This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, and this is the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by two of my favorite political commentators: Will Stancil, you can read him on Substack. You can also see a lot of his great posts on Twitter and Bluesky. A very insightful voice on politics.

Brian Beutler used to work for The New Republic at one point, and also for Crooked Media for a period. He now has a great Substack, Off Message, and is one of the most insightful writers about liberal and democratic politics. Welcome, guys.

Brian Beutler: It’s good to be here, man.

Will Stancil: Absolutely.

Bacon: So I think the question I want to sort of zone in on is this, which is that affordability—there’s a big discourse about affordability right now. Essentially, the argument is that affordability is the way to think about American politics today.

It’s the defining issue, and if Democrats figure out how to win on that issue, they will win. And so I want to question—talk about—that assumption, because I think the three of us are not sure that’s quite correct. I want to sort of unpack that a little bit. I’ll start with Will: Is affordability the defining issue of politics? And if Democrats win on that, will they be in great shape?

Stancil: Well, it’s certainly an issue people are talking about a lot, but I don’t really know how you win it. And it sounds a lot like a lot of issues I’ve heard about in the past that people said the same thing about—that the Democrats unequivocally won—and then still lost the election. So, I’m pretty skeptical myself.

Bacon: When you say other issues, do you mean like healthcare? Do you mean the economy? What do you mean by that?

Stancil: So every single cycle, you get the same thing. You see Democrats say, Well, we would’ve won last time if we had just focused on the working-class, kitchen-table, economic issues that real Americans care about. And so what they actually call that issue always changes.

So some years it’s health care, some years it’s jobs, some years it’s affordability or inflation—which is literally just affordability by a different term. And the issue itself kind of rotates, but they all have these similar qualities. And it’s every single cycle this gets brought up. And you don’t notice a lot of difference in the election outcomes when Democrats focus on these things. I mean, I just don’t really see what the evidence is that this is moving a lot of votes.

Bacon: Brian?

Beutler: Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything Will said. I think that there’s maybe a couple distinctions between Democrats focusing on affordability as a concept and focusing on other kitchen-table issues where there are, in theory at least, policy solutions that they could bring to voters and say, “Look, you have concerns about health care, you have concerns about prescription drug costs. Vote for us, we’ll lower your health care costs. We’ll lower your prescription drug costs in these fairly straightforward ways.”

With affordability, because it’s a subjective term, it’s not measuring anything real, the risk is that they win while campaigning on this issue and then have nothing really material to offer voters to actually address what voters say their concern is.

So, I mean, what I see happening is, like in 2018, Democrats are very likely to win because of backlash to Donald Trump. Democrats will reverse-engineer a different story where they won because of their brilliant political commitment to lowering the cost of living.

And thus [they will] tell themselves that to maintain power, to not waste all their new political capital, they have to do stuff to lower prices when they don’t really have any good ideas for how to do that. So it’s in some sense even like a worse trap to be in if they’ve convinced themselves that this is really political gold.

Bacon: Let me make sure I understand the problem with it. You basically said affordability is not a concrete thing. But I think, in theory—like, how much can I afford my house? Can I afford my groceries?—that is obviously real. So explain what you mean a little bit.

Beutler: Yeah. So, I think that there’s maybe three ways that you can look at the poll finding—or the consistent poll finding—that voters are saying right now. When asked, “What’s the biggest issue for you?” they say, It’s the cost of stuff, right? My life is unaffordable.

One interpretation of that is that it’s literally true and they want to see the numbers go down. Another, on the completely opposite end of the spectrum, is that they have sort of free-floating antipathy to Donald Trump over the economy, but maybe a variety of issues.

And so they park their sentiment negatively wherever they’re asked about it, including about Trump’s promises to bring prices down or to reduce inflation. It’s not that they really feel uniquely stressed at the moment. They just know that Trump hasn’t helped and he promised he would, and they’re pissed. And so that’s what they say.

And then I think that there’s like a middle ground, and I think this is probably where I put my money on the true opinion of the public—to the extent that something like that exists—which is that voters are unhappy with Donald Trump for a lot of reasons, but they wouldn’t be pinpointing prices per se if their real malaise wasn’t, in some sense, economic in nature.

And if that’s the case, then if you’re Democrats, you really want to try to not be too literal about everything, right? Like, if you say, “Well, people are saying affordability, they’re saying the cost of living. Therefore, we need to come up with an agenda that will make meat prices fall and fast-food prices fall. And just across the board, the numbers will drop.”

And what you need to do is say: If people are just kind of unhappy with the state of things or how secure things feel, what are they really asking for? I as, like, a man of a certain age—I’ve lived through 9/11, the Great Recession, the COVID pandemic, and sometimes I feel like I don’t want to go through another one or two of these things before I reach retirement age. And I’m not sure I could weather it financially if that kind of thing happened.

Well, what does that mean about me? I think what it means about me is that I would feel better about things if America had better safety nets. And so if you want to talk to Americans in a way that sort of scratches their affordability itch, you might do it by saying, We need to make life fair for people. We need to make it so that if there are emergencies in the world, everything doesn’t fall apart.

But that’s not really how Democrats are interpreting these repeat findings about affordability. They’re saying, We can’t attack Donald Trump on other issues because we have to remain laser-focused on affordability. And they’re actually trying to make prices go down, like literally down.

And if they try to do that in power, I think that they’re likely to fail. But what’s happening right now in politics while they’re trying to win votes is that they’re trying to make Donald Trump’s health insurance premiums fall so that Donald Trump can take credit for lowering prices, and they are running on an affordability message. With weeks before the Supreme Court probably brings his tariffs down—which will eventually bring prices down, too—and so they’re setting up politics in a way that will allow Donald Trump to say, Everyone agreed affordability was the issue and I solved it.

So I just think that if they’re going down this road, if they’re going to commit themselves to devoting X percent of their messaging energy to affordability, they need to be clear in their heads about what all this stuff means. Or they’re going to either fumble the ball before the midterms or else run into the end zone and be like, “Now we don’t know what to do with the power that we’ve won because we made promises we can’t keep.”

Stancil: Well, this is unusual, Brian, because I think we substantially disagree on this. I mean, first off, I’m going to say [that] the trap that you have described—that Democrats will say, “We will make things affordable,” and they get in office and they cannot do so is precisely the trap that Donald Trump has fallen into.

He ran on “I’m going to lower prices,” and there was no idea really what that meant. It was this kind of foggy notion, and then it became impossible for him to say that he’s done so.

And the irony here is… I won’t get any likes for saying this, but the irony here is that prices are not actually up that much over the last year. I mean, we measure this. This is inflation, this is what inflation measures, and it’s up 3 percent.

So that’s higher than usual, but it’s still a lot lower than it was in 2022 and 2023. And so prices are up 3 percent. But the problem is [that] because this notion is so vague and so foggy, anyone who’s mad about any price anywhere in their life, anything that they just think seems unfair. Oh, I hate having to pay for college for my kids. I hate having to pay my mortgage. Rent sucks. I mean, I’m a renter. Rent does suck.

They can just say, Well, that’s the affordability crisis right there. It’s a free-floating, like, inchoate discontent that you can’t get rid of because there’s no way to just really describe, first of all, what it is, and second of all, how you solved it.

And Donald Trump walked directly into that trap. So I don’t have a lot of sympathy when he’s out there saying, “Well, inflation’s not that bad. Like, why is everyone so mad?” He did it. But also, he’s not totally wrong. It was the same thing that Biden was saying a year ago, where he’s saying, “Inflation is down. Why are you so mad?” He’s not wrong. It isn’t that bad, using the measures that we typically use.

Right. With that said, I think that what you’re saying is that Democrats should avoid that by running on this platform of “We’ll improve the safety net.” Great. I love improving the safety net. The moment you say “safety net,” you get likes on the cloud. Everyone loves talking about the safety net. We’re all liberals. I love improving the safety net. Let’s do it.

I’ll say that the platform of “Let’s improve the safety net, let’s help the people the least fortunate, let’s make sure that [we] reduce precarity in American life”—that’s just what Democrats have been running on for my entire life. I mean, that is literally just like the standard Democratic platform. And so while I think it’s great, and I’m all for it and I’m a Democrat, if this was our electoral gold, I think we wouldn’t be in this bind. We’d be winning every election 80-20.

Beutler: I mean, we’re not disagreeing. When I say if Democrats want to make a pitch to voters related to affordability, they should make it in terms that they can deliver on. I’m not saying that that necessarily represents some sort of optimal politics.

I’m saying that the mistake would be [saying], “This is $9.99 a pound; we’re going to make it $8.99 a pound with policy hocus-pocus.” And then they win because they’re capturing the bad vibes of the people and turning them into election victories. But they can’t actually bring the prices down.

And I think, like, as you were saying, Donald Trump just lied about this. He saw survey results. “People are upset about prices. I’ll bring prices down.” Day one, it was a lie. And now he’s sort of reaping what he sowed.

And so, like, I don’t have any sympathy for him. I think it’s totally fine—I like turnabout being fair play here—for Democrats to be like, Look, he said he’d fix this on day one. He was lying. It’s like the latest in a thousand lies he’s told you. We can’t let him keep getting one over on us in this way.

Stancil: And it’s certainly true. I mean, it’s worth noting that while price inflation’s 3 percent, we’re not, like, seeing runaway inflation. People say, Oh, prices are up 50 percent, the economy is getting worse. There’s not a lot of hiring right now. It seems like we may be headed for a recession, which would be really bad. And the tariffs are increasing prices; to say inflation is probably down is 100 percent insane. The idea that, like, we’re seeing this runaway affordability crisis everywhere—it’s considerably better than it was three years ago, even.

Bacon: Go ahead, Brian,

Beutler: The safety net as enhancement as a solution to malaise is sort of like, I think, a long-run thought. It’s sort of like what Democrats should do because it’s the right thing to do, less than, like, “This is how you square the circle of voters [who] say focus on affordability.” So you give them a safety net gift basket, and then they reward you for that, right?

I think that the campaign against Donald Trump should be straight-up confrontation with all the ways he’s failed, all the ways he lies, all the ways he’s corrupt. And you see in Democratic communications that they are instead going to rerun the play they ran ahead of 2018, where every year—every few months or something like that—Al Green, the congressman from Texas, introduces an impeachment resolution against Donald Trump.

Those resolutions are privileged, so they automatically get a vote on the House floor. And because Democrats are scared of their own shadow, every time he does this, they have to figure out what they want to say or do about it. And the official leadership position is: Democrats should vote “present,” not for or against; basically take themselves out of the equation. Don’t........

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