What comes next for Longleaf Politics in 2026

A note on tightening the mission, building something more influential in North Carolina, and adding video to the mix.

Axios ran a fascinating piece recently about New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. It’s short, so I recommend you just read the whole thing, but the gist is this. With an influential podcast and a new best-selling book, Klein is no longer just opining on politics. He has “positioned himself as a powerbroker” inside the Democratic Party.

That’s made some people at the Times uneasy, unsurprisingly. But it’s really not a new phenomenon. I say this all the time, and it keeps proving itself true: We are not in unusual times, in politics or media. Rather, we’re actually drifting back toward the natural order. The 1950 to 2005 period was the historical exception, with its unique mass media culture and unusually broad social consensus.

For most of American history, politics has relied both on elected leaders and the writers and editors around them that add some intellectual and rhetorical heft. We’re just getting back to that now.

The theory has popped up elsewhere, too. Nate Silver wrote recent…