Transcript: The Mistake That Progressive Candidates Keep Making

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Michael Podhorzer: We’re going to kick off, and folks will join. Hopefully you all know our guest today. He’s been on here before, but more importantly, I hope you’ve been following his writing, as I have, from when I first encountered him writing for the old FiveThirtyEight, when it was Nate Silver and independent, and was really bringing a not sort of data-nerd-alone exclusive view of the world. And this is someone who actually could map it to what was happening in the world and how it actually affected people, as opposed to, how do we tweak the model so we can improve our forecast by a couple points or whatever.

And from there went on to write a really great column in The Washington Post, which, like, naming it as a great column should be the spoiler alert for what comes next. Because then Bezos shows up, and great columns are no longer part of what The Washington Post is about. It’s not part of the editorial model anymore. And so now he’s at The New Republic, and both writing and doing his own Substack live, which hopefully you’re subscribed to.

So we don’t have as eventful a day after primary as we’ve had for the last couple months. But I thought we’d start, Perry, just getting your sense there. This is an area you’ve covered a lot, which is, what’s going on inside the Democratic Party, and what should we take away from the series of primaries now for 2026?

Perry Bacon: Thanks for the nice introduction first. And, people who don’t know I’ve been doing this so long, I also worked at Time magazine, The Washington Post, and MSNBC before I worked at FiveThirtyEight, too. So I’ve been doing this a long time.

But anyway, the primaries have been interesting in that, as I tell people all the time, the average Democrat in Congress, their politics are probably still closer to Joe Biden’s than Bernie Sanders. I think that’s still true. I worry sometimes we take the sort of a DSA candidate or two winning in a few races—the average Democratic member of Congress is not from the DSA and would not want to be associated with the DSA, and I think that’s still true even in the House.

And also, the primaries themselves, I still can’t tell if these have been referendums on Gaza, on Israel, on socialism, on progressivism, or just, like, looking at the Colorado specifically, are just, we want somebody who’s different and not boring like Michael Bennet. I feel like a lot of these races are explained by somebody generic who’s unmemorable. I’ve been covering Michael Bennet my entire life. What has Michael Bennet done in Congress? Michael Bennet, guys, ran for president. Who remembers that in 2020? Because he was so unmemorable there too.

So I think a lot of cases, you have maybe an outsider, a young person, a person from an unusual job, a person who’s charismatic, running in a primary against a forgettable Democrat who’s either been a state legislator or been in Congress. And the new person may be more progressive, or more anti-Israel, or more pro-Palestinian, or more pro-peace, but they also just are not boring.

If people feel like the party has failed and has not fought Trump hard enough, and they’re open to anybody different, I think is what’s driving a lot of these results. You may not agree with all of that, but that’s part of what I think is going on.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I can see that, and that through line and that explanation makes sense to me. I think that an additional element in the primaries, which is very different to the general election—and I also think, just as an aside, that Democratic primary voters and Republican primary voters are very different to each other.

And so that is one of the asymmetries between the parties, where Democratic primary voters on average are more kind of diehard party stalwarts, perhaps more conservative in the original definition of that word, meaning, like, more let’s-not-shake-things-up-too-much conservative, conserve. Whereas Republican primary voters, I think, tend to be more like white nationalist, super MAGA, and so that has—

Podhorzer: Actually, that actually now is the conservative perspective for the Republican Party.

Shenker-Osorio: Sorry to confuse you with word choice.

Podhorzer: That is actually, like, the mainstream.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s true. OK, but in an attempt to be explanatory. So I think, going back to the point that you made, Perry—and also thank you for joining us, I was saying before we went live that it is fun to turn the tables and have the question asker be the question answerer, so always a good time.

I think that another through line, and this may be motivated cognition on my part, is the difference between sort of the economic message that I think more mainstream Democrats are trying to give, which I basically just liken to being on an episode of The Price Is Right, where they’re trying to prove that they know how much things cost, and they’re basically just, Lettuce. Test me. Try me. 635, 702, gallon of milk. What is it? Which, like a lot of focus group participants, they can tell you how much milk is at 12 different stores in their town. It’s actually astonishing the degree to which people know the prices of things down to the cent. So there’s that model, which is like, I am going to demonstrate empathy by telling you how much things cost.

And then there is, I would argue, a more effective economic message, which is not just, I’m going to prove to you that I can recite prices, but, Here are things I’d actually like to do. And obviously, Mamdani is the standard bearer for this, with the three repeated refrain thing that we saw not just all the way across the country, but people in Europe can tell you what are his three things. But also, Milakiro, speaking of Colorado, Frannie, who obviously came short in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, Abdul in Michigan, even James Talarico.

It’s much more not just, I’m going to talk about how expensive things are. I’m going to say, These are the things that I would like to do that would alter the material conditions of your life. And part and parcel of that, I would argue, is that they actually provide an origin story for people’s pain. They name a villain, and they’re presenting an economic populist argument, as opposed to, affordability is important, without laying out, “And that’s why we actually need to stick it to the billionaires.”

Podhorzer: Actually, Perry, before you jump in, I want to do, hopefully, a friendly amendment to your Price Is Right metaphor, which is where I thought you were going, because the purpose of that game is to get as close to the right price without going over. And the attitude of most Democrats is to be much more afraid of being too ambitious rather than underselling what they’re doing. But anyway, sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s totally the point I wanted to make. 100 percent, that’s what I was saying.

Podhorzer: OK.

Bacon: But I agree with what she said about the economic populism side, and then how the insurgent progressive—pick your term—candidates are doing something different in terms of specifics. And also, they’re naming villains. They’re much more willing to talk about—I think Talarico talks about corruption a lot. Others talk about billionaires a lot. Some talk about oligarchs a lot. But there is, like, not just things are unaffordable, but things are unaffordable because of these people.

And otherwise you’re left with the things are unaffordable because—the mainstream Democrats would say the gas is unaffordable because of Trump. And so there is a story there, so there’s some story there. But otherwise the story is, things are unaffordable, hands up, not a lot of solutions and not a lot of villains either.

Podhorzer: Yeah. And I think another way of saying it for a lot of them is, like, the origin story is that you didn’t elect me.

Bacon: Yes.

Podhorzer: That right there—like, the only program they’re offering is them being in the majority, which hasn’t worked, and people know that. One thing I would try—I think there’s another big difference in Democratic and Republican primary voters, in a way that, like, may, where it actually matters, which is in places where they’re going to actually win the general election, because of gerrymandering or because of the nature of the state, which is that those primaries are the only ones left in America where a majority of the people who are voting in them are part of an organized movement, right?

Where in the South you have evangelical churches who have become political, and white evangelicals, especially in rural southern states, constitute about 60 percent of everybody who votes in Republican primaries. And so essentially that controls who can be a Republican candidate in districts where the lines are drawn so Republicans are going to win. And even in certain southern districts, it gets around 50 percent for white evangelicals, which is the bonkers part of why we’re all the way the country is, because nationally they only constitute 18 percent. But instead, between gerrymandering and the states they are, they’re able to exert this enormous influence.

There’s, like, this isn’t—DSA is not this for Democrats, right? People don’t go to DSA every Sunday morning to get their instructions about how to vote, right? And I think because we’ve been focused on Republican primaries somewhat in other areas too, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that doesn’t matter. It’s curious because they’re probably not going to win this year. But in the places they are, that’s where it matters.

And I think one of the perspectives which I can bring to this, as someone who lives in Kentucky, is to really get people to see how politics is different in the rest of the country, especially in the South, from the way most of the people probably on this Zoom are experiencing politics.

Bacon: Let me, I’m going to jump on that. Let me add more about the primaries first, which is that I did think the Wisconsin race showed that this electability issue—whether I, speaking for myself, think it’s, like, fake, or imagined, or that we don’t know who’s electable, let’s have the election first. The Democratic voting base, I think, is very consumed by this, and takes cues from party leaders about that.

And so I was telling people—I live in Louisville, as was mentioned here, but I was telling my friends in Wisconsin, “I’d be worried if I was for Hong, because it seems like the governor is, like, saying every day she can’t win, in these very aggressive terms, and that is going to make a difference.” And it did.

And I think it would seem to me, as a person who wants progressive candidates to win more, watching Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren lose because of Joe Biden’s electability every hour, and watching this process in primary after primary, it would seem to me, if you’re AOC, if you’re Ro Khanna, whoever is running who’s to the left needs to sit down and say, A core part of our campaign message needs to be how I can win Wisconsin. And if Tony Evers or Joe Biden or Neera Tanden says I can’t win Wisconsin, here’s the evidence. Like, I agree that electability may be fake and made up, but as long as Democratic primary voters think it’s real, it may be worth addressing it instead of losing because—

Podhorzer: Go ahead, Anat.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I use my Wisconsin privilege? This may be the second time that phrase has been uttered. Except with respect to Ohio. Sorry, Ohio. You know how it is—that was a sports thing, not anything else.

I don’t disagree with you. I think that the one complicating thing about Wisconsin, for folks who are not in the weeds, is that there’s a temptation to draw a parallel between the Senate races in Minnesota and Michigan respectively, and the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, that I just want to—which isn’t what you were saying, I’m adding a point.

But Crowley is not Haley Stevens, and is not Angie Craig. He is basically much more, I would argue, like Evers, maybe even slightly more progressive than him. And Hong—yeah. So I just want to—I’m just throwing in that complication that, like, there’s a little bit more to it than, you’re choosing between kind of a very cookie cutter standard, like Chuck Schumer pick, and someone else. That’s not the dynamic there.

It’s also interesting, I guess, in a way it’s heartening that Crowley is deemed electable in a state that, I’m embarrassed to say, has never elected a Black person governor, and that sort of didn’t factor in, which thrills me, and I hope that is correct, and—

Bacon: A Black person from Milwaukee, not just—yes, who as far as I know is not the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. And so it is interesting, kind of, when and where electability—everything is relative. Everything is relative.

Bacon: You mentioned the South, Michael, I’ll go to the South now. We talked about this when I came on here about a year ago, when I changed jobs, and one thing I was talking about was, like, if you live in the South, we’ve had this discourse about—there’s a story in the Post, I think. The Washington Post actually does some good journalism, and they did a story, in the news section, about how Black studies and African studies departments are being banned and closed all over the country.

The actual crisis in higher education in America is not that the president of Harvard may not have had enough references on her thesis, and it’s not that person X at Yale cannot say conservative things. It’s actually that in 20 states, they are closing departments, banning words, banning the curriculum.

And one of the biggest problems we have is, we have a media landscape where most of the powerful journalists live in New York and Washington—and I’ll pretend, like, Los Angeles, but really New York and Washington—places where a DSA candidate is more likely to be elected than a MAGA candidate. But in the rest of America, most of America, particularly in 20 states, I would say a MAGA candidate has a much bigger chance. And therefore, also, just to be particularly blunt about this: if you live in New York or Washington, you’re more likely to lose your columnist job, or lose your job speaking on television, or not have your book sales be as good, because of a person to your left in New York or Washington.

But in the real America, your competitors are actually more on the right. There are more people on the right. The threat to democracy is coming from the right. The canceling is being done by Republican legislators, not liberals on Twitter. And we can’t have a discourse—what’s actually happening in America—because the people who shape the discourse live in three places that are not like America. No mayor representing the DSA will get anywhere close to winning the electoral majority in Louisville, Nashville. These are the liberal places in the blue areas, forget about the conservative areas.

So having Zohran be so prominent is useful, but having politics discussed nationally based on people who can vote for Zohran—Andrew Cuomo will be the most liberal person in Kentucky in many races. And so the idea that he’s the conservative tells you all you need to know, in some ways.

Podhorzer: Yeah. One thing, to go back and also end up coming back where you are, like, when you were talking about electability, and to also pull back, having been doing politics for as long as I have and, like, remembering the ‘60s and ‘70s—my sense is that, when you put aside, like, a David Duke or someone who had some personal scandal as the reason that people within their party are saying they’re unelectable, the sort of generic unelectability argument is almost always because the person saying it objects to that candidate’s positions, but knows that those positions or ambitions, whatever, are in fact in line with what their party’s voters want.

And so they can’t say that they’re against them on substantive grounds, because it exposes them to being out of step with what’s the mainstream of the party. And it takes away the—it’s a kind of status hoarding, where if you can position yourself as a judge of that, as opposed to being part of the debate about what Democrats or Republicans should be, then you’re always on the high ground punching down, right? Which is what we’re experiencing.

And the interesting thing was that a lot of this was aimed when Ronald Reagan was trying to run for president, right, as someone who really was in step with the Republican Party voter base, but was an insurgent against what was then the mainstream Republican Party. And interestingly, that was the birth of what they called the 11th Commandment, which is you don’t say anything bad about fellow Republicans, and that held for a long time.

And there’s no movement afoot on the Democratic side for that kind of thing. But I think that’s an important thing to unpack, because, again, like, if someone was accused of Me Too, or if they embezzle, like, electability is a legit thing, right? But when it’s not, it’s really someone saying, I don’t want you because of your positions, but I’m not going to say that, because then people are going to agree with you.

Bacon: Where we might disagree, Michael, is—I agree that electability is an ideological weapon. I just don’t agree that fighting it should be done based on ideolo—I think it has to be fought directly.

Podhorzer: That’s what I’m saying. The answer to someone who says so-and-so is unelectable is to move the conversation to just why, right? Because usually they’re just hand waving, right, saying that they’re too left or they’re too liberal or something like that. Exactly how, right?

Bacon: No, I’m saying something much worse than that. I’m saying, in 2019, Senator Warren should have flown to Wisconsin and given a series of speeches—they were aimed at Nate Cohn and not humans. Whatever. Nate Cohn is a human, but were aimed at pollsters and so on, to lay out, here’s the electoral map. She should have done interviews with Ezra Klein. If AOC actually wants to be president, I would advise her to spend less time thinking about policy and more time thinking about how to appeal to numbersy white guys and show—

Podhorzer: Oh, yeah.

Bacon: —that’s what I. And but, like we’re saying, yes, but these people keep refusing to do this. I’ve been saying this for six years now. If a progressive wants to win the nomination, there’s going—we cannot keep saying electability is fake, and it’s a tool.

Podhorzer: Yeah, I totally agree with you.

Bacon: And now, would you like to win, or would you like to lecture me about why electability is bad? Because I’d like you to win, and I’d like you to try. And Hong might not be a perfect example of that, but in that 10 days when Tony Evers was saying she can’t win, the only thing she should have done in those 10 days was to show up in some swing county, Wisconsin, and say, I can win the election. I will win over cultural conservatives and turn out the Black vote, and whatever she said.

I don’t care what she said, as long as she gave a compelling case for winning. That was the most important thing, and I don’t remember seeing her do that.

Shenker-Osorio: I don’t know. I think—

Bacon: In a strong, compelling way, in a clear speech. Go ahead, sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I think a lot of things happened in those 10 days, and there was a concerted effort in the media, which we’re going to come to, to lift up past statements that she had made to sort of make her answerable for things that—do I wish we weren’t talking about the celebration of Thanksgiving?

Yeah, that was all unhelpful. There were ways to address that, but it’s easier said than done. I don’t know. I think she was trying—maybe not to your satisfaction, maybe it didn’t break through.

Bacon: I gave you, Elizabeth Warren’s a better example, because she had a whole year to do what I’m saying and didn’t. And is very prepared, and still didn’t think she’d had to overcome this. Anyway, sorry, I’ll stop.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I think, Mike, you brought up the Reagan example—I am old enough to remember when Trump was unelectable. That was felt very—

Podhorzer: And he wasn’t elected.

Bacon:, I think many people are electable. Just, like, one wing of one party says no, is always saying this all the time. Anybody can win, that’s what I think, but in general, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I don’t know that I have deep meaningful things to add. I just, I agree with both of you that it’s an ideological masquerade, making believe, and an unwillingness to actually talk about issue differences.

Because if you were to, then voters would actually find out that somebody wants you to make more money and have a less shitty life, and someone wants to keep you having a shitty life. And if people were to find out about that, maybe they would like nicer things, and for billionaires to finally pay for them.

Bacon: Let me come to the media thing, because I do want to talk about that, which is—it’s not just that Kaitlan Collins, when she was interviewing Francesca Hong, focused on Thanksgiving tweets. That makes sense to me, and that’s, CNN’s going to, quote unquote, “objective network” and so on.

I have been struck by, when Morning Joe and Pod Save America, when they have progressives on too—I think Pod Save America and Morning Joe want Democrats to win, I think, as far as I know. But when they have progressives on, they tend to lead with the, DSA says you want to abolish prisons and abolish— and they go through this whole list. I don’t know how helpful it is to say, “Do you—” the questions imply, Here’s a bunch of crazy things other Democrats believe. Do you believe these things too?

I can’t imagine Angie Dixon, in her national moment on TV, probably wants to talk about things that matter to Floridians every day. Even if she agrees with abolishing the Senate, which I’m for, that’s probably not the most relevant issue in the next two or three months. So if I’m a left-leaning outlet and I want to help Democratic candidates win, I don’t think asking them to disavow DSA policies is the best tactic. But I think this is a sincere effort to help them, because the idea is, you can seem normal on national television. But I actually don’t think that helps that much.

Podhorzer: And, one more note—did either of you see the New York Times Magazine interview with Zohran Mamdani?

Bacon: That’s mostly more hostile media, but anyway, sorry. Go ahead.

Podhorzer: No, but, no surprise, he handled that question so well. And should basically be, like, the training video for everybody who gets on one of those things. And he’s, like, saying this back to the Times, and they’re really trying to get him. It’s like, Hey, I’m a Democrat. I belong to the DSA, I belong to other organizations. Let’s just talk about the issues, right? Why are you presuming that, like, I’m their operative?

And, like, he didn’t have to disavow them, and he made it really awkward for them. Because you can watch it in real time. Because the interviewer didn’t see that coming, right? And anyway, but it showed that it can be disarmed. So it’s not just what the people at CNN decide to do, it’s folks who are getting interviewed being smarter about it and moving with it. Were you going to go to—go ahead.

Shenker-Osorio: I was going to come back to Kentucky, just to be a good hostess.

Podhorzer: Have you been there to come back to?

Shenker-Osorio: I absolutely have been there. I’ve been to Louisville. I have been to the Ark Experience in northern Kentucky. So boy, have I been.

Bacon: Not as proud as that. I wish you said you went to the Derby, or saw college basketball, or went to a bourbon tour, or something like that. Anyway, all right.

Shenker-Osorio: We’ll talk about the Ark Experience at a different time.

Bacon: Please.

Shenker-Osorio: So Andy Beshear recently did the disavowal, non-disavowal, I would argue, really beautifully.

Bacon: Oh, he did a good one. He did a bad one too recently, but anyway—what’s the good one? I’ll be curious, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s sort of him, though, right?

Bacon: Yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: It’s like, wow, yes, and then, ugh, and I don’t know what’s going on for—

Bacon: I have a theory about that. I’ll come back to it. But anyway, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: I want to hear your Andy Beshear theory. The one I’m referring to, which I hope is different than the one you’re referring to—as opposed to us being Siskel and Ebert for a moment and having a different evaluation of the same movie. He basically was like, Look, like, I have my views, this other person has their views. We don’t agree on everything. Here’s what we do agree on. We do agree that you should— I’m not quoting him verbatim, but in essence, like, We do agree that you should be able to put food on the table. We do agree that this bag of regimes is entirely corrupt. We do agree that—

And he just was like, Yeah, we don’t agree on everything. Here’s what we do agree on, and they’re all things that, you know, the majority of people desperately want. And I thought that—it’s a variation on the Mamdani thing that you lifted, Mike. I thought he did it really—

Bacon: Four days earlier, he was on MSNBC and said socialism is an outdated ideology, and went through trashing it. So I think he got blowback and gave a better answer. That’s what I—I saw the clip too. He has moments. What I’ll say is, when he was running for governor of Kentucky in 2019 and 2023, living here, I can tell you I’m to the left of him on probably many issues, but he rarely said anything I disagreed with, because he didn’t go out of his way.

He doesn’t do the Joe Manchin, Let me show you how—let me punch left to show you how moderate I am. He rarely did that. He just talked about jobs and schools, and I’m Christian, and I love God, and that, and this. But he rarely thought to attack the left was useful, because there are enough progressives here. And also the thing Anat says all the time—he wanted the chorus to be talking about him.

People who are very left-wing in Louisville will be like, I love Andy Beshear. He’s not a socialist, but he’s a great governor. He stands up for us. He vetoes anti-trans bills. He’s not Mr. Climate Change, but he stands up for us, and we love him for that. And people really appreciated him.

My concern right now is that he’s now running for president, and I think his perception, perhaps correctly, is that the first primary is the sort of center-left donor primary. And to win that—and he’s not rich—to win that, you probably do need to trash the social—he’s competing with Josh Shapiro and 19 other white guy governors, and for that, I worry. I think Andy Beshear actually knows, to win the primary and to win the general election, you need to have people to his left be enthusiastic about him. I think he knows that because he did that here.

So I don’t think he’s unaware of that, but I do think he has to prove to these sort of, the donor types who hate the left more than Trump some days—I do wonder if he’s around those people a lot, and now hearing socialism is bad and Zohran is terrible and repeating that stuff, because he’s now in the fundraising. These governors are now in the—would-be candidates, if you’re not AOC or Ro Khanna, you’re mainly in that donor community trying to figure out who’s going to fund your campaign, and those people are more outraged by Zohran than Trump most days. And so I wonder if he’s around that crowd too much right now. That’s my concern.

Podhorzer: Yeah. I want to go back to something really important that you touched on that we got pulled on, which is about what’s being done to higher education—in terms of the whole, like, just what we can’t talk about, and all of that stuff is a big problem. And connect it to something—I don’t know exactly what you’ve written, but something we’ve talked about a lot, in terms of the kinds of pundits and sense makers and people who are telling Democrats what to do, and all of that over the last six years. Especially as, like, now there’s this whole thing about woke 1.0.

Coming off of the 2020 election, when red state legislatures started passing all these different kinds of terrible voting bills, when DeSantis and others were doing the anti-CRT stuff, and there’s that backlash—by and large, the smart crowd was, on the one hand, like, talking about how, Don’t worry, you can’t really suppress the vote,” or “Don’t take the bait, it’s really just messaging stuff. And not being able to see that it was creating the predicate for what we’re experiencing now, which is, like, under the guise of DEI, basically firing every woman and person of color who’s a general or wants to be, just across the board, right?

But it was not just that there was that effort to arrive at the point we are, it’s that for the most part, this crowd was telling us that we were being counterproductive if we were calling it out, right? That, like, it was just, Oh, those silly people who stormed the Capitol, you can’t pay too much. Oh, look at all these academic studies that say, oh, you can’t really suppress the vote, don’t worry about the elections.

And we’re at a moment where they should be categorically discredited for that perspective, and I haven’t seen a single one even acknowledge that they had any connection to basically tearing down the defenses against this massive regression.

Bacon: In fact, I would argue the leading progressive endorsed their point of view essentially—when I think the woke one was crazy comment was actually really problematic, invoking the language of the right, however she framed it. When I call things crazy, I’m usually not praising them.

And so I just thought that comment encapsulated, six years after these massive protests about something important, that we are now having advocates, leading figures in that, say it was crazy, and so that was problematic. But I want to distinguish between two different groups here, I think. I thought 2021 and ‘22, I was like, every other column, Can you believe what’s happening in the South? They are banning us from, like—hair on fire.

I think Joe Biden sincerely believes in racial equality and so on, and sincerely thought Barack Obama had this backlash, on some level, because he’s Black. Hillary had the backlash, she’s a woman. I, Kamala, would not be popular, because she’s a Black woman. I, Mr. Old White Guy, go to Catholic church every week—if I talk about jobs and infrastructure and boring shit till the end of time, I will be popular, I will restore democracy, Republican voters will vote for me.

I didn’t think that was correct. I thought that ignored lots of research and political science evidence, and was deluded, and kept trying to tell his staff—but I think that was believed sincerely by Joe Biden, and just wrong. I would categorize a lot of the pundit types we’re talking about, New York Times columnists, FiveThirtyEight editors, et cetera, et cetera, as in a different place, which is like which is, they were opposed to some of what was happening. And so you saw, when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in colleges, you saw some of these people admit, Actually, I was basically for that. I was against affirmative action, and I was for that decision.

So their view was like, 2020, and the 2014 to 2020, was too much wokeness, too much diversity and inclusion, too much focus on systemic inequality on gender and race. And so they may have not wanted 2025, where Donald Trump is, like, defunding colleges, but they certainly wanted something to the right of 2020, decidedly maybe to the left of 2025. And so on some level they were doing political analysis and saying, The Democrats are losing because they went too far to the left on racial issues.

The Democrats, of course, won the 2020 elections and won a trifecta. What their actual view was, I opposed the way the left and progressive spaces in New York, in San Francisco, how progressive they were on race and on gender, and how Black people got promoted into jobs I wanted, and that couldn’t be stated as easily.

And so we ended up with this sort of, like, backlash to 2014 to 2020 that was, like, endorsed by prominent liberals and Democrats and so on. I think that’s what it is. But I would separate the sort of—I do think Joe Biden himself was not necessarily resentful of 2020, but genuinely thought the politics of unification could work.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I go in deeper on this media thing, because it’s just too—because you’re here, Perry. And we want the tea, we want the dirt, we want to know what it looks like backstage. Like, I feel like one encapsulation of the way that the media covers—waves hands—all of this, is often positioning Democrats as actors and Republicans as reactors, as if everything Republicans do was merely a response to a Democratic overreach. And I think, Mike, you brought up CRT, so I’ll use that, because I think it is probably the canonical example.

The number of people who were thinking about critical race theory before Chris Rufo decided to make people think about critical race theory, outside of the storied academics who are, like, doing interesting legal scholarship around it, was precisely zero. People did not know what that was. They had not heard of it. And I would even say, in the focus groups—I refer to this often—that we do every single month, and have been doing since the end of 2020, when you ask people, What is your biggest beef with Democrats? the number of times they volunteer pronouns, or they volunteer CRT, or they volunteer trans sports, is zero.

You can make them do that. You can lead them on that merry chase, but the things that upset them are the things that you would think upset them, which is basically, they don’t seem to do anything. They don’t seem to actually improve my material conditions. They also seem corrupt, et cetera.

And so what is this impetus, if you agree with my diagnosis, where everything is—and I’m exaggerating for comedic effect, hopefully—where everything is caused by Democrats and Republicans are, like, reacting to it, or voters are reacting to it, instead of explicitly lifting up what Republicans are saying and doing, and how they manufacture topics and controversy and so on. What is that?

Bacon: Part of it is this. I’m obsessed with this geography issue, because it really matters, and I’m going to just, coming together, come back to it again. There was a piece in 2023 in The New York Times, and they were like, it’s not clear what the Republican agenda is, and they quoted John Thune and four of the Republican congressmen and a couple Republican governors.

And I was like, if you look at the 20 Republican states, they all pass the exact same bills every session. Abortion ban here, trans ban here, CRT ban there, massive tax cut. So all you have to do is look down—there’s a very... And then when Donald Trump in 2025 became president, they passed the exact same agenda federally.

So I do think part of it is just purely, the Republicans, I think smartly, a lot of their agenda is executed by state legislators, governors, and judges, the Supreme Court and the lower courts. So on some level, I think journalists—Donald Trump does stuff, I’m not denying the obvious here. But on some level, the Republicans have smartly distributed how they do power. Think about how many, just in a media sense, there’s a huge media assigned to cover Congress and follow around Susan Collins and ask if she’s voting for whatever Trump did that day. I’m not saying that stuff is not important, but the Texas and Louisiana legislators pass these huge sweeping bills all the time and have four people covering them combined.

And so in certain ways, I do think that is part of it, is, like, the agency—the Republicans who are actually doing stuff with lots of agency, who are passing the CRT bans, are random Republican legislators. Even though if you have 1,000 Republican legislators vote for a CRT ban, that’s a lot of people doing stuff, but the media is not—think about the last Thomas Friedman column about a state legislator in any state.

And I think that gets to a part of it, is, versus the Democratic Party—and this is a flaw, is, I would argue our trifecta states don’t do enough. There’s been a controversy about how Gretchen Whitmer was vetoing some bills that the legislature passed in the majority. I don’t feel like we have to beg our—Newsom, and Hochul, we have to beg them, Can you guys do stuff, since you have power? Greg Abbott is not being begged to do stuff. Ron DeSantis is doing stuff.

And so there is a media agency problem, but I do think it’s worth thinking about, part of what’s going on is, the Republicans that are the most strategic are the ones who are not being interviewed each day. John Roberts does not get—John Roberts has done a very effective job moving the country to the right. He does not give a lot of interviews discussing his political plans, and that is probably pretty useful. John Thune does, but John Thune’s is not very tactical or effective, and it doesn’t really matter that much.

Podhorzer: Yeah. So is that, like, a really mean trick question to see if either of us would admit we’d ever read a Tom Friedman column?

Bacon: I used to, I’ll confess. No, during the Gaza War, I read a fair amount, because he actually is very informed about Israel and Palestine. So I haven’t read it. So, yes.

Podhorzer: Yeah. But I think one of the things, though, a couple things on what you were saying: first is, I don’t know that I give Republicans credit for being clever about where they’re getting this done. I think it is just, these are the only places they can win elections and get it done.

Bacon: But they do get a lot done in the places they run, and I would—

Podhorzer: No, that’s what I’m saying.

Bacon: —be concerned if the Democrats—

Podhorzer: But I’m saying, it’s not like they are saying, “We’re only going to talk about this agenda in our states, right? They’re talking about it everywhere, which is why they’ve marginalized themselves as a party in much of the rest of the country. And in that brief moment after the 2010 election, when Scott Walker got elected, when Rick Snyder got elected, they were trying to do the same thing in those states, right?

We had the Flint emergency manager. Like, all of it, like, they were pedal to the metal doing the things they’d been successful at in, like, their solid states. So I think it’s just, we only see it there because everywhere else it’s taken them off, like, the ballot for general elections, right? And—

Shenker-Osorio: But—

Podhorzer: Sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: No, I was just going to make another point in Perry’s geographic analysis column. I was going to issue him a point, but I don’t want to cut you off.

Podhorzer: No, go ahead.

Shenker-Osorio: Just to state the obvious: Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries live in New York, which is, as you noted to us, and I think we were aware, a media center. And Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell doesn’t live anywhere anymore.

Bacon: I was going to say that, but you got there before I did, yes.

Shenker-Osorio: He doesn’t live anywhere, but he is whatever he is in—

Bacon: In Kentucky, whatever he’s doing.

Shenker-Osorio: Yes.

Bacon: Whatever his status is.

Shenker-Osorio: It’s not in New York. And Thune—yeah, back to your geographic point, if part of the contours of this issue are that the media is covering what Democrats say and refusing to cover what Republicans do—

Bacon: Yes, that’s what I was going to get.

Shenker-Osorio: —it’s because that doing is falling outside of, as you were saying, media centers, because that is, as Mike was saying, where they have power and control. And the saying is falling inside of major media centers, because that is where Democrats have neither power nor control, but titles. It is where they have titles. That makes sense.

Bacon: In New York they have power. They don’t use it, but they have power.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. Same with California. I think one of the extraordinary things about working in Minnesota as long as I have is watching them, with a one-vote majority hustle and get themselves 22 pieces of legislation in basically no time. And, granted, it’s cold there, so they have to move their bodies more, and maybe that’s the entire explanation. But I’m joking, Mike. And for those of us in blue trifecta states, and having had them for a while, New York and California—like, where’s the hustle, yo?

Bacon: You made this media point that I want to come back to, which is—I think about the Harvard president, and how The New York Times ran—that’s, like, the prototypic example of that. That was a story that the Harvard president is accused of not doing enough about the anti-Israel protests after October 7th. Then there’s this thing about maybe she didn’t cite enough things in her thesis, and they write story after story about that, and eventually she resigns.

That’s the kind of story where it’s like, the power of the media is not to tell you what to think—obviously Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Donald Trump would never have become president if the journalists got to vote, because the journalists are not for those people. But the media does control what people think about, and we can make something a big story. And the fact that The New York Times made the presidency of Harvard, and what she may have done in her thesis, like, front page news day after—that’s the best example I can think of, like, where the media coverage was so out of bounds.

That was, like, a campaign to get her fired that succeeded, and that would not have succeeded without the nation’s biggest newspaper, a newspaper not based in Boston. It was not a local story. It’s local for them because half their staff went to Harvard, but it’s not local in any sort of real way.

And so, having that happen that way, versus no one in Louisville—that never made the Louisville local news. I’m not sure if it made ABC World News, which my mom would watch. It was purely a New York Times, MSNBC. It wasn’t even covered in The Washington Post that much. That’s the kind of thing where it’s like, there’s where the media power is, and why would The New York Times decide to weigh in there?

That’s not a Republican-Democrat story, but I do think that’s a—The New York Times had, has, more of a pro-Israel position, I think, at that point at least did. Claudine Gay, as the Black president of Harvard, had become a symbol of the DEI has gone too far, and that was a position that The New York Times held, even though that’s not necessarily a Republican—even though The New York Times isn’t Republican, that was just something they held. And so that’s the place where it’s like, here’s where the media has decided, yes. And it’s not like Claudine Gay wrote her thesis last week.

They decided, for whatever reason, that Chris Rufo acted like that was the case. They made him their—his assignment their—and those are the places where, like, that’s the story where you can take off the sort of partisan hats and think about, what kind of media covers Claudine Gay like it’s the most important story in the world? That’s the media you want to change.

Podhorzer: So, yeah. We’re getting close to the end, but I wanted to pull a couple things together. One—and you may have followed this more closely than I did, and I’m pulling sort of other things to inference on this, but my sense, like, on Claudine Gay, was that it’s much more about disciplining universities about Gaza than it was about DEI, and that it was the trustees, and the sort of, who decided they were really dissatisfied with their university administration.

Bacon: I think that “this person might be dumb and didn’t write their thesis” thing is easier to lodge against Claudine Gay than against Larry Summers.

Michael Podhorzer: But why, right?

That why then, as opposed to some other time. The other thing that does, in a way, bring this full circle is that—when we were talking, you both were talking a minute ago about, like, blue trifecta states, right? I think, and you said you’re experiencing this every day, like, where you live.

But to me, like, blue trifecta states are profoundly different from red trifecta states in one important area, which is that there’s still substantive electoral competition, right? The fact that Republican primaries in blue states are the remaining wackos who call themselves Republicans means that the primary races are between the people who used to be electable Republicans but now have to run as Democrats. And we saw it actually happen in the world, like when Arlen Specter left the Republican Party to be run as a Democrat in Pennsylvania, right?

But a lot of the folks—and I think this is in some ways counterproductive, because it doesn’t really acknowledge that there isn’t one blue, and that there are real stakes. There’s, like, factions within these states that, like, confuse us, because they’re both wearing Democratic jerseys, and therefore you think, wow, that other person is a bad blue team member because they’re doing it. And that’s only because you’re not acknowledging that the Republican Party in the North has to wear blue jerseys.

And I don’t think the same thing exists anymore in the South, where maybe someone’s a little more extreme in a primary fight, but not as profoundly in disagreement with abortion bans, or with trans, or with the sort of pillars of what’s become the orthodoxy there.

Bacon: Or, to put it in terms you might—I wish I had said this before—is that it might be, in blue states, the core fight is between, I don’t want to be too reductive, but corporate Democrats and non-corporate Democrats probably gets you most of the way there. And in some ways those are, like, in Massachusetts, for example, which is a one-party state, they have very intense battles over policy, and it’s always between who—the donor-funded Democrat or the non-donor-funded Democrat.

And so on some level, the blue states can’t pass a lot because people with Ds on their name are not really in the same agenda. And I agree, in red states, we just have the Republicans who love Trump extra a lot, and the ones who under-like him two times a lot, and there’s not a lot of—like the sort of the Mitch McConnell Republicans, which I used to refer to almost as people who were pro-immigration and pro-diversity, because Mitch McConnell in iterations of his life.

The history of Mitch McConnell is, Mitch McConnell spent a lot of time promoting this guy named Daniel Cameron, who ran for governor. Mitch McConnell used to care about diversity, and used to really try to promote making more Black people in the Republican Party, and used to really—because he used to be pro-immigration, pro-diversity. There were certain issues. There’s a center at the University of Louisville founded after Mitch McConnell, who used to be very much for education, and used to be very promoting of higher education.

There used to be a kind of Republican that is now gone, and there was an ideological difference between those people. What Marco Rubio was in 20—he’s conservative, but what he was in 2015 was different than what Cruz and Trump are now. And so I think that is an important distinction, and probably why, yes, blue states are actually having a real policy fight between the, yeah, the Gavin Newsoms and the Zohrans.

Podhorzer: Yeah. And it’s not just—it’s not, the important thing for people to understand is, it’s not because Gavin is in some way disloyal to what Democrats are. It’s because there’s still a fight about what Democrats are.

Bacon: What Democrats are for, yeah.

Podhorzer: Yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: I think that sort of takes us. Perry, if you have any parting words, if you want to say anything about—I don’t know, where you see media going, if there’s any bright lights at the end of this dark tunnel, if you just want to spew about The Washington Post, the mic is yours.

Bacon: I’m going to spew about the—I am happy that The Washington Post lost that arbitration case, and my former colleague, Karen Attiah—I don’t know if she’s going to actually go work back there, but they lost. They still have to give her some money, at least, and that’s a good thing, because they fired her unfairly and unjustifiably. I would say The Washington Post, as I mentioned, does some great work in the news section still. They didn’t want the columnists who were left of center, they were not encouraged to stay—but I think that the paper does some good work.

I would say that there’s a lot of great—we’re in this moment where I’ve criticized The New York Times and The Post in this conversation a couple times, and I think that the sort of mainstream CBS News, oh God, CBS News is a particularly bad example, but ABC News—I don’t think the sort of mainstream has risen to the occasion.

But I do think, if you look at The Guardian—the thing that I get up and read each morning—has done a good job. It’s not like they’re saying Democrats are good, they’re saying Trump is breaking rules, and they don’t say that scholars say Trump broke rules, or Trump may have broken rules, but some say the rules, whatever. They just say it. The New Republic, I think, is more openly liberal, but I think we’re doing some great work too. And I’m struggling, I read Drop Site News, I read—I’m struggling right now to name all the things that I read these days. I read Capital B.

But I think we’re in a moment where I encourage people all the time to spend a little less time—if you’re on Bluesky particularly, maybe the time you spent tweeting about paragraph four of New York Times story zero, Z, would be better off spent where you find a story in The Guardian, or The New Republic, or someone’s Substack, and you promote that story. We’re in 2026. People know that The New York Times, The Post, and CBS are going to do a lot of both-sides-ing. People get that.

So maybe you should promote what you want people to read, instead of saying, Don’t read this story that I’m broadcasting for you to not read. Instead, model the behavior you want to see. The American Prospect—somebody noted on the chat—a great publication. The American Prospect, David Dayen, do some great work. They do some excellent work. Great place to read about the Democratic Party in particular.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. That’s a great place to leave it. Tell people what you want them to do. Stop promoting what you don’t want them to do. Perry, thank you so much.

Bacon: Thanks for having me. Great to see you guys.

Podhorzer: Yeah. Take care. Bye.