisan.”

Herndon talked to Klein about the tenets of abundance, the challenges prominent Democrats like Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom face in delivering it, and what he hopes the legacy of his book will be.

Define the abundance agenda for us.

So Abundance comes out of a series of pieces that me and my coauthor Derek Thompson wrote.

We were struggling with the reality that, in places where Democrats governed, you were not seeing enough of the things people need get built or produced — in places like California and New York, Massachusetts, just not enough housing. And that’s compared, by the way, to red states like Florida or Texas, which have an easier time producing it.

Under the Biden administration, we were seeing this huge push to decarbonization, but there was a lot standing in the way of building the transmission lines, electrical vehicle charger networks, the solar panels, the wind turbines.

And so this question of how can you have a liberalism that builds fast enough to achieve liberalism’s goals became, certainly for me, a somewhat obsessing question. How do you have government, particularly when Democrats are running it — the party that believes in government — that when they say we’re going to build high-speed rail or we’re going to build the 2nd Avenue subway, they get that done on time, on budget, quickly. And so people begin to see what government can do for them.

How do you set the conditions for government, particularly Democratic governments, to follow through.

Yes.

You recently wrote a column saying, “America’s housing problem is too much money chasing too few homes.” What is it you think about this issue specifically — housing costs, housing supply — that demonstrates the core argument of the abundance agenda?

So the thing where this issue I think causes particular heartache for Democrats is that there is no bigger part of a working family’s budget or a middle-class family’s budget than housing. And in the places where Democrats govern, housing costs have gone completely out of control. And that is honestly distinct from places where Republicans govern.

So I always say that there is this huge difference between what happens when people move to Austin or Houston and what happens when they move to San Francisco or Los Angeles. Austin and Houston build more homes for them, and, to a first approximation, SF and LA don’t. And that means it is much more affordable for many people to live in these red states.

In the period where we’re writing the book, you were seeing a big exodus, migration out of California, out of New York, out of Illinois, because it has become so unaffordable. So to me that is a real, on the part of Democrats, betrayal of the people they say they’re standing for.

I mean, I wrote a lot of the book when I was living in San Francisco and you have these yard signs where it says “No human being is illegal” and “Kindness is everything,” and everything is zoned for single-family housing and the homes cost more than a million dollars to buy. So yeah, it’s great to say no human being is illegal and kindness is everything, but if the human beings can’t afford to live there, then something’s gone really wrong.

And so the other thing that makes housing kind of interesting and complicated is that it’s actually very hard to solve. I mean, Democrats do want to solve it. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, promised to build 3.5 million new homes over his tenure when he took office. He’s nowhere near on track for that, but it’s not like he hasn’t been trying, he’s suing local cities and he’s signed dozens of housing bills.

It’s actually really, really hard, when you have ended up in a government equilibrium which is about creating a lot of opportunities to say no, to then unwind that if you need to create the space to say yes to a lot of things rapidly.

Since the book has come out, we have seen some “Abundance” civic groups pop up, particularly in big cities that were mentioned in the book, places like New York City and out in California. I saw an “inclusive Abundance group” in my inbox the other week. There’s college groups. Did you expect this? Was this the point, did you think this was a political platform for Democrats?

We knew that there was electricity around this set of ideas because we’d seen it in the pieces that I started writing in 2021, and Derek, who wrote the initial piece naming it. I had the much less good term “supply-side progressivism.”

That doesn’t fit on the side of the book!

Yeah, you can see why “Abundance” won that one.

So we knew some of this was happening, some of the inclusive abundance groups were already there. So we knew that we were writing to a movement and a tendency that was already gaining force and prior to sort of us wrapping a series of ideas into this frame of abundance, the ideas themselves, YIMBY-ism, for instance, or that we need to build fast for decarbonization. So we are standing on the shoulders of giants of activists of policy, intellectuals and also of the past, right, like the New Deal, where they did a lot of things very, very fast.

Yeah. I also wanted to ask how you see your role. Do you see your job as helping Democrats win?

I see my job as trying to create good ideas, built on an honest assessment of the world that will lead to things being better. I would love it if that at this moment did not seem quite so partisan. There are other countries where say, thinking we should decarbonize is not a right-left issue.

Vivek Rameswamy just had a piece in the New York Times saying that he thinks abundance, if you didn’t have all these left-coded aesthetics and ideas, could actually be very helpful for Republicans.

So I don’t think every single idea is Democratic versus Republican.

What I will say is that I do think the Trump administration is uniquely lethal to liberal democracy. I think it is almost explicitly trying to create some kind of successor or I might say predecessor structure to it, a regime of deal-making and transaction and masked ICE agents. And so right now, I do believe that, for people who believe in not just a set of ideals that are in Abundance, but in a broader set of ideals about how we live here together and how we have a free and fair political system and country, creating movements that allow liberal democracy to deliver and be an effective counterweight to right-wing populism is part of how I see my work.

I was going to ask what you would want the legacy of Abundance to be as a book. Is it to reposition the Democratic Party, or liberal democracy, on delivering in cities?

Yeah, but it’s more. What I want the legacy of it to be is the affordable homes people need, is the high-speed rail they can ride, is the clean energy they can use and that makes their energy bills cheaper and that gives us more energy in total as a society…

We were talking about repositioning the Democratic Party, and I’ve had something running through my mind recently, which is something Ben Wikler, the former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said to me, which is he said that the Democratic Party is a party that makes government work for you.

And I remember thinking like, yeah, the Democratic Party, the party that wants government to work for you, that should be what it is. And then it should be ruthless about making that true. And that doesn’t just mean abundance. It means [opposing] corruption, right? I think at this point it probably means term limits and age limits, right? It means taking government working seriously, right? Not the way government works now. And this, to me, is a difficult space for the Democratic Party, which has to simultaneously be defending institutions and modernizing them. It’s a much harder position than the sort of Trumpist Republican Party right now.

That leads me to candidates like Zohran Mamdani or Katie Wilson, the mayor-elect in Seattle. When you see the kind of populist embrace of some abundance lanes, do you look at those candidates and think those are abundance Democrats? Or should I be thinking more folks a little closer to the center?

The Abundance Democrats are the Democrats who deliver abundance. So I am thrilled by the way I’ve seen Democrats of many different stripes and even a couple Republicans pick up some of the ideas and arguments of abundance. But the thing that is going to separate who’s real in this and who is not is whether they deliver.

So I am hopeful about Mamdani, but governing New York City is famously very, very difficult and building a lot more housing is going to be harder to do than implementing a rent freeze. I’m very hopeful he can do it. But I want to be very cautious myself, having watched a lot of politicians promise on this and fail, right?

As I said, Gavin Newsom talks about abundance a lot. He’s actually signed some incredible bills in my perspective in the last year or two, but he was not able to deliver the housing change he promised in California.

And abundance is in the end, not about what you say, it is about what you deliver. It is an argument that the Democratic Party should, that all government should, be judged by whether or not it is able to create — either directly or through creating the conditions for the private market to create it — the things people need.

America’s other populist, socialist big-city mayor

2025-12-23T16:56:12-05:00

Seattle, Washington, on June 21, 2025. | Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images

The election was divisive, pitting an established moderate against an upstart progressive in the large, Democratic city. For a while it seemed like it would be close, but in the end the progressive won definitively, powered by a relentless focus on affordability and adept use of short-form video.

Mamdani? New York? You must be confused — I’m talking about Seattle mayor-elect Katie Wilson.

The 43-year-old political neophyte, whose term begins next month, joined Today, Explained guest host Astead Herndon to talk about her social media strategy, why she thinks the popular new political strategy known as abundance is insufficient on its own, and the other most famous new mayor in America.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Can we get a sense of how you arrived at this point, for those who are unfamiliar with you? How did this race come to be, and how did you win?

It’s been a wild ride this year. One year ago today I had absolutely no thought of running for any elected office, let alone mayor.

Key takeaways

Katie Wilson, a young democratic socialist and political newcomer with a background in community organizing, is Seattle’s mayor-elect.
Like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, she won by focusing on affordability, particularly around housing, and with a slick online campaign featuring short-form videos — but she had little experience with social media before.
She says many of the abundance movement’s ideas have been popular on the left in Seattle for years, and are useful — but that the movement is missing a few ideas about what’s necessary to realize its vision.

I’ve spent the last 14 years as a community organizer and coalition builder running an organization called the Transit Riders Union, and I jumped into this race in March. In February, we had a special election on approving a funding source for our new social housing developers. So we had this social housing developer in Seattle, which was approved by voters last year. And this year, there was a citizens’ initiative to enact a tax on wealthy corporations to fund that social housing developer. And our current mayor was kind of the face of the opposition campaign to that measure, which passed by a landslide in February.

So to me, that kind of showed that our current mayor was very out of touch with the challenges that Seattle residents are facing around affordability and specifically housing affordability. And I realized that there was a lane there.

I think coming into this year, everyone basically assumed that he was going to coast to reelection, because he’d been very successful at building the kind of institutional business-labor coalition that’s considered necessary to win an election in Seattle.

And so I jumped in and quickly realized that it was part of a larger moment, with Mamdani in New York City and the affordability crisis that people around the country, and especially in high-cost cities like Seattle, are facing today.

You mentioned the Mamdani comparison, which I know has happened frequently. Should we see this as a kind of win for Democrats seeking ideological change, generational change — or is it both?

I think there’s a lot of aspects to it. I think that the affordability crisis really is a big part of this. Coming out of the pandemic, we saw these high rates of inflation, and it’s gotten to the point where in cities like Seattle, it’s not just the lowest-income households that are feeling the pinch. People who have decent jobs, who consider themselves to be middle-class, are just looking around and saying, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on in this city.”

Housing costs, child care costs, grocery costs, restaurant costs — everything is so expensive. And so I think that’s a really important part of the moment that we’re in.

There’s also local factors, and here in Seattle we have an escalating homelessness crisis. Our rates of unsheltered homelessness are just off the charts, even compared to our peer cities. And so that was also a factor here.

And then obviously there’s kind of a generational aspect to this, and there’s to some extent a reaction against Trump’s election. This is maybe related to the generational shift, where people are looking for a new, bolder kind of leadership that can meet the moment. There’s a certain kind of transactional establishment-Democratic Party politics that obviously failed to meet the moment last year that people are kind of reacting against, and looking for something new.

You mentioned that you think this doesn’t happen without the kind of focus that you and some others have put on the question of affordability. I wanted to go back to your history in community organizing. It seems as if you’ve been living with these issues for a long time.

How will we define the affordability issue in general? Are we talking housing costs, health care costs? What do you think is under the umbrella that is really pinching people right now?

It’s really all of the above, but I think in cities like Seattle, housing is really at the core, and it’s also at the core in terms of the levers that the government can pull to make things better.

I moved to Seattle over 20 years ago, and my husband and I rode the Amtrak with our stuff in boxes and found an apartment, or just a room in someone’s basement, that we could rent for $400 a month and got part-time jobs, and [we] kind of found our feet.

That kind of story is just not possible today. It’s this kind of pressure-cooker environment.

Yeah, I was thinking, $400. Great!

I mean, this was back in 2004, but there’s this sense of just immense pressure where you’re just hustling 24/7 just to pay your basic bills. And I think that the housing crisis is really kind of at the core of that. Again, in cities like Seattle where housing costs have risen much faster than inflation, much faster than wages.

I want to also ask about how you translate that into a campaign: Activating people as a “coalition of renters” — a term I’ve heard people use — and bringing folks to the ballot box is a little bit of a different thing.

One of the things we noticed was a campaign ad that you ran about a high cost of pizza. Can you tell me how you took your focus as a community organizer and translated it into the mayoral race? And specifically about that ad?

The pizza ad, I’ll say — it is funny because I’m totally not a social media person in my personal life at all. And so then having to become a social media person and be in videos was a little bit of a thing for me, but I did it and with some success …

We’re all YouTubers now! Get used to it.

I think it’s so important — and this is really something that I hope to carry into the mayor’s office — that we’re able to really have an honest conversation with the public where we’re educating people about policy. And it’s not just about slogans. It’s actually about, okay: Why is the cost of pizza so high? How is this related to housing costs? And we have to treat voters like adults and believe that they can actually understand things, and you need to make things simple enough that you can explain it in a few-minute video. But you can actually communicate quite a lot in a few-minute video.

I really think that that kind of public education and having a real conversation with the public about the challenges that we’re facing and why they exist and what the solutions are — I think that’s super important, and I think that that’s something that I really want to continue for the mayor’s office.

We talked to Ezra Klein about his book Abundance, and it made an argument that rings true to some of our conversation. One of its core points is that blue cities have not delivered for their constituents, and that they prioritize things like process or red tape over the kind of delivering that you’re talking about.

I wanted to know what you thought of that argument. He specifically makes one point in relation to housing, saying how people need to embrace the supply side, or the role of real-estate markets, to build new housing supply.

Is that a transition that you had to come to, or was that something that was natural to you to see?

I feel like some of the book’s themes are not at all new in Seattle for some years. We’ve had an urbanist left in Seattle that’s basically on board with the abundance agenda when it comes to housing, that really recognizes the role that zoning and land use laws have played in slowing housing production. And that [group] is 100 percent there on changing those laws and on permit reform. That’s something that has been in the air here for some time.

I do think that there are some limitations in the kind of desire to have this narrative around our problems, [that they exist] because well-meaning liberals, progressives put all these rules and regulations in place. I think there’s a lot of other big factors too that are also important.

I would love to hear you draw out what you think are some of the things that go beyond that, and the ways you try to shape your politics around other forces too.

They begin the book with this description of life in 2050 once the abundance agenda has been achieved. And it sounds great. And one of the things that they mentioned is that we have a lot more leisure time now. The work week has been shortened because productivity is so much higher. And when I got to that, I just immediately began thinking of the level of social upheaval and frankly, class struggle that would have to take place in the next quarter-century in order for major productivity gains to actually result in a shorter work week.

So I think there’s just a power analysis maybe that is a little bit missing from their narrative, which is fine if they’re just aiming to be like, “Here are a few things that we should do.” But if they’re pitching it as more of a story that explains everything, then I think that there’s definitely some things that are missing.

Why do you think national Democrats were at such distance from their own voters in the last year, and what do you think they should take from campaigns like yours?

I think it goes back to a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about. To use this mayoral election as that capsule, the incumbent mayor had kind of built all the interest groups around him who were going to support his reelection, but he didn’t realize that his constituents were worried about paying the rent or paying for their child care, and he wasn’t speaking to that effectively.

So I really think it’s about really just understanding where people are at and speaking in a way that resonates with them, and also painting a picture of a future that we want and that we can build together. And there needs to be this sense that you actually believe in it.

This is not just like, message-tested, focus group-tested, consultant speak, or whatever, that you’re putting out into the world, but it’s actually something that you believe in and that you feel yourself. People want that genuineness and that sense of integrity and vision, and that’s what wins. That’s something you can’t buy.

America’s war on data centers is coming

2025-12-05T17:45:11-05:00

Residents of Saline, Michigan, rally against a $7 billion Stargate data center on December 1, 2025. | Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

For more than a century, the Conshohocken steel mill in suburban Philadelphia employed thousands of people and anchored a booming industrial economy. But the original owner went bankrupt in the 1970s, after which the facility limped on with a succession of new owners. Last summer it was idled indefinitely, and put up for sale.

It’s a familiar story of decline. The Trump administration talked a big game about reviving American manufacturing; its efforts so far have been a failure. But in Conshohocken at least, the remnants of America’s industrial age are a perfect fit for what’s powering its economy now — artificial intelligence. A local developer quickly moved to convert the old steel mill into a massive new data center.

“What I’m proposing is to enable AI to progress while replacing 19th-century manufacturing with 21st-century manufacturing,” developer Brian O’Neill told the Plymouth Township Planning Agency meeting in October.

There are billions of dollars of data center projects currently underway in the United States, with hundreds of billions of dollars more planned. President Donald Trump loves them. So do prominent Democrats. On the local level they’re sold to officials as all-upside: Be part of the economy of the future, rake in tons of tax revenue, and do it all without having to provide many new services.

“The annual revenue of the building I’m proposing is $21 million a year. And that’s with no traffic, no kids in the school system, nothing but cash flow,” O’Neill said. (O’Neill did not respond to a request for an interview.)

This pitch is going over great with many politicians — but it’s falling flat with a large and growing coalition of regular people.

“For residents around data centers, there’s just no positive,” said Genevieve Boland, who lives just a few blocks from the old steel mill.

That backlash has been steadily growing in communities throughout the country as the AI economy has boomed — and it may very well shape the future of our politics and economy.

The populist backlash to data centers

Soon after finding out about the planned data center, Boland and her roommate Patti Smith began rallying neighbors in opposition, posting flyers and “hitting the town Facebook page like we’ve never hit it before.”

Their appeals resonated. Neighbors shared their concerns about noise and light, possible environmental pollution, and what the center could mean for the cost of power — concerns that have been echoed in other communities where data centers are springing up.

“Obviously our utilities are going to skyrocket and I don’t want to see that happen,” said Mark Musial, who also lives near the mill.

Pennsylvania is part of a regional electricity grid that has seen a huge amount of new data centers added in the last few years, and a corresponding increase in electric costs. Electric bills spiked about 20 percent in New Jersey last year, becoming a flashpoint in that state’s governor’s race.

The backlash to data centers is just starting to bubble up in the news, but it’s already been consequential: In the second quarter of this year 20 data center projects worth nearly $100 billion were canceled or delayed by community opposition, according to a report from Data Center Watch, a project that’s been tracking the opposition to data center development.

How data center opposition is scrambling politics

The data center backlash doesn’t really have an obvious ideological valence.

“One striking finding is that the pushback against data centers was bipartisan,” said Miquel Villa, an analyst at 10a labs, an AI safety company that produces Data Center Watch. “You could find it in red and blue states alike.”

Democratic candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia in this year’s elections made criticism of some aspects of the data center buildout part of their winning campaign message, but the races that have been dominated by data center backlash so far have been local.

In Georgia, two Democrats won big upsets to land seats on that state’s Public Service Commission, which helps regulate climate and energy policy. The race was dominated by rising power bills amid the data center boom there.

And a number of local races in Virginia — home to the largest cluster of data centers in the world — were fought out over data centers. Democrat John McAuliff, who ran to flip a conservative state assembly district in Northern Virginia, built his campaign around opposition to the state’s generous data center policies.

“We would knock 80 to 100 doors [a day] and in that process have 15 conversations; more than 10 of them would be about data centers in this context,” McAuliff said. “Which is remarkable.”

So far, it seems that more Democrats than Republicans have used opposition to data centers as a political tool, but it’s not breaking down neatly along party lines. In Florida, James Fishback, an extremely online, extremely right-wing candidate for the Republican nomination for the 2026 governor’s race, is making opposition to data centers a tentpole issue of his campaign launch. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has also criticized data centers.

In suburban Philadelphia, the Conshohocken steel mill will likely remain vacant a while longer: Last month the developer seeking to turn it into a data center abruptly yanked the application when the project ran into a legal issue.

Boland and Smith, the roommates turned organizers, told me they’re relieved, but they’re not done. They plan to keep organizing against data centers with other activists from around the country they’ve connected with in the last few weeks. Boland recently launched a website to coordinate statewide pushback.

“Data centers everywhere, data centers in your backyard — it’s not inevitable,” she said. “You can change it.”

Amid the growing pervasiveness of AI, it’s a message that’s resonating — and these sites of backlash could well signal a bumpier road ahead for the AI buildout.