Transcript: The Mistake That Progressive Candidates Keep Making

Progressive candidates like Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong aren’t explaining to voters that they can win the general election, leaving them vulnerable to centrist opposition casting them as “unelectable.”

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Michael Podhorzer: We’re going to kick off, and folks will join. Hopefully you all know our guest today. He’s been on here before, but more importantly, I hope you’ve been following his writing, as I have, from when I first encountered him writing for the old FiveThirtyEight, when it was Nate Silver and independent, and was really bringing a not sort of data-nerd-alone exclusive view of the world. And this is someone who actually could map it to what was happening in the world and how it actually affected people, as opposed to, how do we tweak the model so we can improve our forecast by a couple points or whatever.

And from there went on to write a really great column in The Washington Post, which, like, naming it as a great column should be the spoiler alert for what comes next. Because then Bezos shows up, and great columns are no longer part of what The Washington Post is about. It’s not part of the editorial model anymore. And so now he’s at The New Republic, and both writing and doing his own Substack live, which hopefully you’re subscribed to.

So we don’t have as eventful a day after primary as we’ve had for the last couple months. But I thought we’d start, Perry, just getting your sense there. This is an area you’ve covered a lot, which is, what’s going on inside the Democratic Party, and what should we take away from the series of primaries now for 2026?

Perry Bacon: Thanks for the nice introduction first. And, people who don’t know I’ve been doing this so long, I also worked at Time magazine, The Washington Post, and MSNBC before I worked at FiveThirtyEight, too. So I’ve been doing this a long time.

But anyway, the primaries have been interesting in that, as I tell people all the time, the average Democrat in Congress, their politics are probably still closer to Joe Biden’s than Bernie Sanders. I think that’s still true. I worry sometimes we take the sort of a DSA candidate or two winning in a few races—the average Democratic member of Congress is not from the DSA and would not want to be associated with the DSA, and I think that’s still true even in the House.

And also, the primaries themselves, I still can’t tell if these have been referendums on Gaza, on Israel, on socialism, on progressivism, or just, like, looking at the Colorado specifically, are just, we want somebody who’s different and not boring like Michael Bennet. I feel like a lot of these races are explained by somebody generic who’s unmemorable. I’ve been covering Michael Bennet my entire life. What has Michael Bennet done in Congress? Michael Bennet, guys, ran for president. Who remembers that in 2020? Because he was so unmemorable there too.

So I think a lot of cases, you have maybe an outsider, a young person, a person from an unusual job, a person who’s charismatic, running in a primary against a forgettable Democrat who’s either been a state legislator or been in Congress. And the new person may be more progressive, or more anti-Israel, or more pro-Palestinian, or more pro-peace, but they also just are not boring.

If people feel like the party has failed and has not fought Trump hard enough, and they’re open to anybody different, I think is what’s driving a lot of these results. You may not agree with all of that, but that’s part of what I think is going on.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I can see that, and that through line and that explanation makes sense to me. I think that an additional element in the primaries, which is very different to the general election—and I also think, just as an aside, that Democratic primary voters and Republican primary voters are very different to each other.

And so that is one of the asymmetries between the parties, where Democratic primary voters on average are more kind of diehard party stalwarts, perhaps more conservative in the original definition of that word, meaning, like, more let’s-not-shake-things-up-too-much conservative, conserve. Whereas Republican primary voters, I think, tend to be more like white nationalist, super MAGA, and so that has—

Podhorzer: Actually, that actually now is the conservative perspective for the Republican Party.

Shenker-Osorio: Sorry to confuse you with word choice.

Podhorzer: That is actually, like, the mainstream.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s true. OK, but in an attempt to be explanatory. So I think, going back to the point that you made, Perry—and also thank you for joining us, I was saying before we went live that it is fun to turn the tables and have the question asker be the question answerer, so always a good time.

I think that another through line, and this may be motivated cognition on my part, is the difference between sort of the economic message that I think more mainstream Democrats are trying to give, which I basically just liken to being on an episode of The Price Is Right, where they’re trying to prove that they know how much things cost, and they’re basically just, Lettuce. Test me. Try me. 635, 702, gallon of milk. What is it? Which, like a lot of focus group participants, they can tell you how much milk is at 12 different stores in their town. It’s actually astonishing the degree to which people know the prices of things down to the cent. So there’s that model, which is like, I am going to demonstrate empathy by telling you how much things cost.

And then there is, I would argue, a more effective economic message, which is not just, I’m going to prove to you that I can recite prices, but, Here are things I’d actually like to do. And obviously, Mamdani is the standard bearer for this, with the three repeated refrain thing that we saw not just all the way across the country, but people in Europe can tell you what are his three things. But also, Milakiro, speaking of Colorado, Frannie, who obviously came short in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, Abdul in Michigan, even James Talarico.

It’s much more not just, I’m going to talk about how expensive things are. I’m going to say, These are the things that I would like to do that would alter the material conditions of your life. And part and parcel of that, I would argue, is that they actually provide an origin story for people’s pain. They name a villain, and they’re presenting an economic populist argument, as opposed to, affordability is important, without laying out, “And that’s why we actually need to stick it to the billionaires.”

Podhorzer: Actually, Perry, before you jump in, I want to do, hopefully, a friendly amendment to your Price Is Right metaphor, which is where I thought you were going, because the purpose of that game is to get as close to the right price without going over. And the attitude of most Democrats is to be much more afraid of being too ambitious rather than underselling what they’re doing. But anyway, sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s totally the point I wanted to make. 100 percent, that’s what I was saying.

Bacon: But I agree with what she said about the economic populism side, and then how the insurgent progressive—pick your term—candidates are doing something different in terms of specifics. And also, they’re naming villains. They’re much more willing to talk about—I think Talarico talks about corruption a lot. Others talk about billionaires a lot. Some talk about oligarchs a lot. But there is, like, not just things are unaffordable, but things are unaffordable because of these people.

And otherwise you’re left with the things are unaffordable because—the mainstream Democrats would say the gas is unaffordable because of Trump. And so there is a story there, so there’s some story there. But otherwise the story is, things are unaffordable, hands up, not a lot of solutions and not a lot of villains either.

Podhorzer: Yeah. And I think another way of saying it for a lot of them is, like, the origin story is that you didn’t elect me.

Podhorzer: That right there—like, the only program they’re offering is them being in the majority, which hasn’t worked, and people know that. One thing I would try—I think there’s another big difference in Democratic and Republican primary voters, in a way that, like, may, where it actually matters, which is in places where they’re going to actually win the general election, because of gerrymandering or because of the nature of the state, which is that those primaries are the only ones left in America where a majority of the people who are voting in them are part of an organized movement, right?

Where in the South you have evangelical churches who have become political, and white evangelicals, especially in rural southern states, constitute about 60 percent of everybody who votes in Republican primaries. And so essentially that controls who can be a Republican candidate in districts where the lines are drawn so Republicans are going to win. And even in certain southern districts, it gets around 50 percent for white evangelicals, which is the bonkers part of why we’re all the way the country is, because nationally they only constitute 18 percent. But instead, between gerrymandering and the states they are, they’re able to exert this enormous influence.

There’s, like, this isn’t—DSA is not this for Democrats, right? People don’t go to DSA every Sunday morning to get their instructions about how to vote, right? And I think because we’ve been focused on Republican primaries somewhat in other areas too, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that doesn’t matter. It’s curious because they’re probably not going to win this year. But in the places they are, that’s where it matters.

And I think one of the perspectives which I can bring to this, as someone who lives in Kentucky, is to really get people to see how politics is different in the rest of the country, especially in the South, from the way most of the people probably on this Zoom are experiencing politics.

Bacon: Let me, I’m going to jump on that. Let me add more about the primaries first, which is that I did think the Wisconsin race showed that this electability issue—whether I, speaking for myself, think it’s, like, fake, or imagined, or that we don’t know who’s electable, let’s have the election first. The Democratic voting base, I think, is very consumed by this, and takes cues from party leaders about that.

And so I was telling people—I live in Louisville, as was mentioned here, but I was telling my friends in Wisconsin, “I’d be worried if I was for Hong, because it seems like the governor is, like, saying every day she can’t win, in these very aggressive terms, and that is going to make a difference.” And it did.

And I think it would seem to me, as a person who wants progressive candidates to win more, watching Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren lose because of Joe Biden’s electability every hour, and watching this process in primary after primary, it would seem to me, if you’re AOC, if you’re Ro Khanna, whoever is running who’s to the left needs to sit down and say, A core part of our campaign message needs to be how I can win Wisconsin. And if Tony Evers or Joe Biden or Neera Tanden says I can’t win Wisconsin, here’s the evidence. Like, I agree that electability may be fake and made up, but as long as Democratic primary voters think it’s real, it may be worth addressing it instead of losing because—

Podhorzer: Go ahead, Anat.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I use my Wisconsin privilege? This may be the second time that phrase has been uttered. Except with respect to Ohio. Sorry, Ohio. You know how it is—that was a sports thing, not anything else.

I don’t disagree with you. I think that the one complicating thing about Wisconsin, for folks who are not in the weeds, is that there’s a temptation to draw a parallel between the Senate races in Minnesota and Michigan respectively, and the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, that I just want to—which isn’t what you were saying, I’m adding a point.

But Crowley is not Haley Stevens, and is not Angie Craig. He is basically much more, I would argue, like Evers, maybe even slightly more progressive than him. And Hong—yeah. So I just want to—I’m just throwing in that complication that, like, there’s a little bit more to it than, you’re choosing between kind of a very cookie cutter standard, like Chuck Schumer pick, and someone else. That’s not the dynamic there.

It’s also interesting, I guess, in a way it’s heartening that Crowley is deemed electable in a state that, I’m embarrassed to say, has never elected a Black person governor, and that sort of didn’t factor in, which thrills me,........

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