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Joshua Scheer Ukraine’s role in the Western war machine is expanding far beyond its borders. After years of serving as Washington and NATO’s proxy against Russia, Kyiv is now accused of attacking an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea, assisting armed groups seeking to undermine sovereign governments in Africa’s Sahel and collaborating with forces […]

Becca Renk Foster, Popular Resistance. Nicaragua Condemns Attacks. “Nicaragua expresses its unchanging solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people, who continue to face suffering, occupation, destruction and displacement perpetrated by the Zionist government of Israel and its occupying forces,” reads a statement from Nicaragua’s government released on July 29th. The declaration condemned Israel’s renewed attacks, calling them an […]

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.”  

Seven years ago last month, President Donald Trump remarked that he had “an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This statement was widely mocked during his first term, but it appears now to be generally true as a matter of practice. The second Trump administration has broken numerous federal laws, ransacked the Treasury, threatened the states, and even defied the courts from time to time.The Supreme Court, with rare exceptions, has encouraged this behavior. Its current conservative majority has gone to great lengths to expand presidential power while simultaneously weakening Congress. It has operated from a deeply flawed understanding of the separation of powers—one that, despite the majority’s originalist pretenses, would be alien to the Framers in 1789. In doing so, the court has also greatly strengthened itself.Congress has been the primary victim in this two-branch conspiracy. But the real injury is to the American people themselves. Hyper-presidentialism has robbed the American people of their natural way to govern themselves. It has transformed a two-and-a-half-century-old constitutional order into a semi-Bonapartist regime, where a national executive’s election is treated as a referendum on the national soul, subject only to review by a guardian council of unelected jurists.Americans must not conflate the weakness of Congress’s current members with the weakness of Congress as an institution. Trump and the Supreme Court often insist that it is the president who must play the central role in American political life. This is not how the Constitution was designed to work, which is why it increasingly does not seem to work at all. Congressional primacy must be restored, and the cult of the presidency must be defeated.Perhaps the clearest articulation of this presidentialist vision can be found in Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The 2019 case centered on whether Congress could lawfully structure the CFPB to be overseen by a single director who could only be removed for cause by the president. To answer this question, Roberts laid out an overarching vision of the separation of powers.Quoting from a variety of sources, the chief justice argued that the Framers “split the atom of sovereignty itself into one federal government and the states” to prevent “abuse[s] of power” and preserve “liberty,” thereby creating our federal system. From there, “they divided the powers of the new federal government into three defined categories, legislative, executive, and judicial,” Roberts explained.“They did not stop there,” he continued. “Most prominently, the Framers bifurcated the federal legislative power into two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate, each composed of multiple members and senators.” The presidency, he claimed, “is a stark departure from this tradition,” with a unity of vision that reflects the Framers’ own supposed preferences.The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that “differences of opinion” and the “jarrings of parties” would “promote deliberation and circumspection” and “check excesses in the majority.” See The Federalist No. 70, at 475 (A. Hamilton); see also id., No. 51, at 350. By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities. See id., No. 70, at 475–478. As Madison put it, while “the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be . . . divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.”“To justify and check that authority—unique in our constitutional structure—the Framers made the President the most democratic and politically accountable official in government,” Roberts concluded. “Only the president (along with the vice president) is elected by the entire nation. And the president’s political accountability is enhanced by the solitary nature of the executive branch, which provides ‘a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people.’”This creation myth is cohesive but unpersuasive. Contrary to Roberts’ telling, the Framers did not create Congress in a vacuum. There was no “atom” to be split. The Constitution was built upon existing institutions, including a multitude of state legislatures and an effective but ramshackle provisional government. This depiction of events might be tolerable if you must explain the Constitution to children. Its detachment from historical reality makes it poorly suited for a Supreme Court opinion.Roberts also fundamentally misreads Federalist Number 70. As I’ve noted before, Hamilton wrote it to explain the virtues of a single executive, like our presidency, over a plural executive. In the late 18th century, some states like Pennsylvania vested their executive powers in councils instead of governors. Ancient and medieval republics in Europe also often had plural executives: Rome’s consuls, Carthage’s shofets, Sparta’s ephors, Athens’s archons, and so on.Hamilton forcefully argued that a single executive would be more efficient and accountable than multiple chief magistrates, who might evade public scrutiny or conspire together to deprive the people of their liberties. Along the way, he noted that “differences of opinion” and the “jarrings of parties,” which he described as unavoidable in legislative bodies, would be ill-fitting for an executive branch. To read Federalist 70’s commentary on plural/single executives as a debate over legislative/executive power is like arguing that “thou shalt not steal” forbids the Bessemer process.From there, Roberts made a number of additional historical errors. For one thing, the Framers did not make the president democratically accountable as he claimed. The Constitution gives state legislatures the discretion to choose how to appoint electors. Many states opted for some form of popular election, but some legislatures in the early republic simply appointed them. They also set up an electoral college to further distance the president from the people. To that end, the presidency is the only elective office in the entire republic where you can get the most votes and lose. That is not a strong conduit for democratic accountability, as the last decade has shown.But the most important heresy by Roberts and the conservative majority is their overall perception of Congress itself. The Framers did not view “the legislative power” as a “special threat to individual liberty.” On the contrary, the entire path from independence to ratification can be seen as a long campaign to create and empower a national legislature to govern—and govern effectively—on the people’s behalf.In the beginning, there was only Congress. The first concept of a national legislative body for the American colonies emerged in the 1750s. Benjamin Franklin proposed one at a gathering of delegates in Albany, New York, to coordinate colonial involvement in the French and Indian War. It would consist of a “president-general” who was “appointed and supported by the Crown” and a “grand council” of representatives from the various American colonies, in proportion to their relative populations.This plan did not go into effect, but the idea of continental unity persisted and grew. Twenty years later, Franklin was among Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Continental Congress, which gathered in Philadelphia in 1774 to discuss a unified response to the colonies’ disputes with the British government. When no peaceable solution could be found, the delegates declared independence from the British Empire two years later.Many casual depictions of early American history fast-forward from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution’s ratification and George Washington’s presidency in 1789. But the Continental Congress did not disband or disappear after declaring independence. To the contrary, it played a central role in organizing American resistance to British rule as a provisional government of sorts. The Continental Congress sent envoys to foreign powers for aid, cajoled states into contributing funds and materiel, supervised the war’s conduct, paid and equipped soldiers, appointed generals, including Washington himself.Washington was a superb general, albeit one who spent most of the war trying to keep the Continental Army out of a decisive battle with superior British forces. He was also an accomplished president who laid the framework for the early republic. But his most celebrated trait for early Americans was his loyalty to Congress, both as an institution and an idea. His conduct during and after the war entrenched civilian control of the military—and, more specifically, to Congress—into the basic fabric of American governance.As the war drew to a close, the Founders transformed the Continental Congress from a provisional wartime government into a first attempt at a national government. “Certain I am that unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone—unless they are vested with powers by the several states competent to the great purposes of war, or assume them as a matter of right, and they, and the states respectively, act with more energy than they hitherto have done—our cause is lost,” Washington wrote in a letter to a colleague in 1780.The Articles of Confederation, enacted in 1781 two years before the war’s end, largely preserved the national government as it was. Each state had one vote in Congress, as they had in the pre-Confederation version, and unanimity was required to get most things done. But its enforcement powers were ephemeral, it authority to collect revenue was limited, and it was largely dependent on state governments to function and carry out its will. These manifest flaws soon prompted the new nation’s leading statesmen to craft a more suitable replacement.Contrary to the presidentialist narrative, the Framers drafted the Constitution to empower Congress, not to weaken it. They endowed it with numerous powers once held only by the states, whose own legislatures were considered by Madison and others to be unruly and untrustworthy. “In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation,” Gordon Wood, the preeminent historian of the founding era, wrote in his 2009 book, “the Constitution was intended to restrain the excesses of democracy and protect minority rights from overbearing majorities in the state legislatures.”In an April 1787 letter to Washington, one month before the Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia, James Madison described at length how he thought Congress should be structured under the new national charter. He touched upon numerous topics that would arise at the upcoming convention in Philadelphia: the representation formula for Congress, the transfer of powers to it from the states, the creation and jurisdiction of national courts, the supremacy of national law over state law, and so on.“Conceiving that an individual independence of the States is utterly irreconcileable with their aggregate sovereignty; and that a consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable,” Madison told his fellow Virginian, “I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities wherever they can be subordinately useful.”This was a remarkable letter, one that foreshadows much of what would become the Constitution. Madison’s blueprint outlines some checks on Congress, such as bicameralism, but only in the context of also granting it extraordinary new powers. As for the “national executive,” he wrote to the man who would eventually be the first president, “I have scarcely ventured as yet to form my own opinion either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed.”During the convention, Madison also advanced some proposals to give Congress even greater powers than what it ultimately received. One of them, for example, would have given the national legislature the ability to veto any state law. What ultimately emerged from the debates in Philadelphia was a far stronger legislature than had existed under the Confederation. Congress now had the exclusive power to levy tariffs—the principal source of revenue in the fledgling republic—as well as the ability to levy other taxes. It could raise a national army and regulate state militias. It could regulate interstate commerce and set rules for naturalization.While the Constitution separated the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, there was also a clear winner in the checks and balances. Congress can remove presidents and judges from office by impeachment, while neither branch can affect or alter Congress’s membership or composition. Congress alone decides how the executive and legislative branches are structured. It can create and destroy executive departments, and it can establish and abolish the lower federal courts.For practical reasons, there are roughly two million federal employees to carry out the functions of the federal government these days. But constitutional government could theoretically exist with just four people outside of Congress: a president, a vice president, a single federal district-court judge to hear trials, and a chief justice of the United States to review those decisions. That would be highly impractical, of course, but it illustrates that much of what we think of the “executive branch” and the “judicial branch” is merely a result of congressional preference.Congress could vote tomorrow to abolish the White House, for example, both literally by selling off the building to private owners and figuratively by defunding the president’s staff of personal advisors in the West Wing. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the president must get free room and board. The president’s salary is irrevocable, but the many perks he enjoys—access to Air Force One and a fleet of luxury limousines, a retirement pension and free healthcare, an oil painting of himself somewhere down the line, and so on—come from the public fisc, and thus from Congress.The Supreme Court didn’t even have its own building until the 1930s. It used to hear cases in the Capitol’s basement, which may have helped keep it humble. Only a handful of cases are heard before the Supreme Court on its original jurisdiction, which is constitutionally mandated. If Congress so wished, it could remove the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction altogether or reduce it to whatever degree it wishes. Congress’s good graces are all that stand between the nine justices and a future where they serve as the world’s most prestigious admiralty court.Alternatively, and perhaps more cruelly, Congress could eliminate the court’s ability to choose the cases that it takes. Only in 1891 did Congress begin to grant the Supreme Court the ability to reject some cases, and only after Chief Justice William Howard Taft cajoled lawmakers in the 1920s did they grant the court the power to turn down most of the petitions it receives. Perhaps the justices would have less free time to cook up things like “presidential immunity” if they had to review every patent dispute and criminal appeal in the republic.To be clear, I am not proposing that Congress actually do these things. I only wish to emphasize that the federal government as we know it today is Congress’s creation, not the president’s or the chief justice’s. Meanwhile, what can the other two branches do to Congress? Not much. The president can veto the laws it enacts, but even that can be overridden by a two-thirds vote. Lawmakers are also immune from prosecution while going to and from Congress, or for anything they say on the floor. The Supreme Court can strike down federal laws as unconstitutional—a mighty power, to be sure. Congress can respond by expanding the court, limiting its jurisdiction in specific cases, or proposing constitutional amendments for the states to ratify.Nor do I mean to suggest to overstate my case. Congress did not inherit the English doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. Parliament, in the words of one eminent British legal thinker, “can do every thing which is not naturally impossible.” Congress, by contrast, is bound by its enumerated powers in Article I. It is only one actor on a vast constitutional stage that includes the other two branches as well as the states. Nonetheless, Congress is designed to be the leading figure in our national drama, while the other two branches largely exist to serve in supporting roles.When the Constitution tells the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” it is Congress’s laws that he must carry out. When the Supreme Court hears cases and controversies, it is often Congress’s laws that must be applied. In other words, if the Framers truly viewed “the legislative power” as a “special threat to individual liberty,” as Roberts claimed, they did a fairly poor job of showing it.Roberts leaned heavily on the Federalist Papers to make his case. Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote them during the ratification debates as a defense of the Constitution’s structure and design. Those papers can be instructive as to the Framers’ intent in some areas, but they must be taken in the context in which they are written. They are a series of arguments made on the Constitution’s behalf, with points made to suit their audience’s skepticism and doubt. Even then, the papers illustrate the purpose of the constitutional project. Their authors spend so much time explaining the constraints on Congress precisely because they imbued it with so much power.Madison described Congress’s powers in Federalist 48 as “at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits” than the other two branches. The presidency, he wrote, is “restrained within a narrower compass” and “more simple in its nature,” while the judiciary’s power under Article III is “described by landmarks still less uncertain.” Because of their limited powers, Madison explained, “projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves.”Our present situation does not provide Madison wrong, though it does illustrate how far things have fallen. “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” he would later argue in Federalist 51. The president essentially has four real powers that are entirely his own: the power to pardon federal offenses, the power to veto legislation, the power to nominate officials for federal offices, and (with some limits) the power to dismiss Senate-confirmed officials from their posts. To the extent that the executive power exists beyond that, it is to carry out Congress’s wishes.Restoring congressional primacy will require both rethinking and restoring how the federal government works. For the courts, it means giving greater deference to the legislative process. Some of the Supreme Court’s worst moments came when it superimposed its own judgment over that of Congress. After the high court established judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, it went another half-century before striking down another act of Congress. That decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, abolished the Missouri Compromise and helped precipitate the Civil War.Dred Scott may have been the most inglorious use of judicial review, but it was hardly the only one. The Supreme Court overturned federal child-labor laws in the progressive era under now-abandoned theories of congressional power. It waged war against FDR’s New Deal for most of the 1930s until the threat of judicial reform forced it to back down. After 1937, the court did not limit Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause again until a critical mass of conservative justices returned to the court in the 1990s.Now the Supreme Court overturns and invalidates federal laws at an alarming clip. It has invented an entire arsenal of weapons to do so. Under the “major questions doctrine,” the court can invalidate any regulatory move if it thinks Congress did not “speak clearly” enough in the authorizing statute in question—in practice, this has become a subjective means of vetoing Democratic presidents’ policy items. By abandoning Chevron deference, the high court gave conservative judges in lower courts a tool to adopt bizarre readings of federal laws instead of deferring to reasonable interpretations by regulatory agencies on Congress’s behalf.Legislation is the product of more than just a vote in two chambers of Congress. It reflects the culmination of election platforms and campaign promises between representatives, senators, and their voters. Every major bill comes with a delicate series of negotiations and compromises between legislators, stakeholders, interest groups, and even the other two branches. Those coalitions, once formed, are often temporary in nature because their work is thought to be finished. To invalidate this complex work on a habitual basis, as the Supreme Court has recently done, is to render American democracy pointless and frivolous.The court’s conservative majority often engages in some sleight of hand when it comes to Congress and its powers. It is common for the court to substantively limit Congress’s powers while performatively claiming to protect it from executive overreach, as in the major-questions doctrine cases, or by insisting that Congress can still act in the future. In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, for example, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on the grounds that Congress had not sufficiently updated that provision to reflect what it saw as significant changes in the South. It also claimed that it was upholding the “equal sovereignty of the states,” which appears to be a ticket good for one ride only.While the court claimed said that Congress “may draft another formula based on current conditions,” the destruction of the rest of the VRA casts serious doubts about that promise. It is not surprising that conservatives fear a powerful Congress, for it is a powerful Congress that has often achieved the most far-reaching changes to American society. In the 1860s and early 1870s, Radical Republicans used their legislative supermajority to pass multiple laws and constitutional amendments to build multiracial democracy in the South. Progressives in Congress at the turn of the 20th century enacted the first federal labor, antitrust, and consumer-protection laws.Franklin D. Roosevelt and his allies may have conceived of the New Deal, but it was Congress that actually enacted Social Security, funded public-works programs, regulated the banks, and expanded labor rights. Lyndon B. Johnson’s greatest triumphs came from working with Congress to pass civil-rights laws and create new social programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Most of the nation’s most successful presidents actually owe a healthy share of credit to their colleagues in the legislative branch.I have argued before that Congress must expand the Supreme Court because the conservative majority cannot be trusted in the wake of Trump v. United States, the infamous immunity decision from two years ago. That ruling crystallized the court’s upside-down understanding of the president’s role in the constitutional order by giving him an unwritten absolute immunity from criminal prosecution—one that goes far beyond the explicit and conditional immunities that the Constitution actually grants to lawmakers. This case arose in the context of Trump’s plot to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and, eventually, the attack on Congress itself by his supporters. By holding the high court accountable for that ruling, Congress would also be defending itself from future assaults.Congress must also revisit the amount of freestanding discretion that it gives the president. Many of Trump’s worst abuses as president have come from finding loaded guns left lying around by past generations of lawmakers, so to speak. The Supreme Court blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago and other cities last December, recognizing that it exceeded the powers granted by Congress under federal law. At the same time, legal efforts to block the deployment of troops of D.C. have failed because Congress explicitly (and unwisely) granted that discretion to the president with few constraints.A wide range of “emergency” laws enacted by Congress over the past century gave powers to presidents under the assumption that they would be used wisely and legitimately. That is clearly no longer the case. While the Supreme Court blocked Trump from imposing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs on the nation’s top trading partners earlier this year, Congress might rethink whether it should outsource so much discretion to the White House under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Perhaps the most urgent target for reform is the Insurrection Act, which Trump and his allies view as a flip-switch for authoritarian rule.Most importantly, Congress must rejuvenate itself. One good place to start would be by rebuilding its institutional expertise. Before the 1990s, Congress “operated one of the world’s premier scientific advisory bodies” and employed an “extensive network” of shared policy-expert staffers who helped inform legislation, according to a 2013 study. After the 1994 midterms, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich abolished the Office of Technological Assessment and defunded much of Congress’s policy-expert staff. The result was a more partisan and less knowledgeable workforce on Capitol Hill that became reliant on partisan think-tanks for policymaking and expertise.Other Gingrich-era changes centralized power in the speaker’s office, weakening committee chairs and diminishing the power of rank-and-file members to influence legislation. In tandem with broader political and media trends, the House soon devolved into a more performative institution where lawmakers, now robbed of the ability to deliver substantive changes for their constituents, increasingly turned to partisan theater to raise their public profile—and their re-election chances—in Washington.Naturally, reversing these changes would not fix American politics in one stroke. There are deeper reforms that could be undertaken as well. Adopting proportional representation would restore competitive elections to the House and end the scourge of gerrymandering forever. House gerrymanders contributed mightily to the polarization of American politics over the past 25 years. By shifting energy and attention back towards general elections instead of party primaries, there would be fewer incentives for extremist candidates.Congressional primacy is not merely a matter of passing the right laws and installing the right justices. It is also about telling the truth about our constitutional order. Americans have a consistently low opinion of Congress as an institution, and not without cause. Legislators who are not willing to forcefully defend and rebuild the legislative branch should not be elected to it, no matter their party affiliation. This country was not meant to be ruled by the whims of presidents and justices, but rather governed by a strong, forceful Congress. The proper balance of powers must be restored.

Flipping four Senate seats, which would give Democrats a 51-seat majority in the upper house, is a daunting enough challenge for this midterm cycle. But that’s the easy part. Realistically, the party really needs to flip five. Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman simply can’t be relied upon anymore. He seems more angered by the progressive faction in the Democratic Party than the antidemocratic radicals who run the GOP and the country. So Democrats must invest heavily in Iowa, Texas, and other traditionally red states that will be hard to win, in order to get a 52-seat majority and make him irrelevant—or to spur him to make a party switch. A Senate where John Fetterman is the swing vote cannot be a steady bulwark against President Trump and his misrule.Fetterman, in a recent interview with The New York Times, declared that he would “never” switch parties. I don’t trust that promise. Fetterman noted that he agrees with the Democrats on the vast majority of policy issues. But based on his public comments, the senator seems fixated on two particular matters: Israeli-Palestinian policy and the progressive-socialist left. And on those two matters, the divide between Fetterman and the Democratic Party is huge and growing. The Democratic left that Fetterman goes on Fox News to bash is surging in numbers and power—in no small part because of the status quo that Fetterman has done much to uphold. Antipathy toward Israel has expanded from progressive politicians to even average Democratic voters. I worry that one day, say in April 2027, someone like Representative Ayanna Pressley tweets something that annoys Fetterman, he declares on X, “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me,’ and immediately becomes a Republican or an independent. Also, it may eventually be smart (and perhaps even necessary) for Fetterman to leave the Democratic Party. If he runs for reelection in 2028 as a Democrat, he will have a hard time winning a primary. His poll numbers among Pennsylvania Democrats (not just progressives) are terrible. Only 19 percent of Democrats approve of him, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, while 69 percent disapprove. One poll from last week had him trailing “someone else” by 18 points.Meanwhile, he keeps taking high-profile actions that will inflame stalwart Democrats, such as writing an op-ed in defense of the filibuster. And he shouldn’t just be worried about progressive challengers. A traditional center-left Democrat, such as ex-Representative Conor Lamb, who Fetterman beat in the 2022 Senate primary, might knock him off too. Someone like Lamb could say, “I will be a loyal Democrat and not go on Fox News and bash the party all the time” and win votes from Fetterman. It’s entirely possible that by this time next year, Fetterman is running in a Democratic primary against a well-funded opponent who is endorsed by a big bloc of Democratic politicians and is well ahead of the incumbent senator in the polls. Then, leaving the party would not entirely be Fetterman’s decision—the Democrats would have effectively kicked him out. (That’s what happened to then–Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema in 2022.) Fetterman’s best chances of winning reelection are either hoping Republicans adopt him as their candidate or running as an independent and winning a three-person race by wooing moderate voters from both parties. If he chooses the GOP path, there’s no better way for Fetterman to ingratiate himself to Republicans voters than leaving the Democratic Party when he’s its fifty-first Senate vote, thereby putting the GOP back in the majority. So no matter what Fetterman claims now, the chances of him leaving the Democratic Party next year or in 2028 are substantial enough that the party needs to price it into its midterms calculus. Let’s say that in the short term Fetterman remains a Democrat. If there are only 51 Democratic senators, every member holds the majority in their hands. I don’t trust Fetterman to use that awesome power for good. In theory, the Senate majority leader (likely Chuck Schumer in a Dem majority) controls the chamber. Schumer won’t schedule votes for Trump-backed policies or nominations that most Democrats oppose. But imagine if there was a Supreme Court vacancy and Trump nominates someone who is strongly pro-Israel and anti-DSA and would be confirmed if Fetterman joined the Republicans. Fetterman could threaten to switch parties unless Schumer brought that judge up for a vote. Are you confident he wouldn’t use his power that way? I’m not. In fact, screwing over Democrats on a very high-profile vote seems the exact kind of thing Fetterman dreams of doing. It’s like—you know—writing an op-ed defending the filibuster knowing that the rest of the party believes that gutting the filibuster is a first step to enacting essential pro-democracy reforms. And while the majority leader generally controls the calendar, there are certain amendments and policies that individual senators can bring up for votes. Fetterman would almost certainly join 49 Republicans and Vice President JD Vance at times, in a way most other Democratic senators wouldn’t. What’s important to underscore is that Fetterman does not act like a normal moderate or centrist Democrat, such as say, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. I don’t always agree with Slotkin’s votes or speeches, but I’m not worried about her undermining core Democratic goals or helping Trump. Fetterman’s different. He’s not a moderate or centrist Democrat as much as an anti-Democrat Democrat, or really a Democratic troll. Like Sinema and Joe Manchin a few years ago, he wants to announce as loudly as possible that the party has gone too far left and punish it for doing so. That’s why he’s appearing on Fox and bashing Bernie Sanders so often. That’s the worst possible kind of Democrat to be part of a majority of only 51. Fetterman’s behavior makes it essential for Democrats to win a big majority this fall. Here’s the good news—they can. Either because of weak GOP incumbents, strong Democratic candidates, or Trump’s unpopularity, polls show Democrats tied or leading in the Senate seats currently held by Republicans in Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, and Texas. Winning five of those races is a very tall order, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. The party’s various super PACs and big-money organizations as well as liberal grassroots groups need to be broadening, not shrinking, their maps and ambitions this fall. Independent candidates running in Nebraska and South Dakota are opportunities to potentially deny Republicans Senate seats they might have otherwise won. And with Trump’s unpopularity only growing, perhaps super-long shots such as Mississippi are in play too. Whatever the path, the goal for Democrats must be a 52–48 or 51–48, or 50–47 Senate, one where Fetterman couldn’t put the GOP back in the majority on a whim. A few years ago, people used to joke about “President Manchin.” The West Virginia senator was one of the most powerful people in Washington when Democrats had a 51–50 Senate majority (by dint of Kamala Harris’s tiebreaker) in 2021 and 2022. He could and often did block Joe Biden’s initiatives. It was a cruel joke, though. The Democratic Party and liberalism were held hostage by an unpredictable, erratic man more annoyed by people trying to expand voting rights than those trying to restrict them. We can’t afford a repeat of that. John Fetterman, more supportive of the Netanyahu administration than the Mamdani administration, doesn’t deserve to be a senator at all, let alone the most important one. A successful 2026 for Democrats will make John Fetterman Senator Irrelevant, whatever party he’s in.

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. The primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan have become intense, nationally-watched battles between the establishment and insurgent factions in the Democratic Party. In the latest edition of Right Now, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive political strategist, and Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explain why Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong and Michigan Abdul El-Sayed have been such strong candidates during these primaries. They argue that Hong and El-Sayed would also likely be solid contenders in general election races against Republicans. Hong and El-Sayed have surged past their primary opponents. That suggests political skill that will extend to the general election, says Shenker-Osorio. Kalmoe argues that the broader political environment matters much more than individual candidates. Democratic candidates are likely to win in Michigan and Wisconsin, he says, because this appears to be an anti-Republican year.

Whenever my friends and family despair about the GOP’s decades-long stranglehold on Texas, I remind them—wistfully—that it hasn’t always been this way. If you’re wincing, I get it. Such optimism in the face of electoral reality is insufferable, especially since I’m frequently bringing this cheerful message from highfalutin New York City, where I moved in 1996, two years after Democratic Governor Ann Richards lost to Republican George W. Bush.Whenever I make a pilgrimage to the Lone Star State, which I do a couple of times a year, to visit loved ones and emotionally eat enchiladas, I cherish any opportunity to remind liberal Texans that I have faith. All is not lost. I dream of a blue Texas. It is my birthright. Texas hasn’t always been red, I’ll remind them. I know this because my old man worked for the last duly elected Democratic senator from the great state of Texas.He was a press secretary, a job I did not understand. I knew he had a small office in the Senate Hart building that he would fill with cigar smoke. I once asked him why people ran for office and became politicians, and he told me some people get into it because they want to help other people—and sometimes the game changes them for the worse—and then he told me other people run for office because someone else corners them at a cocktail party and says, “You know, you should run for office,” and that person says, “Yeah, I should.”Which of these was the senator that my dad served? The man he was doggedly loyal to for decades? Politics is no place for romantics, but I want to believe the former.The first time I ever became aware of politics as a force, a kind of social energy rather than the family business, was during Ann Richards’s epic barn burner of a keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. She was the Texas state treasurer then—the first woman elected to that office—and later, in 1991, sworn in as the state’s second woman governor.Her pugnacious speech electrified me as I watched it in the basement of my house in Northern Virgina with my mother. I was not born in Texas. I was raised inside the Beltway. This is my shame. I didn’t see much of my dad that year, but I knew he was there, somewhere in that roaring convention center.Her performance was perfectly Texan; polite, spicy, principled. She smirked, but she was not fucking around. The Democrats had suffered a long winter during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office. The party was hungry, and the Texans, especially, were scraping for a fight. Richards, with her silver hair and confident swagger, mocked Vice President George H.W. Bush, a political aristocrat from Connecticut who had reinvented himself as a Houston oilman. At one point, she had fun with the Bushes’ penchant for gaffes: “Poor George,” she purred. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” I didn’t even really understand the joke, but I hooted and hollered. Here, glowing from my television screen, was a truly great Texan. It was during this convention that my dad’s boss, Lloyd Bentsen, was chosen as Michael Dukakis’s running mate, an attempt to recreate the fabled Kennedy-LBJ “Austin-to-Boston” axis. My dad spent most of the campaign tending to Bentsen’s Senate campaign—Texas law allowed him to run for both offices.Weeks later, the vice presidential debate between 41-year-old Indiana Senator Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, a lean, buttoned-up 67, proved to be something vice presidential debates usually aren’t: memorable. I don’t think any of my peers watched the debate except, perhaps, Quayle’s son, Tucker, who went to the same middle school I attended.It’s quaint how high-stakes the 1988 election felt; it’s also hard to convey how Zeus-like Ronald Reagan seemed, even when it was apparent, at that stage of his presidency, that he was diminished. At the time, I did not have a sophisticated understanding of why he was the enemy, but he was, and now, I understand, especially, that Reagan and his loyalists were intent on reordering society’s priorities, and at the top of their list were the feelings and fortunes of the rich. I never recall my dad bad-mouthing Republicans, not that he talked shop a lot at home—preferring to decompress while playing Nintendo—but he did warn me to beware of lawyers wearing shiny new cowboy boots. Austin has always crawled with them. Reagan’s veep, George H.W. Bush, was not a shoo-in, but with the help of his sons, including a cocky George W., and the cynical campaign strategist Lee Atwater, he slowly waged a campaign that validated the prejudices of white voters. It was risky to stir up those dark feelings, but Reagan’s legacy was on the line, and Dukakis, while a decent man, was vulnerable because he, the son of immigrants, suffered from the Democrats’ greatest weakness, which is an inability to be mean as a rattlesnake on command.Here, Bentsen struck a contrast with the top of the ticket. At one point, during the debate, Quayle dared compare himself to another young, dashing politician: JFK. This prompted Bentsen to coolly retort: “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you, Senator, are no Jack Kennedy.” This was the equivalent of a body blow, a sudden burst of excitement in an otherwise sleepy back-and-forth. All Quayle could do was stutter and respond: “That was really uncalled for, Senator.”The Democrats would lose the White House in November, but Bentsen would win reelection. In 1992, Bentsen would become President Bill Clinton’s first, and arguably most influential, treasury secretary, and my dad would follow. But Bentsen’s mostly remembered for delivering the spiciest debate zinger in modern presidential politics.I met Senator Bentsen a few times. He was always warm. I knew to call him “Senator”—as in “Nice to see you again, Senator” or “Yes, Senator”—and to simply punctuate my sentences with “sir” when in a room with him, and only when addressed. I knew it was important to my father that I perform acts of Texan courtliness for his employer, whose position in the adult world I didn’t quite understand before the ’88 election. I regarded the senator as a sort of Santa Claus figure, a magical authority figure whose favor I craved. Politics is a spiteful business. Theatrical. Occasionally bloody, which is surprising, since the job tends to attract the squeamish. But growing up inside the Beltway, politics was a bedtime story. A morality tale starring Texans. Texans who never lied. Who cared about others. One thing that must be understood about Texans is that they are a deeply sentimental people. From the Panhandle to the border, the Hill Country to the Gulf. The state was once nothing but wild country. Rugged individuals don’t survive long out on the frontier. Especially not alone. You need friends. Neighbors. They watch your back and vice versa.I grew up being told stories about Texans. I was raised to believe the three greatest Americans were Texans: Lyndon Johnson, Jesus, and Tom Landry, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys from 1960 to 1988. My old man looked up to LBJ, whose flaws he was willing to point out. This was years before bestselling biographer Robert Caro—great New Yorker that he is—canonized him as a twentieth-century icon. My dad would sometimes listen to cassette tapes of LBJ’s phone calls in the car. What he liked about the man was his ability to change and do the right thing, despite his moral flaws and long-standing loyalty to racist Dixie. The senator had been a protégé of LBJ. He was an oil scion, a blue blood, a World War II combat vet—like George H.W. Bush—and believed in civil rights and social safety nets: old-school noblesse oblige. He also found my father funny.He was probably more conservative than my memory allows—he once publicly opposed Ice-T’s iconic rap song “Cop Killer,” much to my teenage, free speech–loving chagrin. When I complained about his boss’s opinion in 1992, my father dutifully noted my disapproval, and we never spoke of it again.Their collaboration was among the longest on Capitol Hill and ended after 23 years, when Bentsen left Clinton’s Cabinet in 1994. Bentsen and my dad were dubbed “the Odd Couple” by the press—an aristocrat and a preacher’s kid—which felt honest enough, but who knows? The Texas Democratic Party I grew up in resembled my parents’ relationship: racially and religiously mixed. She was a Mexican American Catholic; he was the son of a Southern Baptist pastor who had a congregation in El Paso before moving west and eventually settling in Phoenix. They taught me that Jesus heard you no matter what house you prayed in. The party at the time was diverse and hopeful. That was the story I was told, anyway. I remember names like Barbara Jordan—the first Black woman elected to the Texas state Senate and then, a few years later, the first Southern Black woman elected to Congress—who spoke from a wheelchair during the 1992 Democratic Convention. She was commanding and principled, and she mesmerized me. There was Henry González, the first Texas-born Mexican American elected to the House. He was the longest-serving Hispanic member of Congress. And Henry Cisneros, former mayor of San Antonio and housing and urban development secretary.The first openly gay member of the Texas state legislature was Democrat Glen Maxey. He was elected in a 1991 special election. A true trailblazer, he was shunned by many of his conservative colleagues. Some victories are ugly. One of my father’s friends (or, if you prefer, “allies”) was Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking “sumbitch”—a Texanism that, depending on the intonation, could mean “honest and reliable” or “two-faced and greedy.” The lieutenant governor is a powerful position in Texas’s quirky legislature, which meets every two years. Bullock was a prodigious smoker, like my old man, and they both fought cancer around the same time.My dad was fond of Bullock, a temperamental rabble-rouser in his heyday. I had heard many stories of him over the years that made him sound like a tyrant, but he was the man who called my father in the hospital after risky surgery to remove a tumor-riddled lung and gently reminded him to eat his breakfast. Here is one story my dad told me back when Texas politics was chummier than it is now. In the late 1990s, Bullock was friendly with George W. Bush, then the governor. Bullock had told Bush that some bill the governor didn’t particularly care for wasn’t going to make it to the floor for a vote. But later, Bullock buckled under pressure from his party. Bush found out that Bullock was going to break his promise, so he stormed into Bullock’s office before he could get a chance to break the news and gave him a smooch on the lips. “I like to get kissed before I get fucked,” said Bush. The message: I understand. We’re good. Dubya was popular in Texas. That was mainly down to Bush’s frat boy charms. He was the worst president of my lifetime, who visited death and destruction on millions of people all over the world and who changed this country for the worse. But he was never unlikeable. He won two elections, and one of those victories was even fair and square.But there was something else in Bullock’s story my dad loved—a kind of boys’ club nostalgia. Great Texans aren’t petty. They may see things differently, but they’re not rude. Or cruel. They respect one another. They work together when they can, and when they can’t, they crack a joke and move on. All of this is naïve, in retrospect. The fantasy of bipartisanism is well intentioned, even if it has led us to where we are now: a flailing democracy in which one party does not believe the other is legitimate. Years later, in 2002, months before he died at the age of 63, during his last trip to visit me in New York City, my dad and I attended a party for Ann Richards, who was joining the Austin-based P.R. firm he worked for part-time after retiring from government.The firm was run by friends, and this hootenanny, held at the legendary French restaurant Le Cirque, was a modest display of clout. The restaurant itself, true to its name, was a colorful circus for fat cats and the well connected, and this launch party was meant to introduce Richards to New York’s elite. Everyone was there, including Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton. Richards’s job was to hobnob with Democrats and Republicans and, most of all, her bestie, New York gossip columnist Liz Smith.I remember feeling out of place. I was too shy to shake Clinton’s hand. My dad stood in the back, weak but happy. Smiling, even. Richards was bright and feisty. Cackling as champagne glasses clinked. There were so many more fights to have. I was starstruck. I adored her, from a distance. Can you imagine the bullshit she must have put up with? She would pass away four years later, at the age of 73.Sometimes I wonder what my father would think of everything. Of Texas, of me. How it all turned out. His burial flag sits on the dresser in my bedroom in Austin. When I visit, I stare at it before falling asleep and dreaming. When I dream, I dream of a blue Texas. Getting your hopes up is always a risk, but you should do it all the same, from time to time. You’re allowed. It’s a good dream, after all.