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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.

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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—I guess 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, 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, et cetera, 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, I think, 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, kind of, 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: Can I just—so 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, 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: 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—I don’t know if it’s called Epic, or 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, forty-six, Abdul, forty-three percent—so a three-point advantage—versus Haley Stevens would be at forty-four if she were the candidate, and Mike Rogers at forty-two. 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... Yeah.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: And 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—as opposed to the person who’s going to deliver a... Like, he has a—granted, it’s a small track record, because you don’t run that many races in your life. But 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, actually, 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. And—Shenker-Osorio: Most people can’t name their elected official.Bacon: Congressman is what I was going to say. Yeah. Yes.Kalmoe: Yeah. 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 US 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—excuse me—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.Bacon: Speak for him. Sure.Shenker-Osorio: 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 this year, 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, MAGA. And that is really what is drawing in a lot of these either new or non-habitual voters, or non-habitual midterm. It’s really a desire to beat Republicans.And so even with my unobjective 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’d 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, and 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 sort of, like, the gesture towards, 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.Bacon: No, go ahead, Anat. Yes.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: So go ahead, Nathan. All right, that’s helpful. Go ahead, Nathan, about what’s going on there.Kalmoe: Yeah. 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, 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 hard 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 be something with nothing, and they have nothing, is like—anyway, I’ll let you start it out. Yeah.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 one second. And, for example, the sort of marquee people that famously just swept various New York races—talking about Brad, I’m talking about…So 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 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 kind of 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 rep, 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 sort of 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 sort of 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—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 these 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, which 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 particularly 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 sort of 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. So they might prefer to lose than to, yeah.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 shockingly, 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.

The mainstream U.S. media has done a fairly good job in reporting on the latest in a long line of reprehensible Supreme Court decisions. As of July 27, the high court stripped legal protection from 330,000 Haitians who are here in America, thus granting the Trump administration leave to deport them back to a country torn by the type of deadly violence that brought them to these shores in the first place. But The New York Times, CNN, and the rest are ignoring one vital angle to the story: There is compelling evidence that the U.S. government, under both Democrats and Republicans, is partly but directly complicit in the ongoing disaster in Haiti. The United States therefore has a strong moral obligation to stop the deportation of Haitians, on top of our simple humanitarian duty to not arrest people and ship them to a country where they will likely be murdered. That the U.S. government bears this moral responsibility is clear, if unreported. Let’s start with a major prosecution witness: the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Dan Foote. He warned nearly five years ago that U.S. policy was a dangerous failure, and in September 2021 he resigned in protest, ending a distinguished 23-year State Department career. His blistering resignation letter, which became public, argued that the repeated efforts by the U.S. (and other outside powers) to intervene in Haiti’s political life had “consistently produced catastrophic results,” and he warned of “calamitous consequences to come.” That calamity is here. The 330,000 Haitians who now face deportation have been here legally under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program, which Congress established by law in 1990. The U.S. media are, to their credit, reporting that the Haitians who are in the U.S. are overwhelmingly hardworking and law-abiding. Haitian health workers and home aides for the elderly are indispensable in certain places, such as Florida, New York City, and Boston. The Republican governor of Ohio has defended the Haitian factory workers in his state, the same people who Donald Trump and J.D. Vance lied about, despicably asserting that they were eating cats and dogs.The U.S. press is also explaining how dangerous Haiti is now, as violent gangs control much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and are expanding their reach. Some 1.5 million people have had to flee their homes for safety, more than a tenth of the population. The situation is so perilous that the American media has understandably rarely sent journalists there. Fortunately, there are brave and skilled Haitian reporters on the scene, such as Widlore Mérancourt and Magdela Louis, who are producing chilling accounts of massacres. What’s more, the gangs are already kidnapping returning deportees, assuming, correctly, that they have more money than those who did not leave.But the U.S. media is missing American complicity in the crisis, which should not exclusively be blamed on Donald Trump. Even when Democrats ran the State Department, U.S. policy was a growing disaster.First, it may sound unbelievable given the grim news in recent years, but the truth is that Haitians are not a violent people. As late as 2012, the murder rate there was 6.9 per 100,000, one of the lowest in the Americas (and the same as Long Beach, California). As ex-Ambassador Foote told me: “Just look at Haitian communities here in the U.S. They are not violent.” But over the years, Haiti has been dominated by a small, selfish economic elite, which is often allied with a ruthless political class. In the past decade or so, some of that elite helped fund and arm the emerging gangs, in order to maintain their hold on power. The chronic political and economic crisis deepened, especially after President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in July 2021. The gangs have exploded in size, using powerful weapons smuggled in from Florida to outgun the beleaguered, underpaid local police. All the while, the U.S. State Department contributed to the deepening crisis. Outsiders may be surprised at just how prominent and powerful a political figure the U.S. ambassador is in Haiti. Haitians are politically conscious, especially in the capital, and they scrutinize the American envoy’s statements and apparent preferences as part of their political analysis. Foote says, “Everyone including the shoeshine guy pays attention.” And one U.S. ambassador after another stood behind the increasingly corrupt Haitian elite. Here’s just one example of blatant U.S. interference, which I witnessed firsthand in January 2016. The outgoing president, Michel Martelly, who had been a favorite of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, tried to impose his handpicked successor in scheduled elections, even though Haitian voters had been enraged by Martelly’s massive corruption. The State Department—this was still the Obama administration—tried to pressure Haitians to accept the results of the tainted balloting, and only massive street demonstrations forced the U.S. to back down, at least for a time. But American meddling only got worse. Starting in 2018, a popular mass movement rocked the country, as huge marches blasted government corruption and demanded that the president resign and that democracy be respected. The protesters also called for an end to U.S. engerans, the Haitian word for “interference.” Popular resistance reached a peak in November 2019, when a nationwide strike paralyzed the country for more than two months. The strike, in the Haitian language, was called “Peyi Lok” or “Country Lockdown.”The U.S. State Department ignored the protests. Its motivations, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, are still something of a mystery. Were U.S. officials supporting Haiti’s ruling elites by instinct? In the mistaken view that those elites could maintain “stability?” Or were American officials just plain stupid?Foote arrived in Haiti as the U.S. special envoy in July 2021. He had been stationed there 10 years earlier, so he knew his way around. He was immediately surprised to hear from his local Haitian contacts that the State Department had not been talking to them during the long political upheaval. “I was astounded to find that the Embassy had not been regularly meeting with opposition figures and members of civil society,” he told me.He has other examples of foreign meddling. As the U.S. ambassador, he chaired meetings of the Core Group, which consisted of the major outside powers. “As the most significant foreign aid giver, the U.S. chaired the meetings,” he said. “There were of course no Haitians in the room, because heaven help us that Haitians should be allowed in to decide the future of their own country.”Foote could see right away that the State Department wanted to impose its own choice as Haiti’s interim leader, a suspicious character named Dr. Ariel Henry. Foote, based on his previous experience, had other ideas: “I wanted to convene meetings of a broad range of Haitian civil society, so that they could among themselves devise a Haitian-led political accord that would plan a transition to holding fair elections and establishing a new government.”It took Foote only three months to see that his efforts were doomed. In September 2021, he drafted his resignation letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. That letter, which is only five paragraphs long, is an eloquent indictment of American arrogance that deserves to be widely known, and it made him a hero in Haiti. Here is part of it: “But what our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates but with genuine support for that course. I do not believe that Haiti can enjoy stability until her citizens have the dignity of freely choosing their own leaders fairly and acceptably.”Today, Foote argues that Haiti would be better off if his recommendation had been followed: “We would have moved forward with a Haitian-led political accord,” he says, “and worked with an interim provisional government. The Haitian people might not have trusted us at the beginning, with good reason, but they could have come to trust the process. Things there would not have gotten worse. Instead, over the last few years Haiti has lost political control of the country to the gangs, which have gotten significantly more powerful because under the unpopular government that the U.S. imposed the state and the rule of law have collapsed.” Foote is blunt about American responsibility for Haiti’s present crisis. “We caused it,” he says. “The United States’s foreign policy caused it. We messed this up. And we’re taking no responsibility for it.”