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The US president’s comments came after several of the world’s biggest oil companies reported huge windfalls from a surge in oil prices driven by the Iran war.

Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general cleared a major hurdle this week after two Republican senators who had raised concerns agreed to back him. Blanche gave written assurances that a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to pay Trump allies would not be resurrected, and that a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service only gave the president retroactive immunity from audits rather than perpetual protection. The Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Blanche’s nomination Tuesday, with the full Senate expected to vote later in the week. Blanche, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and acting attorney general since April, has been central in many of the administration’s most controversial episodes, including prosecutions of Trump opponents and the botched rollout of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. If confirmed, Blanche would entrench a culture of corruption at the Justice Department, warns legal expert Norm Eisen. “There have been a series of offenses against the rule of law, miscarriages of justice,” he tells Democracy Now! Eisen is co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund. He previously served as White House special counsel for ethics and government reform in the Obama administration. The Justice Department recently dropped charges against his client, former Olympic athlete Davey Hearn, who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general cleared a major hurdle this week after two Republican senators who had raised concerns agreed to back him. Blanche gave written assurances that a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to pay Trump allies would not be resurrected, and that a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service only gave the president retroactive immunity from audits rather than perpetual protection. The Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Blanche’s nomination Tuesday, with the full Senate expected to vote later in the week. Blanche, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and acting attorney general since April, has been central in many of the administration’s most controversial episodes, including prosecutions of Trump opponents and the botched rollout of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. If confirmed, Blanche would entrench a culture of corruption at the Justice Department, warns legal expert Norm Eisen. “There have been a series of offenses against the rule of law, miscarriages of justice,” he tells Democracy Now! Eisen is co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund. He previously served as White House special counsel for ethics and government reform in the Obama administration. The Justice Department recently dropped charges against his client, former Olympic athlete Davey Hearn, who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Joshua Scheer President Donald Trump calls his Gaza agreement a “major milestone” toward peace. For Palestinians living beneath Israeli aircraft and beside an ever-advancing military boundary, that triumphal language bears little resemblance to reality. Israel killed 18 Palestinians on Sunday in one of the deadliest days since the supposed ceasefire began, while survivors described attacks […]

I’ve written before about how US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has ties to an ascendant Christian nationalist movement. Specifically, he attends a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a denomination founded by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who has said that women’s suffrage was “a mistake” and suggested that homosexuality should be […]

Prem reports from Michigan on election day, where something astonishing is happening: Abdul El-Sayed, backed by a new leftist coalition, might be about to beat establishment candidate Haley Stevens.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.A Fox News poll of Texas shows Democrat James Talarico leading by three points. But here’s what’s really striking about this survey. It finds Donald Trump underwater by nine points in Texas, a state that he won by fourteen points less than two years ago. Those are stunning numbers for the Lone Star State, and if Democrats are suddenly competitive for the Senate, numbers like that explain why.All this comes as Trump just unleashed a crazed tirade about his poll numbers, one that strongly suggests he has zero interest in helping his party in the midterms. It now feels like time is running out for Trump to turn things around, and we may be within striking distance of getting the election that Democrats really want. So we’re talking about all of it with Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett, who knows Texas and has worked on midterm elections as well. Sawyer, good to have you back on.Sawyer Hackett: Great to be with you, Greg.Sargent: So let’s just start with this bizarre rant from Trump. He posted this: “My real poll numbers, not those made up by the fake news media, are the best they have ever been. And why wouldn’t they be with the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers ever, the biggest outside investment in America and world history? A totally secure border, a giant victory in Venezuela, the denuclearization of Iran. Unparalleled respect and success throughout the world, and much more.”Sawyer, does that litany of made-up successes sound like a description of what majorities see in this presidency?Hackett: Based on the polling that we’re seeing across the country right now, it looks like Donald Trump’s coalition has fallen apart. I mean, he’s atrophied severely with Latino voters, atrophied severely with Black voters, atrophied severely with young voters, and especially independent voters who are running away from him across the country in all of these major swing states, in all of these states where we have major Senate races. And that’s really going to be the tipping point, I think, for the midterm cycle.Sargent: And by every metric, things are not going in the right direction. Let’s talk about this Fox News poll of Texas. It finds Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton by 51 to 48 among registered voters. Before we get into the head-to-head, let’s talk about Trump’s numbers in Texas. CNN’s Harry Enten flagged this. Fox has 54 percent viewing him unfavorably there versus 45 percent viewing him favorably. Sawyer, as someone who knows Texas, can you explain how shocking it is for Trump to be nine points underwater in that state?Hackett: It’s absolutely shocking for him to be nine points underwater in the state, especially this far out from the election. I mean, Donald Trump won Texas by, I think, more than thirteen points in 2024. It’s a state that has consistently been red for the last thirty years. I mean, we haven’t elected a statewide Democrat in Texas for many, many decades. And so, you know, over cycle over cycle, we’ve gotten closer and closer to kind of flipping the state, but Republican numbers, especially Republican incumbents, have always kind of performed better in Texas, because it is a state that is fairly conservative. It’s also a state that’s fairly independent. It’s one of the most unaffiliated states in the country. And those voters, while they claim to be independent, tend to break towards conservatives, tend to break towards Republicans in some of these statewide races. And so yeah, it’s shocking to see Trump underwater nine points with still a couple more months—three or four more months—until the election, when this is a state just a year and a half ago that Trump won by almost fourteen points.Sargent: You brought up independents. The Fox poll finds that 78 percent of independents view Trump unfavorably versus 18 percent who view him favorably. That’s sixty points underwater. And 50 percent of independents in Texas in the Fox poll have a strongly unfavorable view of Trump. Sawyer, have you ever heard of numbers like that? And can you explain why independents matter so much in Texas?Hackett: Yeah, as I mentioned before, independents make up a huge chunk of the electorate in Texas. It’s one of the most unaffiliated states in the country. And I think independents have largely shaped how Democrats have performed over the last 30 years. As I mentioned, they’ve kind of broken towards Republicans, towards conservatives in each of these statewide races. But I think independent voters, more so than any other specific demographic, are responding to what’s happening with the economy. I mean, you look at this poll and you look at the breakdown of what are the most important issues voters care about to independents especially, it’s affordability. And on cost of living, you have James Talarico running away with the issue, with Ken Paxton, who I think has been kind of bogged down and mired in personal scandal and kind of trying to overcome that with the electorate, not necessarily winning over those independent voters with his attacks on James Talarico’s masculinity. That’s not necessarily working for them. So Talarico being focused on affordability is turning those independents in droves over to the Democratic side.Sargent: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting that you say that we have to be alert to the possibility that independents break away from Democrats at the end. But numbers like these would suggest that we’re looking at maybe a muted effect. If anything, along those lines, it looks like Talarico’s going to win this demographic. In fact, the Fox poll has Talarico beating Paxton by thirty-nine points among independents. Clearly Trump is driving that. Yet at the same time, Paxton is winning by really overwhelming margins among non-college white voters and rural voters. That’s why it’s so close, despite Trump being shockingly underwater there. What’s your candid assessment of the real state of the Texas Senate race now?Hackett: My assessment is that Talarico is in a really prime position to take this victory in November. And I think it’s kind of a perfect storm in Texas, where you have a really faulty candidate on the Republican side who’s turning away independents and not necessarily able to keep that coalition intact, and a Democratic nominee who’s able to kind of reach across the aisle towards independents, who are really disillusioned with what’s happening on the economy. You look at these pollings and you look at the crosstabs, impressions are much more firm of Ken Paxton in these polls than they are of Talarico. And there’s still something like 14 percent of Texas voters who are undecided at this point in the race. From this point on through November, you’re going to see a deluge of millions and millions of dollars of negative ads. I think especially coming from the right against James Talarico, that are going to be trying to peel away some of those independent voters from him. A lot of them are really fixed on that cost of living issue. And that’s been the issue that Talarico has been dominating on in the race. So really, I think it’s a matter of whether Talarico can keep running up those margins. We can keep running down Trump’s numbers in the state. And hopefully we can get to a point where, heading into the GOTV part of this race, the deluge of money that we’re going to see coming from the right isn’t enough to dissuade enough independents away from Talarico.Sargent: And you can see a few other spots that Talarico really has got to firm up here. For instance, Fox has Talarico winning among Hispanics by 59 percent to 41 percent. The last time you were on here, you said that one of the key pieces of a Talarico victory is to really run up the margins in some of those southern Texas counties that are very heavily Latino. It seems to me like he isn’t quite there with Hispanics if that Fox number is right, doesn’t it?Hackett: Well, and we talk about, the Trump coalition of 2024, the reason he was able to kind of have such a wild swing to the right across all these different states and all these different demographics—that coalition was built on winning over support from Latino and Hispanic voters in places like Texas, winning over younger Black men, winning over younger voters in general. That coalition has completely collapsed. And I think Texas embodies that collapse more than any state in the country.The Texas Tribune, just a couple of weeks ago, had a poll out that said one in five Latino Texans who voted for Trump in 2024 would not support him again. And two-thirds of Latinos in the state disapprove of the job he’s doing as president. Those are not numbers that you can compete in, in a state like Texas, whose electorate has become so much more diverse and so much younger and so much more urbanized. And in all of those places, in all of those areas, Donald Trump is atrophying his support among voters, not gaining.Sargent: I would assume, though, that we should all breathe a little easier if Talarico gets up into the sixties with Hispanics, right?Hackett: I think it would be a lot better if he was winning over a bigger share of the Latino vote in Texas. I think, if you look at it compared to 2024, it’s a pretty wild swing, a thirty-point swing towards Democrats. That being said, historically, to compete in a state like Texas, I think you need to run up those numbers really high. The other thing I found interesting in that Fox poll was that Talarico, it looks like he has 87 percent support among Black voters in the state. There’s been a lot of conversation, especially post-primary, whether Talarico can win over Black support, especially after kind of that dust-up during the primary cycle. It looks like he’s doing a lot better with Black voters than he was just a few weeks ago. I’d like to see those Hispanic numbers come up a little bit, but the coalition is looking pretty strong.Sargent: Yeah, the story seems to be that the coalition’s coming together. We still have some spots where he’s got to do better. I think he’s got to probably keep [Paxton’s] numbers down a little bit in some of these rural areas as well. To your point about the swing among Hispanics from 2024 to the present, again, Fox has it at 59 to 41 in Talarico’s favor among Hispanics. We really shouldn’t overlook the deeper importance of this. As I think you alluded to, the swing to Trump in South Texas among Latinos was widely held up by countless pundits and commentators and analysts as a sign that there had been something like a permanent realignment in U.S. politics. And now that has entirely evaporated. So this swing away from Trump among Texas Latinos is a major, major story. It shows that lots and lots of people really overread the significance of 2024. And I really think we should underscore that. Can you talk about that?Hackett: I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that’s not just a story that’s happening in Texas. That’s happening in states across the country, especially in these states with a major predominant Hispanic population like Texas. That coalition, Donald Trump’s coalition in 2024, I think was an aberration. I think those voters were largely reacting to an economic situation in which affordability was the top concern for voters, and they did not feel like Democrats were serious enough in addressing it, and at the time had a nominee—or an incumbent president in Joe Biden—who was not kind of addressing their concerns. What we’ve seen is that that coalition was not actually intact at all. And mostly they were responding to the national environment, which is what we want to happen right now in 2026 in the midterms.We want those same voters to be looking at the national environment and to be upset by what they’re seeing in terms of cost of living, in terms of these foreign wars, in terms of these tariffs that are driving up prices in places like Texas. So really, you know, I think what we’re seeing is a new dynamic with Hispanic voters and Black voters that are much more responsive to what’s happening in that exact national moment, as opposed to kind of just, winning over voters on cultural issues or whatever it may be from Trump.Sargent: And there’s some cause for concern going forward about whether, if Democrats can pull these voters back, how permanent is that? But I think the story here is that Trump’s 2024 gains with these demographics proved incredibly fleeting, right?Hackett: Yeah, it was never an actual intact coalition as far as I can tell. I think this was, again, an aberration. I think Democrats can do a lot to win back those voters. That being said, if we come out of this midterm cycle and we’ve won 63 percent of Latino voters nationwide, we should not rest on our laurels that they’re going to come back out and turn out for us in 2028. We have to be laser-focused on telling our story to all parts of the coalition, including Hispanic voters, about why they should support us, why they and their families would be better off under Democratic policies that support them and help lower their costs.Sargent: A hundred percent. Couldn’t agree more. Let’s listen to something CNN’s Harry Enten said about all this. He points out that if Talarico is really ahead in Texas, even if it’s a small amount, three points, then all of a sudden numerous other Senate races are in play. Then he cites the prediction markets. Listen to this.Harry Enten (voiceover): All of a sudden you put Texas in play, you put places like Iowa, Ohio in play. You know, you’re talking about Alaska being potentially in play. Look at this chance to win the Senate. Now it’s basically an even race. Republicans were three-to-two favorites a month ago. Look at where we are right now. Now Republicans’ chances have fallen significantly, just a 53 percent chance to hold on to the United States Senate. Democrats have a real shot indeed.Sargent: So I don’t know how much stock to place in prediction markets, but it seems to me the story here again is Trump, Trump, Trump. If you want to know why the Senate’s in play, a big part of it is Trump being nine points underwater in Texas and what that says about the possibilities in Ohio, in Iowa, and places like that, North Carolina, right?Hackett: Our ability to compete in all of these major Senate states is mostly going to be a reaction to where Trump is. Where costs are at the time, what’s Trump’s approval rating, are we still at war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is still shut down? All of these are factors that are going to play into the national environment around Trump. And right now we’re having this discussion in the Democratic Party about, you know, what these results mean for the party and where we should take things. But really, all of this is going to be a reaction to Donald Trump. Every midterm election is a referendum on the current administration. And right now they have a current administration that’s driving their prices up on gas, on groceries, is kind of causing them massive chaos and corruption on a daily basis that they’re having to deal with. And right now I think voters are looking at the situation and they want to turn the page. It’s kind of a throw-the-bums-out election.And I think if you’re seeing a state like Texas be that competitive, the kind of brackets for what’s available to Democrats is pretty wide. We have to gain four net seats in this midterm cycle in the Senate. We have to defend Georgia and Michigan. We have to, you know, look at flipping states like North Carolina and Maine. But then maybe we also look at states like Iowa and Texas. And Iowa and Texas may be kind of in that bracket of states that help protect our majority if, say, we win one seat, a one-seat Senate majority, and then John Fetterman decides to flip to the other side. I think we need to have that buffer. And a state like Texas, I think, is right within that wheelhouse of what’s achievable. But so is a state like Alaska. So is a state like Iowa. So is a state like Ohio and North Carolina. So we’re competing in all of these states. But I think Texas right now, James Talarico is kind of putting forward a playbook on how to compete in the Trump era. He’s staying focused on affordability, staying focused on corruption, and honing his own message and not getting into this back-and-forth over culture war crap that they’re trying to put out against him.Sargent: I will say one thing about Talarico, though, in addition to all those things you said there. On some level he is campaigning against the kind of moral rot that Trump and MAGA have foisted on the country. And that’s what I really like about him as well. He is laser-focused on affordability, but he isn’t afraid to really speak in lofty moral terms about what’s happening to this country right now. I find that to be—I’ve said this before on here, but it’s like he’s found this new politics for the era of late-stage Trumpism or end-stage Trumpism, where everybody’s just had it and just wants to move on and wants to see something better in this country than this complete maniac completely unleashes on us every single day, day in and day out. What do you think of all that? Is Talarico, and maybe Ossoff as well, John Ossoff in Georgia, developing a language too? Are you seeing a language come together here that’s a little bit new and different?Hackett: I am. And I don’t necessarily think that it’s tied to ideology, right? Like in both of those candidates, both Ossoff and Talarico—I also think you’re seeing it in states like Michigan with someone like Abdul El-Sayed. These are not necessarily just focused on ideology. They’re not trying to come at Trump from the left or from the right. It’s from the top and the bottom, right? They’re talking about corruption. The way that these two, Ossoff and Talarico specifically, have been able to kind of hone in on the corruption angle in the midst of a conversation about affordability has been fascinating. And I think it’s going to be the kind of message that we’re going to need to run head-on with in 2028. I think Ossoff’s honing it very, very well ahead of a potential 2028 run. I would like to see more Democrats start to articulate that message, because it does seem like it kind of—you can win over a lot of folks who are in the middle. You can win over independent voters who are kind of looking at the corruption and looking at the affordability concerns and saying, this is a problem happening in both parties. I think Trump is the one causing the pain right now. But I’m willing to support this Democratic nominee in a state like Texas because he’s clearly laser-focused on the things that are, you know, driving up my costs and, you know, making me angry when I see my elected representatives kind of enriching themselves and their allies at the expense of working families.Sargent: It really is interesting what’s happening. And of course, John Ossoff has to win first. James Talarico has to win first. But if it happens like it’s looking like it might happen, then there will be a ton of stuff to learn about this. Sawyer Hackett, awesome to talk to you. That was really fascinating. Thanks, man.Hackett: Yeah, great to be with you, Greg.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: We’re going to talk about these big primaries that are happening—tomorrow in Michigan, and then next week in Wisconsin, where Nathan is. So these are primaries. I’m here in Louisville, but people are talking about them. It’s become like this year’s version of the New York primary, where everybody who’s left of center is thinking about these races, talking about them, knows the candidates’ names, knows who they would vote for, even though we do not get to vote. Nathan does, but the rest of us do not get to vote in these races.So I’ll start with a question I like to ask, which is—we’ll start with Michigan—we don’t know who’s going to win, and we haven’t had any results yet. I brought you all on intentionally knowing that, because I want to ask, in some ways, what are we going to learn? We don’t know who the winner is, and I hate when people say, This race obviously showed X, when they wouldn’t have said that if they knew what the results were. So I want to ask you all, knowing what you know today, which is not the results, what have we learned about the Democratic Party from this race in Michigan? There’s a lot of things that have happened. You went from three candidates to two, a lot of spending, so on. So I’ll start with Nathan.Nathan Kalmoe: Yeah. Thanks, Perry. I think maybe the main takeaway for me is that Democratic voters seem to be unsatisfied with the conventional Democratic candidates that the party prefers. Obviously, it’s up to the voters to decide, but clearly the party establishment has preferences. The supporting groups have preferences. Some of that could look ideological, I realize. People talk about left and right, and we’ll get into this later. I think the main takeaway is less about ideology and more about dissatisfaction with the level of fight, with what Democrats have been providing. Obviously, a range of fight. And the other piece for me is just the dissatisfaction with what Democrats have been able to deliver. And I think that’s reflected in the advantages that we see for El-Sayed in Michigan and for Hong in Wisconsin.Anat Shenker-Osorio: I guess that’s me.Bacon: Yes.Shenker-Osorio: I want to say the responsible thing on both these counts, which is that I know Abdul, I have for a very long time. I don’t do paid work for him, I never have, but I have given him advice from time to time. We’re going to talk about Wisconsin, where I’m from, next. The same goes for Frannie Hong. So that feels like the responsible disclaimer to make. I’m just a human being, and so I know that objectivity is a fiction, so that feels fair.So I think as far as what we’ve learned—just to take it in a different vein than Nathan did—I agree entirely with what he said, and in fact, I think that could be underscored with how much more traction Abdul has this time around than, say, when he ran for governor unsuccessfully against one Gretchen Whitmer, who, spoiler alert, is the governor. So that’s how that went. And obviously different race, different time, but still so much more traction than he had in the previous round. We’re seeing that in multiple ways. And so, just at the outset, big picture: Insurgent candidates—this is the term a lot of people have been using for them—are doing better than they have before, which just is a point of fact to hold up what Nathan said.I think, to give a different answer, what’s interesting—and I saw an author named Eric Garcia remark this, and I thought it was really smart—the Democratic establishment, Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, etc., could have gotten behind McMorrow. She was sitting right there for them, and she was very much positioned, I would argue, as a Goldilocks candidate, right? Not too hot, not too cold, somewhere in between, and had progressive bona fides to run on, came to prominence through a really well-done speech clapping back against a lot of anti-LGBT hatred, as we probably recall. And they didn’t. They went with the true, most establishment of the establishment. And like I said, just looking for a different thing to say, because I agree with Nathan: What we learn is that even when there is an option that the party arguably could have been more comfortable with, they still go to, I don’t know, the least common denominator.Bacon: Let me follow up one thing Nathan said. You said it’s not about ideology, it’s about fight, not fight. It seems to me—I agree with that on some level, but I’m struggling to name the fighting moderates, and I think there’s a reason why that might be the case. So I agree with you in concept that maybe the voters are not voting on ideology. But the people who voted for Kristi Noem all are moderates, and I think that does tell us something. So talk about the point I just made.Kalmoe: Yeah. So it’s not only fight, I want to be clear. A lot of the conversation around that, where people are using ideological terms, I would say is really about groups. It’s fundamentally about groups—by race, by class, by sex and gender, sexuality, religion. And people have fairly clear views about prominent social groups, and they make choices in politics based on that. Likewise, they’re not very ideological, most voters, in the sense of ideas of principle differences, or like really elaborated policy preferences. There are some of those people, but they’re few. People are really oriented more around how they feel about groups.You could say that there’s maybe an ideological principle of, like, egalitarianism generally—like, all groups should be treated equally. But even there, when you get into the practice, even among liberals, you’ll see that there are certain groups that don’t count, or they’re left out of that formulation. And likewise, even though we talk about candidates and parties in terms of ideology, really parties are coalitions of groups, of interest groups, of social groups. And the goal of the party is to form a majority, in most cases, of—Bacon: Let me stop you a second. So you would agree that the people who give money to AIPAC and the people who go to DSA meetings probably do have some ideology. You’re just saying that’s probably not the average voter.Kalmoe: Yeah. And the people who go to DSA meetings, that’s a really tiny percentage of people. The folks who like DSA candidates are a much larger fraction of the public. And part of this is recognizing that voters are really heterogeneous. They’re really heterogeneous in the ways that they make decisions, and the kinds of views that they bring to bear. So all of this is with a grain of salt, but even among primary voters, people are less ideological than you think.An example of this is, in 2016, Chris Achen and Larry Bartels did an analysis that they published in The New York Times about Bernie Sanders and Clinton supporters, and found that on average, on many economic issues where you’d expect that Bernie supporters would be to the left of Clinton on the ideological spectrum, they actually weren’t. They were pretty similar, or in some cases, Clinton voters even a little bit to the left. So even in, like, the sort of quintessential ideological battles that we imagine, the voters, even in the primaries, are not always resembling that.Shenker-Osorio: We do focus groups all the time. All the time. We’ve done 320, maybe 330 since the outset of 2021. That means a whole lot of voters.Bacon: A lot, yeah.Shenker-Osorio: They tend to be configurations either of what we call “disaffected Democrats”—people who, if they were to turn out, they would turn out for Democrats, but they are very plague-on-both-your-houses—and then your traditional swing voters. I like to joke that swing voters have all had to quit their jobs, because they’re required to be 24/7 in various focus groups because there are so few of them.And what I would say is that we don’t do this every time, but we used to, all the time, do two things. We would ask voters, “If you had to liken the Democratic Party to an animal, what animal would it be?” Perry, forgive me if we’ve talked about this—I remember nothing anymore. And generally speaking, with sort of regularity, you could almost turn it into a drinking game. They would say a slug, a sloth, a turtle, or a tortoise. And with Republicans, they would say an apex predator—so that would be a lion, a shark, a tiger. And in more recent groups, we finally got some variety, because we had some folks saying a deer in headlights, which—I don’t know, you tell me, is that better or worse? I guess a deer, in theory, could run, but, you know, it is considered—Bacon: It is not running well.Shenker-Osorio: My summary statement for a very long time is that voters’ beef with Democrats is that they’re weak, not woke. And that’s not because you can’t talk them into being mad about whatever it is you want them to be mad about, but you have to actually plant that for them. And if you do, you can take them on that merry journey. I’m, again, not arguing you can’t. But left to their own devices, what upsets you about Democrats? It’s that they don’t do anything. It’s that they don’t stand up. It’s that they don’t fight back. And that is, generally speaking, what most people feel. And as I’m sure we’re about to get into more deeply, and Nathan has already intimated, most voters are very low information.Bacon: OK, that was helpful. I’m going to shift to something a little bit different. So in Michigan, there was a poll by a firm, EPIC-MRA. This is a poll that does a lot of polling for the Detroit newspapers there. And there was a poll that showed, in a general election, hypothetically, Mike Rogers, a Republican, 46 percent, Abdul, 43 percent—so a three-point advantage—versus Haley Stevens, who would be at 44 if she were the candidate, and Mike Rogers at 42. In other words, they show Abdul maybe down by three, potentially, and Haley Stevens up by two. This went viral on Twitter as an idea of, Oh dear, the Democrats are about to give away a Senate seat by not picking the most electable candidate. Talk about why that should not be the conclusion here. Anat, I’ll start with you.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. So first of all, I’m not looking at the poll. I’m guessing it was probably an N size of 1,000, because that’s what, usually at best, a state poll is going to be. The margin of error is, I don’t know, two points, 2.5, three. So first of all, let’s just take that all with a grain of salt.Bacon: In other words, if the poll showed Stevens ahead by 15 and Abdul down by 12, that would be different than a poll with this small number of—Shenker-Osorio: First. Second, I tried to find this, and so hopefully one of you remembers better than I do. I couldn’t find it before this interview. My recollection is that Abdul came up from behind, that whatever he was polling—how many months are we from November?—at the start of the primary, and where he is now, is a radically different trajectory. Or is a radically different spot. Am I wrong?Bacon: You mean among Democrats, right?Shenker-Osorio: Among Democrats.Bacon: Yes. He’s surged tremendously. Yes.Shenker-Osorio: Just wanted to, you know, not spew lies on here. There are many other channels that can do that.Bacon: Are you saying politics is not static, you might imply? That he might be able to gain support as politicians do when they are good at politics.Shenker-Osorio: Good at politics. So I want to underscore that. Like, any human being could start in one place and end in another. This particular human being happens to have demonstrated actually achieving that recently. So that’s a thing that’s already happened among Democrats, of course, in Michigan.Then the next thing to say is—ironically, I would say ironically, if the consequences were not so dire—a lot of the discourse that has happened at the end of this race, if there is anything that is really troubling and may be a contributing factor to concern about any Democrat being able to take Michigan in November—which, thermostatically, just based on the environment, is what should occur, like, that is how the setup is right now—the ugliness and the brutality of this race, the amount of corporate cash unleashed against Abdul, the personal nature of the attacks. As far as self-inflicted wound, if the Democrats are really serious that they want a Democrat to take this seat, period—then that’s a serious issue.And then finally, what I would say is just that people cannot tell you today, in August, what they actually plan to do in November. And I am not saying I know he’s going to win. That’s ridiculous. I’m not even telling you I know he’s going to win tomorrow. I’m certainly not saying that about November. But what I’m saying is, we have not yet begun to fight. He has not begun to fight the general election. And so that kind of idea is so premature, and it is detrimental to the overall cause, if the overall cause is actually a Democrat winning this seat.Bacon: Nathan, can you respond to this? And also, I want you to weave in what you wrote and sent to me, about candidate parties and maybe not candidates. Anyway, go ahead.Kalmoe: Yeah. And some of this reiterates your great article, I think last week, talking about these electability issues. I think the big picture is that in each of these races, all of the party’s candidates, all the Democrats’ candidates, would be similarly favored to win or lose against their Republican opponents. So it’s going to be close in these swing elections, no doubt. But no Democrat is clearly safer than the others, for a couple of reasons.In general, political conditions favor Democrats. It’s not the best year ever, but things are looking good for Democrats to win in wave elections generally. Those fundamentals of conditions, broader conditions for the party, matter a lot more than candidates and campaign choice.Maybe the biggest point here is that progressive candidates do just as well as moderate candidates for Democrats in recent elections. There’s really good work by Bonica and Grumbach on this, basically showing that decades ago, there was a penalty for progressive candidates compared to, quote, unquote, “moderate candidates,” but that seems to have gone away in the last decade or so.And then there’s the points on polling. I haven’t looked into the particular poll that you were citing, but I have paid very close attention to the polls in Wisconsin that have similar nuances in the methodology that I won’t bore anybody here with, but to pull apart a little bit, reinforcing some of what Anat said. At least in Wisconsin, the main poll has been the Marquette University poll by Charles Franklin, which is great. But it is a sample of registered voters. And Wisconsin has same-day registration, and Hong’s support is strongest among young people and others who are less likely to be registered. And so that means that both in the primary and the general election hypothetical matchups, her support is probably underestimated by just having a sample that starts with registered voters.As Anat said, polls won’t become really strongly predictive of the outcome until November. Most people who are normal people—no offense to anybody, us or anybody—Bacon: All the listeners will be abnormal, so to speak.Kalmoe: No shade intended. But most people couldn’t even name the candidates right now.Shenker-Osorio: Most people can’t name their elected official.Bacon: Congressman is what I was going to say. Yeah. Kalmoe: So we always have to readjust our baselines when we’re thinking about that. As an outset, in Michigan and in the Wisconsin case, with similar hypotheticals about general election matchups, they’re within the margin of error—which means basically they’re statistically indistinguishable.And then, maybe a broader point—I don’t want to push this too far, but getting representative samples, especially at the state level, is really hard these days, for a bunch of reasons. And although all of the polls seem to be moving in similar directions—which is a good sign, that there’s some kind of reliability between them—they may all be picking up similar biases that come about from the challenge of recruiting people to participate in surveys. There’s such a low percentage of people agreeing, you always have to be a little bit nervous that the people who are participating are, despite all of the best efforts of these survey companies, maybe not as ideally representative as we would like. And it’s hard to know what that bias is.Bacon: Nathan, in the answer you said two things. Generally, it’s the parties that win—if a party’s doing well in a swing state, all the candidates will do well in that party. And you said something along the lines of, moderates do as well as progressives do. So OK, so you’re in Wisconsin. Mandela Barnes in 2022 loses for Senate, Tony Evers wins—I think that’s what the moderate camp would say is a victory for moderation. 2024, Elissa Slotkin, one of my least favorite members of Congress, I think, did manage to win a Senate race where Kamala Harris lost the presidential race. Ruben Gallego wins a Senate race, versus Kamala Harris loses the presidential.So both of you, how do you take those? I think those are used as examples of the “moderates win and other people don’t.” How do you all respond to those? Maybe not each one, but just talk about why that might not be the explanation there.Shenker-Osorio: Nathan, do you want to start?Kalmoe: Sure. I’ll just start with some of the Wisconsin details. So in 2022, the Democratic incumbent Governor Evers won the governorship by 3 percent, and the Democratic challenger for U.S. Senate, Mandela Barnes, lost to Ron Johnson by 1 percent. You can try to point to differences in the candidates, differences in the campaigns—and Anat can speak to some of those things too—but one of the big differences is that Ron Johnson, the Republican, was the incumbent. Tony Evers, the Democrat, was the incumbent.Similar in 2018, you have Tammy Baldwin, the other senator from Wisconsin, winning her Senate race by 11 percent, while Tony Evers, when he was first running as a challenger against Scott Walker, was only elected by 1 percent. And you could argue that Baldwin was more progressive, relatively, than Evers. And similarly, in 2024, Baldwin won her Senate race by 1 percent, and Kamala Harris lost the state to Trump by 1 percent. I think that provides a little bit of context.Especially recently, we’re talking about very small differences. I think incumbency is a bigger factor, and there’s no incumbent in this case. And something that we haven’t really talked about yet, but I think we will—midterms are very much about turnout, and having people enthusiastic about supporting the vision of the candidate and the party. And to the extent that different people respond differently to the candidates and the parties and the conditions, a lot of the potential effects would be offsetting. Some things that might turn off a handful of voters can be things that other voters are more enthusiastic about. It makes them want to turn out more.Shenker-Osorio: What I would add is that, on Barnes-Evers specifically, Barnes three weeks out from the election was minus nine. And in a three-week sprint, which I would argue was a decidedly different campaign than what had preceded it, managed to make up eight points to lose by one—which is still losing, and as we know in politics, there’s only winning and losing.But the campaign that he was running previously, when he got to minus nine, was a campaign that was very much, perhaps ironically, controlled by a very old-school, stalwart, you’ve-got-to-be-centrist campaign model that was foisted upon him from the DSCC, the people holding the purse strings, Chuck Schumer. And in particular, Barnes was met with really horrifying, really ugly—I call it Willie Horton on steroids—tough-on-crime attacks that were bought and paid for by Wisconsin’s very own homegrown billionaires. There was a state level of the badness to prop up Ron Johnson.And instead of recognizing that there’s no such thing as race neutral in American politics—because the right, at the very least, is never ever going to shut up about race, and so even if you don’t care from a moral perspective, which, by the way, is my view, you just care from a strategic perspective, that just doesn’t exist, because those racialized attacks are occurring in voters’ faces for the campaign. And so if you clap back with an ad with your candidate making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—which perhaps is the most offensive thing that could happen in Wisconsin, when obviously the man could have been making beer brats, at the very least. If you’re going to pander, let’s pander, Wisconsin. Nathan and I are both from Wisconsin, and therefore deeply offended by the peanut butter and je—well, I’m not going to speak for Nathan—but you just can’t clap back against evil with vacuousness.Bacon: So now I’m eager to know what happened in the last three weeks. I’m waiting on the edge of my seat, even though I covered this, I think.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. Again, not objective, because—Bacon: You were working with him.Shenker-Osorio: Not objective. But from my view, he began to actually clap back and to actually say, Look, they have the same one trick in the book that all authoritarians do—not that he said authoritarian, that’s my wording—They want you to point your finger at me. They want to divide us. They want to have us at odds. They want to scare you about me, because they know that I’m the one that’s actually going to try to make life better for you and do something about these billionaires that are financing these attacks.There is, I would argue, a formula to how you clap back, and he began to be more honest and forthright, some would say aggressive—which was advice he had been given not to do, because you’re going to look, and I’m sorry to say it, but like—Bacon: He’s a Black candidate, so you can’t seem aggressive. Sorry, I’ll just say it and help you make it.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, thanks, Perry, for being my Black man anger translator. So, was that the reason? I don’t know. But that happened, that occurred.And then, I think more broadly, to Nathan’s final point about midterms being different elections—this is where he didn’t want to torture you, even though he is a professor, with Stats 101. But you have to remember—for those who, it was long enough ago—if you’re only polling, you’re only surveying registered voters, by definition you are over-indexing to the people who are reliable, habitual voters. And in midterms—Mike Podhorzer has pointed this out many times—if you were to look at a graph of participation in every midterm and look at every year, it’s in this narrow band. It’s all these other years, and then you have 2018. And 2018 is a leap larger than any previous leap, except for when we granted women the vote.Meaning we actually altered who could participate. We have not seen a jump between two different midterms that large previously, except in that instance, which I think is pretty explicable. And so what is the point of that story? The point of that story is that the name of the game really is, are we bringing new voters—meaning people who’ve just aged into the electorate—and new voters meaning people who have been like, A plague on both your houses. I don’t care about any of this. Please turn it off. I am not interested—into the electorate. And so the question really is, who are the candidates that can do that, in a year in which the name of the game is throw the bastards out? And by the bastards I mean MAGA. And that is really what is drawing in a lot of these either new or non-habitual voters. It’s really a desire to beat Republicans.And so even with my un-objective view about Hong and about El-Sayed—what’s going to happen in this election, fingers crossed, is that Republicans will lose. Notice that I say Republicans will lose, not Democrats will win. And we have a two-party system, so that’s the same thing. But I really do mean Republicans will lose.Bacon: I want to come back to that before we finish, but let me move to—we’ve talked about Michigan mostly, but in general, Wisconsin is happening next week. We don’t know the results. We do know Hong is leading, and that one is more surprising. I knew Abdul had run before, and I knew he was a strong candidate, even if he had a base, even if he didn’t think he was going to win. Hong—I didn’t know much about her. She’s a state rep. She’s an actual socialist, which I thought would be a bug, not a feature, in Wisconsin. So talk about that campaign. Nathan, you’re there. What has happened there? What does that race tell you—about also this weird thing where Tony Evers, like, grabs someone off the street to run again, for whatever reason? What, in some ways, has this race told you about the Democratic Party?Kalmoe: Crowley isn’t quite off the street, but—Bacon: But he was out of the campaign, and, anyway, I get the point. Yes.Kalmoe: He dropped out, an establishment person dropped out, and then Crowley was in, and Evers had endorsed the guy who was out but now is in. It’s been a little bit chaotic these last couple of weeks. And now Barnes is out too.I think big picture, Hong has been really hammering home the ways that government can help people. And I think that’s been meeting people’s needs, not in a sort of affordability in a really micro sense, but in a more profound way. And it’s not really about policy proposals, necessarily. Policies are basically the heuristic, the gesture toward, I have a plan to help the people that I say that I’m going to help, and to live up to the values that I’m putting forward.Bacon: If you don’t mind, just to zero in—because she’s probably not running on free buses and a rent freeze, because it’s not New York. So what is she—she’s doing a sort of practical campaign, like Zohran, but with different issues. Can you name some of the issues?Kalmoe: Yeah, education, healthcare. Anat, you can go ahead.Shenker-Osorio: Big on $20 minimum wage, temporary moratorium on data centers, and then there’s a third one, because she knows that three is cognitive good.Bacon: That’s helpful. Go ahead, Nathan, about what’s going on there.Kalmoe: Another sort of big picture factor is that, unlike Michigan, there was really a large number of Democrats who were running, and multiple candidates who really fit the more or less more establishment. And Hong really stood out as somebody who was pushing back against that and really emphasizing this change narrative and the fight narrative. And so I think part of the story is the lack of coordination. I think there were certainly preferred candidates, but they couldn’t unite behind one candidate early enough to really give her a run for her money. And I think part of that is there were low expectations for her ability to generate real enthusiasm among Democrats.And I think actually the biggest argument against her right now is really—other Democrats have basically conceded that the kinds of ideas that she’s putting forward are what Democratic voters here in Wisconsin want, the values and the vision. And really, their main argument is an electability argument. They say—Bacon: She really doesn’t shy from calling herself a socialist, mostly, right?Kalmoe: Yep. And it’s been remarkable that they basically have given up on the substantive argument. And I hear this from people who cross the ideological spectrum, if we want to use that, after I just poo-pooed that. But people with a wide range of ideas about politics are approaching this with, I think, trepidation, because so many of us have learned—from maybe not in elementary school, but from maybe college classes, from the scholars that we hear in the news and the news media—the pundit messages are all embracing this idea of the median voter. And this myth that everybody’s going to vote, everybody has strong preferences about policy and about ideology, and you can only win if you win over the median voter. And forgetting about turnout entirely.And basically, that entire model is false. This has been around since the mid-20th century. A guy named Anthony Downs, a scholar, put this forward in An Economic Theory of Democracy, and it’s not all his fault, but people took the idea and ran with it, and I think fundamentally misunderstand politics as a result. So lots of Democrats have absorbed this conventional wisdom that I think is dangerously wrong about how elections are won and lost, and how people think about politics when they’re making these choices.And so I think Hong’s support would actually be quite a bit higher if not for people who are saying, You know what? I really want to support her, but I’m worried about the—can she actually win? And we can’t guarantee that she’s going to win. It looks like she’s going to be the nominee. But the electability arguments are based on lots of misunderstandings, and really, I don’t see a way that she’s less electable than the other candidates who are running.Bacon: I want to ask Anat about Wisconsin, but let me ask one thing before that, Anat. I read a piece by Astead Herndon—worked at The New York Times for a while, he’s now at Vox—and the piece argued that the story we’re telling about this election is like, the left candidates, or the progressives, or the insurgents, whatever the term we’re going to use, are innovating and doing really well. And he argued the actual story is the other side—establishment, whatever—they have nothing to say. And that’s what the real issue is. “What is Haley Stevens running on?” would be a hard question to answer. “What were all these people in Wisconsin running on, beyond electability?” would be hard to answer. Is that a big part of it, that the one side has things they have to say that they are proud to say, and one side has pablum? Is that actually the story that’s happening?Shenker-Osorio: I have so many things to say at once. That’s part of it. Part of it is actually—Bacon: You can’t beat something with nothing, and they have nothing.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. There’s the mechanics of the way that they are running, which is really notable in Hong’s case, and I’m happy to talk about that. And, for example, the sort of marquee people that famously just swept various New York races—talking about Brad [Lander], I’m talking about Darializa [Avila Chevalier].To put it in sort of simple, crass terms: When you don’t have to spend as much, or even any, of your time doing call time—which is famously what candidates are required to do for a certain number of hours a week, sometimes even a day, calling donors to be like, Hi, I’d like some more of that sweet, sweet cash—then you have more time to be out in the world. And the number of person-hours that Hong has spent, the number of person-hours that Mamdani spent, the number of person-hours that those other New York candidates spent, is just more time.And one mainstay that people reported back to me—and this is anecdotal—in New York, is they would just be like, “I don’t know. He was just everywhere. I would be dropping my kids off and there’d be Brad Lander,” or, “I’d be, like, at a picnic and there’d be Brad Lander.” And I’ve lived in this district for however long and I’ve never seen my elected representative. I’ve literally never seen him, so I don’t know what he’s doing, and he’s been the representative for however long.And so one of the things that Hong did, which is a really interesting model—there’s a Wisconsin consultant named Josh Clemens who does, like, down-down-down-ballot races. He also worked digital consultant for Dan Osborn, and he calls it the “backbone model.” And I won’t go into all the details, but basically, Fran was relatively unknown. You said it yourself, obviously you’re out of state, but she was a state representative from the east side of Madison, and in the rest of Wisconsin she wasn’t a big name. She had almost no money, and somehow she went from this real outlier, just in terms of the pragmatics of how you’re supposed to run a campaign and what you’re supposed to need, to becoming this front-runner. And a big piece of that was that after she was elected as a state representative, unlike everyone else, she didn’t turn off her digital advertising machine.She kept serving ads at a very low rate, but they weren’t ads. They weren’t traditional political advertising that was like, Stop right now. It’s about to be the whatever quarter, and we need this much money. The most important vote ever is happening. It would be like her at a fish fry, or her hanging out with people, or—AOC is famous for this—doing a get-ready-with-me, or doing a behind-the-scenes, “We just took a vote, this is what actually happens in Congress,” or Mamdani doing a scavenger hunt.So there’s a big difference between political advertising and content—and making content that people actually want to watch, that doesn’t, on the face of it, look political, but actually is a get-to-know-you, establishes a brand. It establishes a relationship. Because the mistake that these mainstream consultants have been making—forget ideology for a second—Bacon: Or even policy. OK.Shenker-Osorio: They have misunderstood, I would argue, the practice of politics, as being: Hold all of your money, hold all of your fire until October, because most voters are low information, they’re paying no attention—that’s true—and do endless RCT, randomized control trial testing, and come up with a spreadsheet of, this ad did best, this ad did best, this ad did best, this ad did best. None of those ads together tell a story. This one is about healthcare, this one is about the bus, this one is about taxes, this one is about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and there is no establishment of a story and a brand.That does not work, because in reality, the way that people make political decisions, especially low information people, is on the basis of an impressionistic feeling and whether or not they get a sense of belonging, whether or not the people in their milieu are also—the guy, to take the New York example, my bodega owner keeps talking about this Mamdani guy. I don’t know who he is, but it seems like the bodega owner’s really into him. And so in Hong’s case—not a lot of bodegas, some in Madison, some in Milwaukee, but for the most part—it’s like she shows up to things. She does content, not advertising. She has been doing this the entire time she was in office. She’s running a better campaign.And so with that, that means that she is going to run a better campaign for the general election, because that is what she has been doing. And does that mean that I’m sure she’s going to win? I’m not sure of anything. I’m not sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, but that is a good indicator. I maybe have wandered away from your question unintentionally. I get very passionate about this.Bacon: I have even forgotten what my question was, but that’s OK. But I like the answer, and I feel like it was very informative. Oh, I did—the question was along the lines of: Is the story of the last year and a half, New York campaign, these campaigns, that the insurgent candidates are running well, which you explained very well? Or that the mainstream candidates are running blandly, which you didn’t get into as much, but they’re not doing the things you talk about? I think the answer to the question is yes, but I was just trying to—is the story here that politicians are behaving well, or are politicians behaving boringly? And that’s what I’m trying to tease out, what’s driving the results here.Shenker-Osorio: Part of it is boring. Part of it is, the piece of advice that I give to everyone the world over, that is the most obvious statement that I ever make but somehow cannot be internalized by most people, is that a message that nobody hears, by definition, cannot persuade them.And so when they are perfectly calibrating these 80-word or 100-word statements that are crafted toward this median voter, or whatever the name of Chuck Schumer’s make-believe family. I don’t know, they’re so boring to me, I can’t remember their names.Bacon: I can’t remember their names, yes. I’ve read this article a few times. Yes.Shenker-Osorio: I can’t remember their names, this made-up family he is pitching to—which is perfect, both literally and as a metaphor for everything. Nobody hears what you’re saying, because politics, modern life, is such a cacophony that if you are not actually saying—when you’re Mamdani, you’re questioned about, you’ve said you’re going to tax the rich, you’re going to tax the rich, you’re going to tax the rich, and so you’re asked on The View, people are saying that you’re anti-billionaire, and instead of demurring, he says, “I don’t think billionaires should exist.”Part of wanting to get heard is that you actually have to say something that makes people go, “What?” and stop scrolling. And you have to recognize that if you’re running a campaign, there’s going to be conflict. You’re going to be attacked by the people who oppose you. And so rather than get freaked out by that, you have to figure out how to turn that back into a way to keep talking about your issues. You have to remember the rule of three. You have to make it seem like voting for you could make a tangible difference in people’s lives, rather than just simply belabor their problems.And the problem with the standard Democratic practice, which seems to be that they think they’re on an episode of Price Is Right, and they just keep saying, Can you see how expensive this is? Can you see how expensive this is? Can you see how expensive this is?—I guess because this is the first time they’ve ever been to a grocery store and not had a helper do it for them, they’re suddenly clued in. People don’t need you to tell them how expensive things are. They actually shop for themselves. They know. So what they need is to feel like voting for you could resolve that problem, if only a little bit. It’s not enough just to name the problem.And so yeah, it’s about not being boring. It’s about being able to actually present something. And it’s about demonstrating that you’re actually going to fight back, because if you won’t fight back, how will you make any of these things into law?Bacon: I’m going to close with a tweet—I’m on X, so this is an X comment from a professor. His name is Keith Oragel—I hope I’m pronouncing his name right—but I like what he said, so I’m going to read it to you. “Yes, if it’s a massive blue wave and Dems win everywhere but El-Sayed and Hong lose, then lefties will have to face some real tough realities about electability in swing states. But that has not happened, and I remain optimistic they will win.”And so the question I want to get at is, are these—like Wisconsin and Michigan, if the two candidates we’re talking about win—are these really high stakes races, in this way he’s implying? Is the AOC presidential campaign, or the Ro Khanna one, kind of dependent upon the results here? So talk about these campaigns and what the implications of them are. I’ll start with you, Nathan.Kalmoe: Yeah. So, good question. Obviously, people are going to—people always take election results and interpret them, often in ways that reinforce the way they already thought. This is going to sound like a dodge, but I think we’re going to learn a lot about what is possible from a range of elections this year. But no one election is really definitive as to whether things made a difference or not, because you don’t ever get to see the counterfactual, right? We will never see—assuming, let’s say, Hong gets the nomination in Wisconsin—we’ll never see Barnes or Crowley or Boyd or others in a similar position. And we can speculate, but we don’t really have strong evidence to suggest otherwise.So really, what Grumbach and Bonica are doing in their analysis, it’s hard to wrap our minds around, because these individual cases are so salient. But really, you have to look at the constellation of all the results to find what would be small differences, but actually it turns out are really, really quite small. I think the best evidence that would be more definitive from these elections is if Hong, El-Sayed, and others who are similar do as well as we would expect a standard Democrat to do. I think that’s a really strong proof of concept for progressive candidates, for progressive groups. Again, it sounds like a dodge, but if they lose and it’s close, and it’s basically where we would expect a standard Democrat to perform, I don’t think that is a definitive knock against their candidate or the ideas or the vision that they’re putting forward.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, two things. One, Fran Hong is a working-class candidate. Not a cosplay, not a make-believe—she grew up in her parents’ restaurants, not for funsies, but because that is what they needed in order to survive. She didn’t finish college so that she could go home and help her parents work in that restaurant, and she eventually became a restaurateur herself. She has famously held two jobs, both on the Capitol Square: the restaurant, which is located there, and the state legislature, which is also located there.So I guess if she loses, we can conclude that actually people don’t want working-class candidates. But that’s not what we’re going to conclude, is it? Because somehow Graham Platner is manna from the heavens when he is a cosplaying fisherman, but she is not. So that’s just my little snark aside.My non-snark aside, or non-aside, is that this electability conversation is, in and of itself—to the extent that voters, that normie voters are paying attention to anything that it is we are saying, and thank God they are not, because they are too low information to be inside baseball—it is itself detrimental to the cause of getting Democrats elected, period. And that is because, again, people do the thing they think people like them do. And so if low information people are inhabiting a milieu, like they did largely speaking in 2018, where the vibe and the thing to do and what everyone believes and is doing is, I’m going to go, I’m going to vote even though I never do in midterms, or I never do, period, and I’m going to get rid of these MAGA bastards, then that’s what other people do.And that is in fact the dominant discourse that we require—whether that is to elect a Fran Hong, or whether that is to elect a Dan Goldman, whomever—is, voters are turning out in record numbers. Your vote is your ice whistle, blow it. Your vote is your gas bill, lower it. Your vote is your healthcare premium, slash it. Your vote is your body, protect it. And that’s what people like me do. And so shame on the people who are introducing an argument that Democrats could possibly lose. That is a silly thing to do, across the board. It is not something we should be doing for moderate candidates. It’s not something we should be doing for insurgent candidates. We need to be reinforcing the behavior that we actually desire.Bacon: I want to repeat that just so the audience makes sure they hear it. I would not vote for Haley Stevens, Perry Bacon, but I am not going around saying Haley Stevens cannot win, because I want Haley Stevens to win if she is the nominee. So I’m not saying she’s a weirdo people wouldn’t vote for, because I want people to vote for her if necessary. So please, if you’re listening, whatever centrist you are, saying you don’t agree with Abdul on policy, don’t vote for him—in the primary, that’s fine. Abdul is a weirdo who can’t win the general election is not helpful. Please stop saying this. Particularly since the Muslim candidate is going to be hurt worse by the sort of vague, “unelectable,” what have you, things.We’ve got to get away from this kind of discourse. I’ve been trying to write a lot about saying, having every primary be about electability is problematic. And I’d much rather—even Israel policy, while being divisive, is still not a divide that is suggesting if you vote for this person, it is not normal to do. We want people to think voting for the Democratic candidate is normal, no matter which one they are, and I don’t know how we get out of this. I guess I’ll ask you about this: Is there a way to get out of the primaries being about electability? I guess that’s easy for the progressive to say that, but is there a way to—I’m not a centrist, but is there a way to get centrists to run on centrism, as opposed to the progressives are weird? Because the progressives are weird is a toxic argument.Kalmoe: Yeah. I just wanted to reinforce what Anat was saying, that Democrats, if they want to win, need to stop being so terrified about what Republicans are going to say about them, and really focus on what they say about themselves and make Republicans afraid of what we’re going to say about them. Because they’re running as extremists, insurrectionists, people who support pedophiles. It’s pretty shocking to come up against them and feel like we’re the ones who should be afraid of what they’re going to say about us.Shenker-Osorio: Is there a way to make them stop? No. And I think the fact that they will not stop is them telling on themselves. Because—Bacon: They might prefer to lose than to win without being in charge.Shenker-Osorio: That’s the even meaner version, which I agree with. If you can’t run on your actual policies, if you can’t run on—what do we want, incremental change? When do we want it? Whenever I get around to it. If that can’t be your campaign slogan, which even you know it can’t be, then the only thing you can run on is, that person can’t win.Kalmoe: Yes.Shenker-Osorio: And so that has to be their campaign message, because the thing that they are actually selling themselves is, unfortunately, a lighter version of what voters are not that into. And so that’s what they got. And regardless, even still, this is a wave year. It is going to be a blue tsunami. This may be the Berkeley, or the Bay Area, in me, but you need to speak into existence the thing you want to occur—not for woo-woo reasons, but because humans are primates, we are social creatures, and we do the thing that people like us do. And so what people like us are going to do, come November, is send these pedophile protectors, this MAGA murder regime of the bullies for the billionaires, packing, to try to save our own lives. That is what we are going to do, and that is what we should be saying.Kalmoe: And it’s not going to be just the advertising that does that. It’s really—politics is relational and social, and it’s all of you out there talking to your friends, and them talking to their friends, and knocking on doors, that is going to make the difference.Bacon: Nathan, Anat, thanks for joining me. Great place to end on. Good to see you all.Shenker-Osorio: Great to see you.Kalmoe: Thank you. Thanks, Perry.