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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Could the oil industry be held responsible for fueling the extreme heat that led to a woman’s death? That’s the question at the heart of a novel lawsuit in Washington state. Misti Leon’s mother died from overheating during the hottest day in state history […]

Trump’s war in Iran has cratered his approval on cost of living and created new toss-up races. The president gave one of the war's architects, Lindsey Graham, the embarrassing send-off he deserves.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 29 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.Donald Trump just unleashed a barrage of unhinged threats toward Iran in a new interview with Fox News. He threatened to bomb all Iran’s bridges and power plants, and said explicitly that the entire population of Iran might soon be without electric power.There’s a temptation to dismiss moments like these as bluster. But we can’t let ourselves lose sight of what exactly he’s threatening to do, just how sociopathic these threats really are, and just how terrible it is that the media is now largely numb to them. This all comes as some MAGA figures are warning against escalation in some surprising new ways as well.So we’re trying to make sense of it all with former State Department official Emily Horne. Emily, always good to have you on.Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.Sargent: OK, so we’re in this weird holding pattern where Trump has held off on escalating and he just keeps making all these threats, and he keeps saying Iran is desperate to talk to him. Yet at the same time, the reporting indicates that in reality the Iranians are not in any rush to talk to Trump at all. Emily, can you sum up the situation as of now?Horne: The TLDR on that, to use bureaucratic terms, is that Iran has all of the leverage and all of the momentum at this moment in the conflict. I think they’ve shown that there’s a real willingness on their end to pass the cost of this war to the Iranian people, which, as terrible as that is, is a major asset for them. They are not particularly troubled by their own people’s suffering. And that, plus their control of the Strait of Hormuz, gives them a lot of incentives to maintain the status quo, and a lot of leverage over the status of negotiations.They also continue to have a nuclear program, because Trump walked away from the JCPOA in his first term. So no matter what Trump has said at various points in Trump II about obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, again, that is something that Iran has as a bargaining chip, and they have been very clear that they’re going to control the direction of the conversation moving forward.Sargent: Why is it that they don’t seem to fear Trump escalating, exactly?Horne: I think part of it is that, again, they have the leverage here. As you and I have talked about before, this is an existential conflict for the IRGC. Many of them have lost family members, have already suffered greatly; they have already inflicted a great deal of suffering on the Iranian people. And so there’s a tremendous sunk cost that has already been absorbed by the IRGC in this conflict. And from their perspective, maintenance of the status quo is fine by them—as much as that continues to put Trump in an impossible position, because again, he just doesn’t have a lot of leverage at this point.But also, their strategy has been working for them. They don’t just control the strait, they are able to inflict a great deal of pain on the broader Middle East region, including by attacking tech infrastructure like data centers, attacking desalinization plants in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, attacking civilian infrastructure across the Middle East. And that again sends a signal that it is Iran’s momentum at this point in the conflict, not the U.S.’s.Sargent: Well, in that context, let’s check out something Trump just said on Fox News. He starts by saying, I could knock out all the power plants, then it keeps going from there. Listen to this.Donald Trump (voiceover): I could knock out the power plants within one day. All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. They say, look—people want me to do that. I think about 91 million people without power, without bridges, with that to live. And it’s a very, very delicate balance. So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal. The bridges are going to be gone. Literally, in less than a—I would say in two hours, most of the bridges, the major bridges, will all be gone. And the power plants in one day.Sargent: Emily, I could be wrong, but I think this might be the first time that Trump has explicitly said not only that he’d knock out all the power plants, but also clarified that he really means knocking out electricity for all of Iran’s 91 million people. He said that. And that would be like a humanitarian catastrophe of unthinkable proportions. What would actually happen if he did that?Horne: So if Trump were to follow through on his threats to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants en masse, then you would likely see an immediate and mass humanitarian crisis that would affect at minimum tens of millions of people. Remember, Iran has a population of almost 91 million people, many of whom are outside of the center capital of Tehran. And so the power grid in Iran is already deeply stressed. Power plants and desalinization plants—which are so critical to Iran’s ability to function, with their limited access to freshwater—those are already deeply stressed as a result of this war.You would likely see a collapse of Iran’s already stressed health system because of those effects, when you have tens of millions of people who are dangerously dehydrated, don’t have clean water to drink; diseases and waterborne illnesses will be spiking as sanitation is failing. You would likely see supply chain disruption from all sorts of civilian infrastructure destruction, including things like damaged roads, which would probably cause a spike in food prices. There are already millions of people internally displaced within Iran. The latest estimate that I could find is from April, and that estimates 3.2 million people.The humanitarian crisis already is so dangerous that tens of thousands of Afghan refugees—who fled Afghanistan to find safety from the Taliban and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan by going to Iran—are now returning to Afghanistan. That’s how bad the current humanitarian crisis is. And so you can only imagine how much worse it would quickly become were Trump to undertake these strikes that he is threatening.Sargent: I just want to make one other point about this. I think in the West, in advanced democracies like ours, we think to ourselves, OK, knock out a power plant, it could just get back up and running pretty quickly. But that really isn’t the case here. It would sort of depend on what exactly Trump did. But if he really decided to make good on his threat—and again, he said this on the air on national television—if he really decided to knock out power for 91 million people and really demolish a whole lot of power plants, it would take probably months, if they were lucky, to get them back up and running. So we’re talking about a humanitarian crisis that would extend for months and months and months, right?Horne: Absolutely. Probably years, probably generations, in fact—especially if you’re widening the aperture to talk about things like the effects of having tens of millions of people turned into refugees in their own country. I mean, that’s tens of millions of lives that are permanently disrupted. And the ripple effects of that are absolutely staggering to comprehend.But I also want to make another point here, that what he is proposing is a war crime under both international humanitarian and human rights law, and importantly under U.S. law.Sargent: It really would be. And I think another point to get out about this is that Trump is talking about knocking out power for all these 91 million people as if to kind of say, I’d be reluctant to take such a step. The tone is as if he’s being humane by saying that. But I really want to underscore this aspect of it. In saying this, he actually stated straight out that knocking out power for 91 million people is something he’s giving serious consideration to. Listen to that clip. At the end, he says, I will do this if Iran doesn’t do my bidding.Now, I think a lot of reporters hear this and say, he won’t do it, that’s a lot of bluster. But I don’t think that’s the right way to react. We should be saying, it’s unfathomably sociopathic that he’s even considering it, and an American president shouldn’t be talking this way. What do you think?Horne: Well, as with so many things with the second Trump administration, multiple things are true simultaneously. So again, I cannot be clear enough about this: what Donald Trump is talking about here would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. Intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure like power plants—universally, human rights attorneys and organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International agree that threatening electricity, water, health care, other civilian infrastructure is a war crime. So that’s point one.Point two, I think, yes—maybe someone on his staff got to him and made him realize that what you’re talking about is something that would be enormously disruptive to a country of 91 million souls, in addition to being outright illegal, and that that would have devastating humanitarian consequences that the United States, under your leadership, would be responsible for.But then there’s also a third part here that I think is important to call out, which is, you know, Trump has threatened many times during this conflict—as recently as a week ago—to bomb civilian infrastructure like bridges and power plants and desalinization plants. And there have been strikes that have hit, reportedly, some Iranian civilian infrastructure, that have caused some disruptions to things like water supplies to Iranian villages, but nothing at the scale of what he’s talking about. He hasn’t really done it. And the more that he talks about it but doesn’t do it, the more he sends a signal to the Iranians, but also to the global community, that he is all bluster—that there is no strategy here other than going on Fox and Friends and bragging about how big his bombs are. Which, I’m sorry, that’s not actually a strategy. And it’s certainly not going to be effective against the IRGC when, as we talked about before, they have most of the leverage in our current state of play.Sargent: Even this is alarming as well, because the logic of it doesn’t lead to a good place. Donald Trump doesn’t want to end this whole thing in humiliation—that’s the big thing we know about this. It’s been reported that he’s urged his own advisors to find some way, any way at all, for him to be able to say that he got more out of Iran than Obama got during the nuclear negotiations of 2015. And the idea that that’s what’s motivating him is just completely unthinkably loony. But putting that aside, Trump does not want this to end with him looking bad. He wants to walk out either looking incredibly strong and powerful, or with a world historical victory, or with some combination of that.And so if he keeps opening the door to these really heinous war crimes, I fear that if Iran keeps kind of poking him and stringing him along, there may come a point at which he’s willing to do it. Is that unreasonable?Horne: That’s the question. And I don’t know that anyone knows the answer to it, to be honest. Look, I think a week ago, this is what he was threatening to do. And the conditions were, as he wrote on social media on July 22—which, incidentally, was the day of the dignified transfer of four Americans who had been killed in the conflict, at Dover—he wrote on Truth Social that any time Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant in Iran. And now, a week later, he’s going on Fox and Friends and saying that instead it is, we will bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran if there’s not a deal. And he’s not specifying what he wants in that deal. But if you listen to the full clip, he immediately starts talking about how Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.Now, I’m always very reluctant to zoom in on any one particular Trump talking point and say, that’s it, that’s the new strategy—because frankly, most of the time, I don’t think he knows what the hell he’s even talking about. But it is kind of a tell to me that a week ago he was talking about Iranian missile or drone attacks on ships in Hormuz, and now he’s talking about Iran’s nuclear program and not talking about the Strait of Hormuz. And that says to me, maybe his attention has moved on, maybe he’s gotten bored, maybe there’s a part of him that realizes that he can’t do anything meaningfully to change Iran’s dominance of the strait without incurring very serious U.S. military costs—that this war is incredibly unpopular, and it’s a real albatross around his neck as Republicans approach midterms. And he’s got to figure out a way to tie a bow on this that makes it look like there’s something he can claim as victory, to your point.Sargent: Yes, and that’s not going to be easy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump Tuesday. Many MAGA figures are upset about this, fearing that a meeting will push Trump into escalating, and they don’t want Trump to do Israel’s bidding. Steve Bannon told Politico, “All of Trump’s most ardent non-Israel First supporters are furious.” Bannon called it a disaster for America First. Curt Mills of The American Conservative called it “DEFCON 1” and warned that Bibi will “argue for the essential logic of escalation.” And meanwhile, new polling shows a large chunk of MAGA turning on the war. What do you make of all that, Emily?Horne: Well, one, I think it’s really important to note that a big chunk of that strain of MAGA that you just identified is coming at this from a really virulent and ugly antisemitic place. And we need to be really precise about separating out what is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu’s approach to this conflict—versus something that does veer into a really, really ugly place that none of us should want to go. So I want to draw that distinction there.But that aside, I think it’s really telling that there is not agreement within MAGA, within the Republican Party, on the best way out of this own goal that is Trump’s Iran war, his forever war, really. And even Trump alluded to this himself in his Fox interview this morning, where he talked about how there are elements of the Republican Party that want this to be over and done with, as midterms are approaching and everyone’s aware of how wildly unpopular this war is—how, as members of Congress are going back to their districts for August recess, they’re going to be getting an earful about gas prices and forever wars and politicians who are focused on the wrong thing. And that there’s a continual hawkish wing that wants this war to just keep on going until, question mark, because again, there’s no strategy here. Nobody knows what Trump’s endgame is or what the strategy is. They’re clearly just making it up as they go along. And the only answer that they have for “the bombs haven’t worked so far” is more bombs.And I’m sorry, but it’s pretty darn clear at this point that you cannot bomb your way out of this war, that Iran is not going to give up its nuclear program because of air pressure, that they’re not going to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz because they’re getting attacked from the air. I think the only things that are ultimately going to get to a resolution on the nuclear issue are, one, what we already had—an agreement like the JCPOA that includes international monitoring and inspection to enforce its terms—or two, a big honking ground war that commits a lot of U.S. troops in perpetuity to a Trump-Iran war that I do not think anybody, even Donald Trump, has the appetite for.So it’s really hard to see how this ends, but the best-case scenario is something like a return to the status quo that Obama had for us. You know, I was in the White House when the JCPOA was being negotiated, and we got a lot of criticism for it at the time from a lot of different voices in the Republican Party. And it’s really fascinating now to hear a lot of those same voices—maybe not in their outside voice, but in their inside voice—starting to come up with something that, boy, sounds an awful lot like the deal that we all had ten years ago.Sargent: Yeah, that is pretty funny. To your point about how we’ve got to be precise about what MAGA is actually motivated by here—it’s worth saying that MAGA certainly doesn’t care about Iranians and whether they suffer through a humanitarian catastrophe or not. They have their own set of reasons, which you alluded to, for not wanting an escalation here. I think there might be some elements of MAGA that are genuinely not for foreign entanglements and so forth, but a lot of it is really polluted with ugly sentiments, as you said. All that aside, when they hear Donald Trump talking about knocking out bridges and knocking out power plants, they too—meaning MAGA, again for their own reasons—I think probably say, shit, man, we’re really headed for an escalation here.Horne: Look, and it is Americans that are paying the price for this war. I mean, obviously the Iranian people, as we have talked about at great length, are suffering tremendously. But this war has cost American taxpayers more than a hundred billion. It’s driven up energy prices. It’s contributed to global instability that is making everything more expensive. And last week the Trump administration went to Congress asking for another $350 billion to keep it going.Meanwhile, our missile stockpiles have been massively depleted in a scarily short period of time, which leaves us incredibly vulnerable for the possible wars and conflicts of the future. And this bomb-and-hope strategy that Trump keeps on touting on Fox and Friends—it isn’t a real plan. Iran’s already survived months of American bombing campaigns. And I see no evidence that more airstrikes, or bigger airstrikes, are going to eliminate their nuclear ambitions, or force them to surrender the Strait of Hormuz, or dislodge the new regime that is in place in Tehran. The only thing that more bombs are going to do is prolong this war, further destabilize the Middle East, and continue to drive up costs for everyday Americans.Sargent: And paradoxically, I think that that dynamic actually points to the real possibility that he does end up bombing things like bridges and power plants. He may get it into his head that it’s the way the bombing was happening that essentially wasn’t forcing Iran’s hand. And it can’t possibly be that Iran can’t be bullied into this, for reasons that are intelligible if you actually put yourself in their heads, right? He can’t think that way. So he can only think, I need more force. And I just think we can’t really rule out the possibility that he makes good on some of these threats to start destroying infrastructure.Horne: Unfortunately, I suspect that you may be right about that. We can’t rule it out. And one dangerous element that we haven’t talked about in this conversation is that Trump has systematically weeded out any military advisor who is capable of telling him, Mr. President, that is not going to achieve the impact that you hope it will, or, that’s not a good idea. All of those people who are capable of speaking truth to power and speaking from their years of military experience have been forced out of our armed forces, or are essentially in hiding, because they know that to challenge the king is to end your career and possibly invite a whole host of retribution on your head. It’s an incredibly dangerous scenario where no one can tell the mad king that his decisions are not good ones.Sargent: Boy, it’s really grim when you put it like that. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack. It’s called Spin Class. Emily, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.Horne: Thanks, Greg.

A photo went viral on Independence Day this year. It showed a Black woman on a Metro train in Washington, DC, surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a far-right white nationalist group. The picture, taken on America’s 250th anniversary, seemed to encapsulate not only the continuing story of race in America, but also this current […]

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 28 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Jonathan Guyer. He’s the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs. He’s also been a great writer about foreign policy for a long time, most notably at The American Prospect and at Vox, and he has a new piece out about AOC that we’ll get into in a bit. But Jonathan, welcome. Thanks for joining me.Jonathan Guyer: Great to be with you, Perry.Bacon: So the piece you wrote recently, that we’re going to talk about, is called “AOC Meets World,” and it was in Foreign Policy very recently. So give us an overall sense of what made you decide to write about AOC’s foreign policy? I think there’s obvious reasons, but what made you kind of want to write about her in terms of foreign policy context?Guyer: I think she represents this leftward tilt of the Democratic Party, and also—I don’t want to say the failure, but the ambiguousness of the left’s foreign policy. I think the left, and a couple of the experts in the piece said this, has not always had a great strategy when it comes to foreign policy. It’s been a big question mark. And I think if you talk to people in and out of Washington, they’ll say, I don’t really know what AOC’s foreign policy is. Which is, I don’t think, entirely correct. I think she has a pretty developed worldview. She’s taken a lot of positions on Gaza, on Latin America.But the impetus for this piece is, I think she is really dipping her toe into world affairs. She spoke at this major foreign policy conference in February, the Munich Security Conference, which is where the contenders for the next primaries go and sort of strut their stuff. Gretchen Whitmer was there, a number of other muckety-mucks. So the idea that this was her first time there—and my reporting showed that she’d been invited before in 2020, decided not to go. She’s really associated with this DSA grassroots push to take care of her constituents in New York, focus on domestic policy.But I think, as we’ve seen with the Democratic Party over the past decade, you can’t really separate domestic policy and foreign policy. You and I have had a lot of these conversations over the years. You can’t separate them. The way America conducts itself domestically reflects its role in the world. So I think part of this piece was trying to figure out, how does one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, the most popular or among the most popular possible candidates for the next presidential—how is she figuring out who she is? And it’s not like she fell out of a—what is it—a coconut tree, like Kamala said.Bacon: Yeah, I was going to say.Guyer: She has a very developed worldview, AOC. It’s just, she’s, I think, a really all-star politician, carefully messaging and developing strategies and talking with some very intelligent people. But obviously, there’s a lot we can get into here.Bacon: So the thing that struck me by you saying is—we’ve had this sort of, I don’t want to say new left, but this sort of more developed progressivism, that started with Sanders’ 2016 campaign and grows from there. That has mostly been focused, I would argue, on domestic politics—Medicare for All, anti-billionaires, anti-plutocracy. I would say the first seven, eight years of that was really focused on that. But I would argue in some ways now, the leading issue, or one of the leading issues of that, is a foreign policy issue. I would say the war in Gaza. And it’s a critique of both the Republicans, but also it’s a critique of the Biden administration and centrist Democrats. So I don’t know if the left has a foreign policy vision. It certainly has a vision on that foreign policy issue, I would say. You agree?Guyer: I would even broaden it a little bit, in that the domestic issues that AOC is most associated with, like you say—fighting against the oligarchy, she joined this tour with Bernie Sanders. Climate, Green New Deal. Immigration. Obviously, a member of the squad who pushed back, part of that resistance in Trump 1.0. Those are actually global issues. None of those are really domestic alone.And I think there’s been this kind of job of the great monks of Washington foreign policy to cordon off domestic and foreign policy—and this has been going on since the Cold War—and saying to the young guns like AOC and many others, Hey, leave foreign policy to us. We’re the experts. And I think what she does when she goes to Munich is she takes all of these dynamics that have been a big part of her career—as youngest member of Congress to be elected as a woman, someone who is part of that kind of Democratic contender who ousted an incumbent and represented all this—and said, Hey, fighting the oligarchy is part of foreign policy, and is part of the reason we have a Trump presidency for the second time. That’s part one.The second part is, I think on Gaza, she’s largely been consistent. I went back—one of her first interviews, I think she wasn’t even elected yet, she had just won the primary—was on PBS, and she described a massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, and obviously setting in the structural dynamics, what’s been happening in Gaza, has been an occupation and violence for several decades. So she kind of said this and got incredible pushback, and also wasn’t really fully briefed on it. I think she had the right message, but couldn’t explain it right to a TV audience. To her credit, she was a newly minted contender, and so forth.So part of this piece was trying to figure out, how did she go from there to now, where I think she has a pretty developed point of view on Gaza and has gotten a lot of flak from the right, a lot of flak from the left. But I’d say if you look at her messaging over time, it’s been pretty consistent. So when she warns of famine in Gaza in 2024, when she’s put out some very strong criticism of the Biden administration or the Trump administration, or when she goes to Munich and calls what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—it’s not really part of this new left moment. It’s part of a progression over time, where she has been trying to bring in some of these principles towards US foreign policy. And I think, as we know, principles and US foreign policy don’t always mix, for worse, I would say.Bacon: I want to separate out a little bit what the left is doing and what AOC is doing—those are related—and then come back together a little bit. So I do see Gaza as a seminal issue of left foreign policy right now. Do you agree?Guyer: I do, yeah. And I think it’s like a new Vietnam, and a litmus test, and there’s only one right answer, I would say, for the left and for the new generation of DSA contenders who are trying to shape not just domestic policy, but foreign policy.Bacon: And a related question—there’s a piece in The New Yorker about the Biden foreign policy. And so I think you’re also seeing this issue, but I’m curious what you make of it, is what I perceive as an effort almost to say that Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, the architects of Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, should be disqualified from membership in Democratic leadership in the future. They shouldn’t get these big jobs in the future. That’s my sense of what’s going on. Talk about that a little bit, in terms of what the left is trying to do about the people who were involved in Biden’s foreign policy.Guyer: Absolutely. So I’d say this even came from Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii—I think he said something like this, and others have said that. I think a lot of the grassroots organizing groups—and there’s a whole left quotient of kind of Project 2020-whatever that’s going to shape the next presidency—are saying, We have to get rid of these advisors who enabled some of the most heinous war crimes of this century so far, that were done with US weapons and US leadership backing the Israeli government headed by Netanyahu.And I think what we’re seeing at the same time are the Biden personnel, the senior leadership who had been involved in Middle East policy since the Obama years—secretary of State Blinken, Jake Sullivan, many of their kind of top lieutenants—and this is my analysis here—seem to be saying, This was really President Biden’s decision. We were trying to figure out the best way to manage this and work with Israel under all these constraints. But I would say—and this isn’t uniquely AOC—but this changing US public opinion, changing views of the MAGA right, changing perspectives of Israel and the world, actually has totally changed the way that I think the next president could deal with Israel, could deal with Palestine and the Middle East. So those old constraints have fallen by the wayside, but we’re seeing many Biden alumni doing a bit of reinterpretation and saying, “We did the best with what we had,” and so forth.It’s a really contentious moment. And if you look at who’s advising AOC, it is not these people. It is a lot of the strongest critics of the Biden administration—namely Matt Duss, who’s someone who writes sometimes for The New Republic and has been a Bernie advisor—Bacon: Has been here on this show. Yeah.Guyer: —and so forth. I figured. Yeah, exactly.Bacon: And to come back to—I guess I’m going to ask you, as a person who follows foreign policy: Jake Sullivan was probably—the national security advisor is rarely the same person twice. The secretary of state is rarely the same person twice. So Tony Blinken was not likely to be secretary of state in 2029, no matter what. So what are we really talking about here in terms of who is not going to get a job, who would’ve otherwise? Because I don’t think those two people would’ve got those jobs even if there wasn’t a Gaza policy.Guyer: I think we’re talking about two things, Perry. One is the Biden legacy, which is really important. This was a guy who, when it came to economic populism, was trying to be the next FDR, and this Gaza tragedy threatens to upend the entire Biden legacy. So we’re going to have memoirs from the former president, from Tony Blinken, from other senior advisors coming out this fall, and they’re all going to be grappling with, what does that mean?But spinning it forward, what we saw in the Obama years is everyone kind of moved up a notch. Blinken, Sullivan—they were all kind of deputies, and then they became the principals. And there’s a huge possibility that Mr. Sullivan could be the next secretary of state, could be a UN ambassador.Bacon: You think still?Guyer: Depending on who’s the—you know, if it’s a very traditional Democrat, if it’s a Gavin Newsom—Bacon: Josh Shapiro, yeah.Guyer: Exactly. But if we have a Jon Ossoff, or, who knows, any number of progressives—people are angling. And this is the off-season, everyone’s favorite game of not just who are going to be the next presidential contenders, but who are the advisors and who’s in good standing. When I interviewed Mr. Sullivan several years ago, before Biden even was the heir apparent, he hadn’t even chosen which candidate. He was advising Klobuchar. He was advising Biden. It was kind of different times.So we’re still way before that consolidation, and it actually gives the Democrats a really unique moment right now, with the midterms coming up, to say, big picture, conceptually, what does this party represent foreign policy-wise? Because a year and a half from now, there’s not going to be time to deal with these nitty-gritty issues. It’s going to be a bruising fight to take the White House. So right now, you’re seeing the biggest grand strategy questions of, should the US be a moral force for good? Should we go into some sort of more realist tack? Should we focus more on the Western Hemisphere? These are pretty big questions that don’t actually get discussed a whole lot. But I do think people like the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, with the clarity he speaks with on Gaza, has forced a discussion, among others. But there is a real foreign policy debate happening among Democrats, which is not always happening, right?Bacon: Not at all. And so it seems to me AOC’s foreign policy—if I was just watching the speech in Munich, or the speeches in Munich, I get the idea. The idea is that the oligarchy and the authoritarianism and the democratic decline we’re seeing around the world is in part tied to economic policy around the world that is rewarding—the decline of the middle class is helping, around the world, is helping lead to oligarchy, dictatorship. And so therefore, we need to address the economic conditions around the world if we want to address the... In other words, the democracy threat that Biden talked about a lot is also about oligarchy, and you have to fight the oligarchy to restore democracy. Is that essentially what we’re talking about here?Guyer: Yeah. That’s a big part of what she talked about in these couple different kind of Q&A sessions. I think that message irked some on the left, that thought it was a little bit too black and white, good and bad. But on the other hand, many people thought this was a really strong message. I interviewed this former head of the Center for American Progress and Obama ambassador Patrick Gaspard, who is now advising Mamdani, and he actually said, “Look at this other moment from her time in Germany.”She was in Berlin. She was speaking to a more centrist group at a university forum, and someone challenged her on Gaza, saying, This is a pro-Israel party platform you’re speaking with. What are you doing here? And she said, “If we don’t go together, we all fall apart. We have to unite the left, the liberals, the kind of social left.” And so that was another message that might’ve gotten lost in all of... It’s tough to be AOC. You’re a lightning rod for every piece of racist vitriol, every misogynistic racist. Some of the criticism has very little to do with the substance. But on the substance, I thought that was another interesting foreign policy message—we don’t need a moral purity test, we need to unite to beat the Republican Party in the next election.Bacon: So I think Biden would’ve agreed we need a big tent, and that’s the kind of—he was trying to unite people around the world. I think the point where I think it’s different is, I don’t think Biden necessarily would’ve said the cause of authoritarianism is wage stagnation, oligarchy. Or maybe he said that, but it was at the 2020 front. I think at the beginning, he was saying the cause of authoritarianism was, like, people not respecting democracy, people like Putin, people like Trump. I think he was more individualistic and less—AOC is making—I’m not sure Biden would necessarily forcefully disagree with it, but I think AOC’s making a more class-based foreign policy point than Biden would’ve. Is that correct?Guyer: That’s right. And she declined to do an interview with me for this profile. But I spoke with a lot of people around her, allies, advisors, and so forth, and that kind of working-class foreign policy was something people kept coming back to. And it’s something we’ve seen from other members of the squad. I think it resonates a lot. Graham Platner has now been fully disgraced, but what he represented was, is there a working-class foreign policy here?The other thing I would add, Perry—and it’s something that is, I think, a distinction from the Biden administration—was she was drawing connections between all these different theaters of war, and saying, what the US is doing in Venezuela or Cuba, Gaza, Europe—these are all connected. We can’t separate these out when the US is using economic sanctions as a tool of first resort. That connects Iran to Venezuela. And there’s a bigger story that she’s telling that I think Democrats have long struggled to make, because—not to dumb it down—but foreign policy is complicated. It’s hard to tell one big story. And I think the US has such an entrenched military-industrial complex, so many bases and drone strikes and all this stuff, it’s hard to imagine a world where the US is an unambiguous force for good. And I don’t think she’s actually saying that. She’s trying to narrow where there’s things that can be changed, and parallels between these different conflicts.Bacon: So I, as someone who liked AOC and maybe is biased toward her, thought the coverage of her speech was very fixated on, did she use the right foreign policy code words on Taiwan and so on. Do you think she is someone who needs a lot of training in this area? Or, in my view, she’s being policed by the foreign policy establishment that doesn’t agree with her and is looking to police her gaffes on the code words, because they don’t agree with her broader vision? What do you think?Guyer: No, I agree with you.Bacon: Could be both, by the way.Guyer: And I’m not trying to be a cheerleader for her, as a kind of—Bacon: I know you’re not. Yeah.Guyer: —a reporter. I want to weigh all the different criticisms, left and right, speak with all the people around her, understand how she came out at this place. But yeah, I think there was a real emphasis on the supposed gaffes—the ums and uhs that she said in an answer were all written out in The New York Times, and I don’t remember the last time ums and uhs from other members of Congress.I think on the substance, a lot of it was pretty mainstream—which was maybe that’s the hard thing to grapple with. But some of the experts I spoke with who work at places like MoveOn basically were like, This is a big deal. They have a Latina woman in her 30s on this stage in Munich, where it’s really largely white men who have dominated the foreign policy sphere. And she does threaten them.But the other point I think you’re making is, she doesn’t necessarily have the traditional credentials of, let’s say, an Elissa Slotkin, who was in the CIA, or some other prominent lawmakers who work on foreign policy. But digging into her background, I found that she actually has a lot of the markers of true geopolitical intelligence. She spent time in Niger as an undergraduate, doing homestays, understanding how US development and humanitarian assistance really works. That’s what she studied at university. She has a sense of foreign policy that is not wholly untraditional. It’s just that there is a certain cabal that kind of determines what the national security leadership ought to look like, and she hasn’t exactly fit that mold, let’s say.Bacon: You mentioned—you interviewed Matt Duss, we mentioned him earlier. So Matt Duss was an advisor to Bernie Sanders and his campaigns. He was close to the Biden people for some period, and then broke away even before Gaza, is my impression. So talk about who is around her. They’re not necessarily the sort of people who served Clinton, Obama, Biden, but who’s around her in terms of foreign policy?Guyer: So her chief of staff, this guy Mike Kaska, comes from Bernie’s office. So that’s one thing to note, is she’s within these kind of progressive circles. Matt, who now runs a progressive think tank in DC, has gathered experts. He’s primarily a Middle East guy, but has brought in China and other foreign policy experts to have a kind of a kitchen cabinet around AOC.But one of the most interesting things that I dug into was her foreign trips. She’s gone on a handful of congressional delegations, and one that really stood out was a trip she did to Latin America that was done with one of the major Latin America-focused progressive think tanks. And these are guys—I keep saying guys, but obviously I’m meaning that more broadly—who focus on how economic sanctions really affect people, how they damage the lives of people in Cuba and Venezuela, and not your typical hyper-security-focused think tanks. This is much more human-centric, human-focused.And when she went to Latin America—I spoke with a number of Latin Americanists who said she didn’t just meet with the US Chamber of Commerce or the kind of economic chieftains that members of Congress tend to meet with. She met with grassroots leaders. She met with Indigenous organizers. She met with the kind of folks doing politics that reflect how she did politics in New York and the way that she came up. So I found that to be a kind of interesting detail, and I do think it represents the kind of—you know, spinning it forward—what AOC and a number of other representatives are trying to do, which is, at this moment in US politics, where you have an imperial presidency, she’s trying to make connections with Lula in Brazil, with progressive leaders throughout Latin America, similar to what she was doing in Germany—finding liberals and leftists who she can work with, the Green Party, social Dems, and forging these connections in a way that isn’t exactly your typical mano-a-mano, let’s say, way that members of Congress tend to interact when they go abroad.Bacon: As I read this piece, I was reminded of something. I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I wrote a piece in late—early 2006 about a famous Democratic politician, and who he was meeting with and how he might run for president. His name is Barack Obama, obviously—a similar kind of piece to what you did, talking about who’s around him and so on. And I generally liked what President Obama did, but in office, he, I think, adhered to the blob’s points of view a lot, ultimately. And his foreign policy—the things he talked about as a candidate, opposing the Iraq War, being different—in office, I would argue, he was a fairly standard Democrat on foreign policy. Do you think AOC is vulnerable to that same kind of thing if she became president? Ultimately, she would appoint the Jake Sullivan types and be 88 percent the same as President Shapiro or Buttigieg would be?Guyer: I think this is maybe the core question, Perry, and I don’t totally explore it in this piece, but I have some thoughts. I think one of the things you’re identifying is the gap between President Obama’s message and his policies. I think his message was pretty remarkable—going to Cairo to give a speech and end the war on terror and the war on Islam and so forth, and hiring someone like Samantha Power, who is an expert in genocide and US failures in foreign policy, and giving all these people like Ben Rhodes the ability to shape policy.But at the end of the day, as we saw over those eight years, the people who held the Cabinet positions, the Hillary Clintons and the Robert Gateses—and now we’re going probably way far back for some of our viewers here, but you and I know this history really well—these were really traditional, bipartisan members of the blob. And I think this is where the rubber hits the road. It’s really hard to change US foreign policy. It’s not just the State Department or the Pentagon. It is all these entrenched institutions, and it’s trying to have a reckoning with the architecture of American military bases abroad, the way that big institutions work, and this other whole dynamic, which is the allure of power, and the allure of wanting to be respected and liked by peers of both parties, and by projecting US leadership, whatever that means, in the world.But I think since President Obama, a lot has changed in Washington. We’ve seen the fracturing of the Republican Party and a new movement—probably most aptly represented by JD Vance, and there’s a lot of questions around it—but of a kind of a more restrained, less militaristic Republican Party. Lot of debate to have around that, of course. Not trying to cheerlead anybody. But this is kind of categorically different, that you have a President Trump who’s run on populist perspectives that basically says we need a ceasefire in Gaza, to the left of President Biden. It’s surprising.So I think one of the main challenges that Obama faced, and that the next president will face, is having the bureaucrats, the people that can actually make government work—and not to fall into the deep state fantasy of President Trump, but you got to maintain this whole massive US bureaucracy of thousands of appointees, of entire military and intelligence and all of this, and I don’t think you can just unwind it. So I think if AOC, or whomever the next Democratic president, wants to really change US foreign policy, you do need some insiders who can change stuff, but it can’t just be the message. The message is one part of it, but you also have to figure out the actions. And I guess that’s what a whole lot of Democrats are trying to figure out in the off-season.Bacon: Two final questions. I guess in writing the piece, I think there’s an answer to this question, but do you consider her a likely presidential candidate?Guyer: I do, but I’ve also heard rumors that—what if Senator Schumer doesn’t run again, that maybe that would be a better call. She is super popular. I think she represents what Gen Z wants in Democratic politics. I think the Mamdani wave here in New York puts a lot of wind in her sails, and I think she has a lot of cred to take on what Trump represents beyond Gaza and Middle East policy and Western Hemisphere policy, but on some of these core domestic policies we talked about—with wildfires burning, with immigration crackdown and all this stuff. She comes in with a lot of credibility to change the game.But I don’t know. It’s going to be a bruising two years, and I think we’re also going to have to see—everyone always says this is going to be the midterms that’s about foreign policy. But if this midterms is indeed about foreign policy, I think we’ll get more clues on who the next Democratic nominee might look like.Bacon: That builds my final question, which is: is this Democratic primary upcoming, is it like most of the Democratic primaries I’ve covered—the exception being 2007, when who voted for the Iraq War was a big issue? In general, it’s not been a big issue in Democratic primaries. But right now, I would argue, if you go to Michigan, El-Sayed’s opposition to the war in Gaza and Stevens’ votes is an issue. I’m not sure if it’s a huge issue, but it’s an issue. A lot of the leftist candidates are saying, We should spend money here at home and not on bombing people abroad, and I think that has become the way to talk about Gaza.But I am curious—the Gaza war, there’s still things happening in Gaza. Obviously, the war in Iran is happening right now. And I think it’s hard to know, but do you really think, when we’re talking about the South Carolina primary in November 2027, in the months before that, are we going to be talking about foreign policy? Or are we going to be back to talking about affordability and housing? Is foreign policy going to be a big part of the mix, a small part of the mix, a medium part of the mix? What do you think?Guyer: No, so I would argue, Perry, that it is absolutely going to be part of the mix, and for the simple reason that I filled up my car yesterday and it was $70 for a tank. And foreign policy is often in the rarefied realm of the experts and, by design, doesn’t usually involve the people. But gas prices, supply chains—our polling with the Institute for Global Affairs shows that, I think it’s something like 78 percent of Americans are hurting economically, and they associate it with the Iran war. So every day this war that isn’t a war keeps going, people experience it.Bacon: No, I was saying, like, in the next—hopefully the Iran war will not be happening in November 2027. So assuming the Iran war is not happening, then is there other—I assume gas prices always matter, but foreign policy beyond gas prices, will it be part of this primary process, do you think?Guyer: So I’m from Michigan, and I think that it is a huge debate right now. You have a very robust Arab American, Muslim American community. You have a huge Jewish community that faced this heinous terrorist attack earlier this year. And it is the conversation people are having, and it’s very divisive.I don’t have a crystal ball about what’s going to be happening two years from now, but look, we have a president who has pursued some very reckless wars. And we could say Venezuela has gone somewhat well, but it does seem like we could stumble into Venezuela 2.0, Cuba, these strikes on boats throughout the Caribbean. These are all these tipping points that could happen that just remind voters how central foreign policy is.And again, just to bring up our polling at IGA, most Americans don’t think the Iran war has made them any safer. This is a hugely unpopular war. We don’t have boots on the ground, but we do have US troops dying. We have a new figure from the Pentagon that some six hundred US service members have been injured, and—I don’t have the number in front of me—more than a dozen have been killed. This stuff really resonates. This is not abstract.And I think the question will be, who’s going to seize the mantle? Is it going to be Vance or Rubio, with a strong message that resonates with voters? Or will AOC or Chris Murphy or other Democrats, whether more progressive or more traditional, have a better story to tell? Because I think the Biden story of foreign policy, that we are going to build back better worldwide, is not resonating for folks. So that’s why this AOC message that I’ve been reporting on does have some interesting kernels, but we’ll see how it develops.Bacon: Jonathan Guyer, great piece in Foreign Policy. The piece is called “AOC Meets World.” And I recommend everyone read it and check out Jonathan’s other work. Are you on Bluesky? On Twitter? Where do people find you?Guyer: I’m on Twitter. I have a really old handle. It’s MidEastXMidWest. Probably need to update that. But yeah, I’m on Twitter, writing for all sorts of spots. And check out the Institute for Global Affairs, where we’re trying to get the pulse of how Americans view foreign policy.Bacon: If you want to read a piece that will interest you and maybe outrage you, Jonathan wrote this great piece about Samantha Power in New York Magazine in 2024. It was a great piece.Guyer: Oh, thanks. Yeah, 2024, I believe. So basically been trying to find the people and personalities that capture all these tensions in US foreign policy. So thanks for having me, Perry. Great to see you. It’s always great to chat with you.Bacon: Thank you. Bye-bye.

For more than a decade, the biggest story in America has been Donald Trump, and for good reason. A real estate conman and reality TV star somehow, despite being a racist, sexist, narcissistic, juvenile, and just plain stupid man, became president of the United States. And then he did it again—after a failed coup, no less. In the process, he fitfully but ruthlessly took over one of the country’s two major parties and remade it in his own authoritarian image. Then he set about doing the same to the country as a whole. The Republican Party is now a cult of personality, and America is a plutocratic paradise governed by the president’s whims. That is still very much the biggest story in the country. The president is waging two destructive wars—a literal one in the Middle East, and an economic one pretty much everywhere else—while jailing political opponents, detaining and deporting hundreds of thousands of people, attempting to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections, and musing—maybe joking, maybe not—about running for an unconstitutional third term. But for Axios founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, that’s old news—a status quo that no longer raises alarm among the Beltway punditry. There’s a new political threat brewing in America, and it’s just as frightening as Trump: There are reds under Democratic beds. The democratic socialists have arrived, and they’re the left’s equivalent of MAGA. And the Democratic establishment may well succumb to these unhinged insurgents, just like the Republicans before them. In the newest iteration of their “Behind the Curtain” column, which is ostensibly devoted to big trends in politics and economics, Allen and VandeHei warn about what may be in store for the Democratic Party. “Party transformations follow a predictable six-stage evolution—recoil, squint, rationalize, submit, amplify, and purge,” they wrote Tuesday. “Each stage has language you can hear long before you see it in the votes. Republicans just finished the full cycle. Democrats might be starting it.” Sounds scary! But here’s the evidence Allen and VandeHei provide: All three candidates New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed won their June 23 House primaries, defeating two incumbents: Brad Lander over Rep. Dan Goldman, Claire Valdez over Brooklyn’s borough president, and Darializa Avila Chevalier over Rep. Adriano Espaillat—the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair, backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.Sit with that: A Jeffries-endorsed incumbent lost to a democratic socialist. That’s Stage 4 machinery switching on, with the primary electorate punishing the establishment side of the fight.It’s not just New York. In Colorado, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros toppled 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette, who leans progressive.Wow, it’s not just New York City—a young democratic socialist also won in Colorado! Four primary victories for the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. That’s the sum of the argument here. But Allen and VandeHei nonetheless insist that Democrats are in the dreaded “Stage 3” of this entirely made-up “party transformation” scale: The Democrats are rationalizing their takeover by the socialists. “Now listen to the language: ‘It’s not socialism, it’s affordability’ is the left’s ‘It’s not the tweets, it’s the judges,’” they wrote. It’s worth taking a moment to remember what those Trump tweets were, back in the day: sexist attacks on news hosts Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski. Racist digs at entire nations and the Obamas. Ridiculous accusations of “wiretapping” and voter fraud. And he never stopped, of course. There were threats of state violence: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Incessant lies that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Today, we’re subjected to a daily deluge of brain-dead AI slop—and, yes, the usual racist, sexist garbage. But we’re supposed to worry that socialism is masquerading as affordability?One problem with the suggestion that these candidates don’t really care about affordability—that they must have an ulterior motive to, I don’t know, force everyone to be vegan?—is that they are all Democrats, and the party has been very clear about communicating its top election message this year. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—hardly a leftie—talks about affordability all the time, as does New York City’s biggest loser in those recent primaries, Hakeem Jeffries. The House minority leader over the weekend unveiled his caucus’s closing argument for the midterms, summed up thus: “Fighting for an Affordable America.”Are these establishment Democrats rationalizing their takeover by Jacobins, or are they—like the democratic socialists in their party—simply pushing talking points that any sensible politician would, given Americans’ enduring anger over rising costs? After all, Trump won in 2024 on an affordability message too.There are currently two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (elected in 2018) and Rashida Tlaib (elected in 2022). Lander is not a member of the DSA, though Valdez, Chevalier, and Kiros are. Increasing their ranks to five is a big deal, but it’s not exactly a revolution. (Interestingly, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who may become Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate next week, said in a debate on Monday evening, “I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist who knows how capitalism works.”) But the big problem with Allen and VandeHei’s attempt at a “conceptual scoop” isn’t that it makes a terrible case for a trend. It’s that the founders of one of the biggest political outlets in the country still don’t understand Trump. His cult of personality is so strong that it has easily withstood multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault, a long-standing and deep friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the pillaging of the federal government to benefit himself and his family, and the destruction of countless families across the country. He is sui generis.That incontrovertible truth is rather inconvenient if you are in the business of dreaming up columns that depend on false equivalences between the country’s two major parties. For Allen and VandeHei, a handful of candidates who have found success in large cities with young demographics and who are pushing ambitious but hardly fascistic policies like Medicare for All and divestment from Israel are basically analogous to Trump and his actual fascism. That is not an insight; it’s a troll. But it does raise an important question about Axios’s leaders themselves: Are they genuinely fearful of the democratic socialists’ plans to ensure all Americans have health care and stop genocide, or are they just not horrified by what Trump has done to this country? Here’s what scares me: that Allen and VandeHei would say “yes” to both.

Center-left Democratic officials are coalescing around the opponents of Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in primaries that will take place over the next month. That’s in part because of ideology—many centrists simply don’t agree with the progressive policy stands of Hong and El-Sayed. But some centrists say that they are backing Hong’s and El-Sayed’s opponents because progressive candidates like those two don’t often win in swing states. And many of Hong’s and El-Sayed’s supporters are also essentially buying into that historical analysis. They are deeply invested in Hong and El-Sayed winning the general election, suggesting that those victories would be unique evidence of progressive electoral strength in swing states, and would show that someone like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be elected president. Both sides’ perspectives are ahistorical, too caught up in the current Mamdani-Sanders-AOC moment. Numerous progressives have won in swing states and districts in the past. Neither El-Sayed nor Hong would be the first progressive candidate to win in the Midwest. Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t be the first president with a left-wing background. These primaries are a real fight over which faction controls the Democratic Party today. But they shouldn’t obscure the success of progressive candidates years and even decades before anyone had ever heard of Claire Valdez or Ilhan Omar. What makes this debate complicated is that there are not precise definitions of progressive, leftist, or other such ideological terms. And what constitutes progressive or leftist politics changes over time. Many progressive politicians were not supportive of same-sex marriage in 2002, but virtually all progressive politicians hold that stance today. So, for this article, I looked at politicians who were described or self-identified as progressive or very liberal during a given campaign and their results. Let’s go back 20 years. “An unabashed progressive takes aim at a Senate seat in Ohio,” was the tagline of a November 2005 piece in the leftist publication In These Times. The author is Chris Hayes, who went on to greater fame. The “unabashed progressive” is Sherrod Brown, then serving in the House. Brown is considered a traditional Democrat now. But back then, his opposition to the Iraq War and deep skepticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other international trade agreements put him firmly on the Democratic left. “If a bedrock economic populist like Brown can win in a red state, it will explode the post-Clinton conventional wisdom that anything resembling ​‘class warfare’ is a non-starter for the Democrats,” Hayes wrote. Among those who praised Brown in Hayes’s article was Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s congressman.Brown ended up winning the Ohio Senate race in 2006—against a two-term incumbent—by 12 points. “I ran a very outspokenly progressive campaign, standing up for the middle class, taking on the drug companies and the oil companies.…  And I think that that campaign shows that you can win in moderately conservative states as progressive Democrats,” Brown told NPR in November 2006. Two years later, a man described by another In These Times writer as an “unflinching progressive” won Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states across the Midwest. Again, today we don’t think of Barack Obama as being particularly leftist. But in 2008, being a strong opponent of the Iraq War, a critic of the death penalty, and a skeptic of the Israeli government—all positions he held in his rise in Illinois politics—were very much on the party’s left. Obama’s 2007 voting record was the most liberal of any senator, according to National Journal. And it’s not just those two. In 2012, Tammy Baldwin, who had been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin. Andy Kim won reelection in 2022 in a competitive district in New Jersey, even though his opponent attacked him for being a member of the Progressive Caucus. Ruben Gallego, elected to the Senate in 2024 from Arizona, was a member of the Medicare for All and Progressive caucuses during his House days. Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford University, found that from 2016 to 2024, there were 27 successful U.S. House campaigns in swing districts by candidates whose ideology was left of the average Democratic politician. Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman won Senate races in swing states even though voters perceived them as fairly progressive, says Bonica, citing the Cooperative Election Study, in which voters themselves rank candidates on a seven-point ideological scale. (Sadly, Fetterman has changed his stripes since then.)Progressive candidates at times obviously lose, including Brown in his 2024 reelection bid. And it’s true that there are far more centrists and more moderates than progressives representing swing districts and states. But that’s in part a screening effect. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tend to encourage centrist politicians to run in swing areas, direct donors to give money to those candidates instead of their progressive rivals, and often endorse those moderates in primaries. So the number of moderate nominees in swing areas is much larger than those who are more progressive. But moderates and progressives win at similar rates, according to Bonica’s research. What really matters is incumbency—progressive and moderate Democratic candidates tend to lose to Republicans in office, but win open seats or when they are the incumbents.“El-Sayed and Hong as a test of whether progressives can win swing states gets it backwards. They’re a rare case where the choice is actually on the menu. Whether they win will track the national environment and each state’s lean. Parties are electable, not candidates,” says Bonica. So what’s being tested in Wisconsin and Michigan is not whether a person who has a history of progressive activism, has called themselves a progressive, or has a very progressive voting record can win in a swing state. That’s already happened. Often. Hong is trying to do something unique, in that there isn’t a record of self-identified democratic socialists winning in swing states. That could be tougher, as some polls show voters in Wisconsin and other states are very skeptical of socialism. And Hong and El-Sayed, if they win their primaries, will be trying to win a general election after the media and their opponents have spent months casting them as “very progressive” and they themselves have, in some ways, embraced that label. That’s often not the case for successful progressive candidates. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Obama did not run as the most unabashedly progressive candidate, instead positioning himself as the young outsider who might inspire the country. In 2012, Baldwin was unopposed in the Wisconsin Democratic Senate primary. Gallego left the Congressional Progressive Caucus before his Senate run. In contrast, Hong has courted the left-wing vote among Wisconsin Democrats. El-Sayed has campaigned with Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. So it is possible that, while a person with a progressive history can win, a person who fully leans into progressivism during the primary will have trouble pivoting to the general election and assuring voters that they aren’t too liberal. On the other hand, numerous Republicans have run as full-throated conservatives during primaries and then won in swing states in the general election. That’s what Marco Rubio did in 2010 in Florida, and what Donald Trump did nationally six years later. And both Hong and El-Sayed (and other progressives, such as Ocasio-Cortez) these days are running more on fighting high costs and billionaires than the broader ideology of socialism. They are winning voters who probably don’t fully understand or support socialism’s tenets. We don’t know if El-Sayed or Hong will even make it to the general election. But either way, their candidacies shouldn’t be considered some make-or-break moment for progressive politics in America. Progressives have already won in swing states, including in presidential elections. What we’ll learn in the next months and years is whether swing states will accept today’s version of progressivism, one led by self-described socialists (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani). You might say no. But I was covering politics in 2004, and not many people imagined Senators Brown and Baldwin and President Obama. America’s voters often progress more quickly than we expect.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t ruling out a 2028 presidential run. And part of running for president is communicating your vision on foreign affairs. Jonathan Guyer, a longtime journalist who is now the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs, wrote a recent piece in Foreign Policy about Ocasio-Cortez’s foreign policy ideas. In the latest edition of Right Now, Guyer discussed his reporting, where he interviewed more than two dozen people about Ocasio-Cortez’s perspectives on the world. He described her vision of a “foreign policy for the working class,” the experts she is consulting, world leaders she has met with, and countries the congresswoman has traveled to. Guyer also explained why he thinks foreign policy will be at the center of the next Democratic presidential primary. He argued that the fissure over foreign policy between the center-left and left wings of the Democratic Party, most notably on Israeli-Palestinian issues, will endure. Those who advised President Biden on foreign policy may have a hard time getting top jobs in the next Democratic presidential administration if a progressive like Ocasio-Cortez wins, Guyer predicted. One of those advising Ocasio-Cortez is Matt Duss, who has made several appearances on Right Now to discuss what a progressive foreign policy might look like in practice.

A one-on-one matchup between Republican Kurt Alme and independent Seth Bodnar in Montana’s Senate race is looking less likely.