Transcript: These Democrats Have a Real Chance of Being President |
Transcript: These Democrats Have a Real Chance of Being President
Political scientist Seth Masket and scholar Mark Schmitt say that the Democratic 2028 presidential primary is more wide open than any recent contest, with more than a dozen people who could run strong campaigns.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 7 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I have two great guests today. Seth Masket is a professor at the University of Denver in political science. Mark Schmitt is the director of the Political Reform Program at New America. But I know they both have some interesting projects going on. So Seth, talk about—you’ve got a book and a Substack—tell everybody about what you’re doing first.
Seth Masket: Yeah, a couple of things going on. I just started a new Substack newsletter that’s called the SMOTUS Report—that’s S-M-O-T-U-S, Seth Masket of the United States. We just had a big launch earlier this week. I’m looking for supporters, so I’m hoping people will be interested.
But basically, the focus there is a lot about U.S. politics, parties, campaigns, and a lot of other things, all with an eye toward the health of American democracy, which is obviously under a lot of strain right now. And on that topic, I have a book coming out next month called The Elephants in the Room. The book is a look at how Republicans ended up nominating Donald Trump for a third consecutive time in 2024, how a lot of people in the party’s leadership were actually quite uncomfortable with that decision but had no way to move voters in a different direction.
Bacon: And Mark, talk about the political reform—is it still called that? I’m forgetting now what you guys call it.
Mark Schmitt: Yeah. I think we have layers, so now there’s a section called Democratic Futures—that’s what I was referring to—and I still want to keep—I like a nice, straightforward name like Political Reform, even though it always makes people say, “How is that going?” Yeah, we’re still doing our thing. I think we’re putting out a lot of material right now about why proportional representation is a timely response, particularly with the Supreme Court ruling in Callais that really guts the Voting Rights Act. And there’s suddenly a—we’ve been harping on this for years, but there’s suddenly a recognition of: okay, maybe that is the answer. You’re seeing it from journalists, from conservatives as well. So we’re trying to take advantage of that moment.
Bacon: Just because even my nerd friends don’t always know—explain what proportional representation is, very briefly.
Schmitt: Proportional representation would be where you have, let’s say, we allow congressional districts to have multiple members of Congress. So you might create one district in Georgia that has five members, and then voters would rank—a candidate who got maybe 25 percent of the vote would have one of those congressional seats, depending on how it was allocated.
And there’s super-nerdy different ways—party lists, things like that. I sometimes just nod along when people talk about the variations. But the essential idea is that you would create a model of representation that’s proportional to the share of support that candidates and parties actually get.
Right now, we’re moving in the complete opposite direction—where Tennessee becomes a completely one-party state. Florida’s pushing that direction. Republicans in California—Donald Trump got more votes in California than any other state, and they’re totally unrepresented elsewhere in the state. Same with Democrats in Texas and Florida.
So proportional representation would change that, and would also enable newer parties to emerge on the scene. If a Green Party, Libertarian, Working Families Party engaged in that system, they could have enough seats in Congress, enough seats in the state legislature to have some real leverage.
Bacon: All right, so we’re going to get to our topic today, which is 2028. We’re starting a little early, and it’s a little lighter than usual. So what I want to do is an exercise that I told these guys about—defining who is running exactly is always complicated, because people are hiding their intentions or maybe running but pretending to run but not really going to run.
But we have one metric, which was that the National Action Network—the nonprofit group Al Sharpton runs—had a conference about a month ago, and it sounds like Sharpton invited people who he thought might run for president, and 10 people showed up. And so I think that’s a good proxy for 10 people who are aggressively signaling they are running. We’ll talk about some others later.
So I’m going to go through these 10 with Mark and Seth. And Seth, as he noted, has written about primaries—he has a great book about the 2020 Democratic primary. And Mark has actually, unlike the two of us, worked in a primary. He was a senior adviser for Bill Bradley back in 2000. So these guys—
Schmitt: Perry, that gives me very limited credibility. A campaign that won zero primaries is almost completely forgotten. Any young person who comes and you engage with, I have to do all the background. It was an interesting experience—I spent time in Iowa and New Hampshire—but James Carville I am not. And I’m happy about that.
Bacon: And so what we’re going to do is go through the 10 people who went to the Sharpton event and talk about them, and then talk about a few others. So I’m going to start out—it’ll be alphabetical—go through this list. The first person evidently is my governor, actually—Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky. And so what I want to do with each one of these people is talk about what they’re doing to position themselves, then talk about maybe what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are.
So Beshear—as you remember, he ran for vice president in 2024 for about three weeks when Harris was choosing between him and Tim Walz and Shapiro. And so right after the election, what he did was he wrote this op-ed in The New York Times where he basically said, “I’m from Kentucky, I’m in a Trump state, but I won, and I also won while being pro-LGBT and pro-abortion rights and pretty liberal.” And so I thought that was a signal that he was going to kind of run as the most progressive of the moderates, for lack of a better way to say that—the most progressive of the sort of mainstream candidates.
Since then, he’s gone in a different direction, which is, I would say, he’s just running in the kind of moderate lane. And we’ll get into lanes in a second. In the sense that pretty much every speech he gives now, he says this thing about how Democrats should not speak in “faculty language” and not use big words. President Obama said something similar this week. I find this eye-roll-inducing. But I do think it’s a way to signal you’re not too leftist, you’re poking at the group. So I think Beshear is planning to try to win the Biden 2020 primary vote, which is Black and white moderates—that’s my sense of what he’s trying to do.
And so strengths are: this is a state that Trump won by 30, 33 points in 2024. So Beshear has by far the strongest electability credential—way better than Shapiro, Whitmer. This is a very red state that he won. And the weakness, I think the big weakness, is—I don’t love the phrase “attention economy,” it’s become a cliché—but I do think in a primary where you have to raise money and break through in debates, Beshear might be a little too—he’s a nice guy—might be a little too dull, to put it bluntly, to break out there. So that’s my assessment. Mark, what do you think?
Schmitt: Yeah, I think that bit is right. He’s a little bit like sort of Michael Bennet in 2020 in terms of personality—just not super [exciting], in my exposure to him. You’ve obviously had infinitely more exposure.
I did think it was fascinating how unabashed he was about trans rights and other issues—not occupying that really socially conservative lane—which I think actually, in terms of the Democratic electorate or even of people willing to vote for Democrats in November, I don’t think that really exists. So I thought that was really smart.
Like you, I’m a little tired of the scolding. I said yesterday, in response to Obama’s thing about not using faculty language: I don’t think the problem is that Democrats use big words. I think it’s that they kind of construct these complicated logics in the comms shop that are like, for the cost of the war, we could be providing you healthcare—because they’re like, We have to pivot to what we think people care about, instead of just saying, Hey, this war is really stupid. And I think that was sometimes the problem with Kamala Harris’s language too—it wasn’t faculty language, she’s not talking about Pierre Bourdieu. She just gets tangled in these logical things that get her in knots. So I’m a little annoyed about that.
And as far as—he’s telling a story about his electability, but he’s not showing it. He’s the classic kind of candidate who can get elected governor of Kentucky but could jump into a Senate race and lose 60–40. There’s a whole litany of people with that kind of history—much less a presidential race. So somehow he has to actually show that as well as tell it, I think.
Masket: First of all, Mark, let me join you on being annoyed by what Obama said—just because Obama is literally a law professor and constructs these very beautiful, ornate speeches and won twice by majority votes. But just on Beshear—he strikes me as, some of what you were talking about Perry, the pure electability candidate. And electability is, as we’ve written about, a very fraught area, and it overlaps with a lot of other things, including assumptions about race and how people vote, and assumptions that you need a white candidate if you’re really going to win. I think those are highly suspect conclusions.
But obviously, this is someone whose main appeal is that he can win in a red state—more so than any of the other sort of electability candidates. For people who just really don’t care what the Democrat stands for and just want to make sure the Republican doesn’t get the White House, you can see the appeal for someone like that.
I can’t help thinking that at least some of that is due to the fact that Kentucky has odd-year elections—and I just wonder, would he win that race if it was during a presidential election where Donald Trump was running? I’m not sure. I’m not sure he does. But it’s a claim. It’ll get him some attention.
I think we’ve often seen some version of this candidate in the past. I can think of—was it Schweikert in Montana?
Bacon: —I think it was Bullock. In 2020. You’re right.
Masket: Yeah. But we’ll see how that goes for him. I think you’re right—there are limits to how far this can take him.
Bacon: Next person is Cory Booker. Seth, I’ll let you lead our conversation about Cory Booker.
Masket: Cory Booker is an interesting guy. You’d think he ran well in 2020—that is, he hit a lot of the right marks. If you think in terms of lanes, he’s potentially the candidate who could win a lot of Black support but also reach out to a lot of white voters. That year, Black voters were already really in the tank for Joe Biden on pure electability concerns.
Maybe Booker would have a better shot at it this time around. He’s interesting in that he sometimes runs moderately, mainstream, but is able to project a lot of strident passion against some of the things Trump is doing. He had the 25-hour filibuster. I’m sure no one remembers it anymore, but he could bring that up.
Also, for what it’s worth, he got married late last year. The last time he ran for president was right around the time he announced his relationship with Rosario Dawson. That’s his signal that he’s running. But he’s interesting in the sense that he’s a combination of really strong principled stances and some feel-good internet pablum. And I don’t know if he’s ever hit quite the right note in there. But he’s obviously well-known, he’s well-liked by a lot in the party, and he’s got a shot at being a real player here.
Schmitt: Yeah, I think that’s right. He’s very—I feel like he might have passed his sell-by date a little bit. He’s capable of being very inspiring—I’m just not feeling like he has the thread right now. He jumped on that stupid thing about cutting taxes for everybody, along with Katie Porter and a couple others—that was really just embarrassing.
It was no taxes if your household is less than $100,000 or something like that, which really, given what we’re going to need to do in terms of taxes, means we’re just going to grind it out more on the sort of middle rich, unless we’re willing to really go after the billionaires. So anyway, that gets into policy complexity, which is probably not the biggest thing that plays.
I feel like Booker has one strength: he’s one of those politicians who goes anywhere and talks to anybody, in the way that Mamdani is. And I think there’s just real value in that right now—not parsing out micro-targeting, but just getting in there and showing up in an unfriendly audience and listening. I feel like he’s got a little of that gift. Might help.
Bacon: Next is Pete Buttigieg—so I’ll let you start, Mark.
Schmitt: I’m not sure where to go on that. He’s clearly just the most—he brings to mind pictures of—just—strengths: he’s just like Obama in terms of ability to articulate a viewpoint and get people going. And he has real credentials now, which—mayor of South Bend was not. And I think he’s super impressive.
Weaknesses—maybe seems a little too slick, maybe will never fully appeal to the left as a sort of former McKinsey........