Perry Bacon: Good morning everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of New Republic’s Right Now, our twice-weekly show on politics and policy. I’m joined by two great guests today. The first is Amanda Litman, who runs a group called Run for Something, which is encouraging—successfully encouraging—younger people across the country to run for office at great cause. And I’m also joined by G. Elliott Morris, who is a journalist who specializes in data, democracy, and politics. He has a great newsletter called Strength in Numbers that I recommend people check out. Welcome to you both.
Amanda Litman: Good morning.
So I’m going to start with Elliott, and I’ll give my premise here, which is that normatively I don’t love when the National Guard is called into a city or someone is deported illegally and Democratic leadership says, It’s a distraction, it’s a stunt, and goes back to annoying talking points and makes it seem like authoritarianism is not that serious. But when I look at the data, it does suggest that Donald Trump is becoming more unpopular. His poll numbers are pretty bad. I think Elliott and others have analyzed it and suggest that Democrats are likely to win in the midterms. So is it possible that the Democratic leadership strategy, while maybe morally, normatively problematic at least to me, is the correct political strategy for right now? I’ll start with Elliott.
Bacon: Or even a little more popular—that’s the counterargument, right? If they talked about—if they sounded more liberal, maybe it helps them is what I think the subtext here is, right?
Bacon: Let me press you for a second. Say, if Hakeem Jeffries, the Black person who runs the House Democratic Caucus, was going around saying, The National Guard being in D.C. is bad, standing beside Muriel Bowser, making it a political, partisan cultural point—would that help Donald Trump?
Bacon: OK.
Bacon: OK, that’s what I think—their strategy seems to be based on speculation is my guess. Amanda?
Bacon: So what do you think about that distraction message normatively? Do you find it problematic?
Bacon: OK. Second point I’ll make. We had a Democratic primary in New York City. A compelling candidate won—Mamdani—and now everyone has written pieces saying Democrats should follow this. But is it possible that this was just one person winning one primary in New York City against a fatally flawed nominee accused of sexually harassing multiple people? Is it possible there’s very little to learn from this race beyond hope to run against Andrew Cuomo in New York, and be good-looking and charismatic ideally? Is it possible this is just one race, and the media is all in New York, and we should ignore most of what it says beyond the simple fact that Mamdani was the stronger candidate than Cuomo? Amanda?
And he really kept it hyperfocused on local issues. They tried to pull him into other stuff, but he kept it focused on the cost of groceries, transportation, housing. That stuff is the quality-of-life shit. The more candidates can keep it hyperlocal, the better. So I’m not saying, Every candidate needs to run like a candidate for mayor of New York City. They shouldn’t if they’re not running for mayor of New York City. But there’s a lot to learn in how he approached this race and how he thought about it that other candidates can take cues from.
Litman: It can because the national Democratic Party is made up of candidates running for local offices. And I think Kamala did a good job of it, but her campaign got less fun over time. I think that was part of it. The more that it became about campaigning with Liz Cheney and some of the most lethal military forces in the country—that’s not fun, that’s not joyful, that’s not a good party. I think that made it really hard.
Morris: So I think what Amanda said was correct, and I think what you’re getting at is correct. There’s something to a candidate who is a very good fit for the jurisdiction they’re running in and it seems like Mamdani is that. And that’s why he’s likely to win. But the second-order question, Can the Democratic Party actually learn a whole lot from that? Or is the media interpreting it too much and trying to come up with too many prescriptions? I would say yeah. If Brad Lander had won, you could argue he’d be a less good fit for New York City Democratic primary voters. But the entire story of national politics today would be about how we need a ‘Brad Lander–ification’ of the Democratic Party based on that one race. So I’m probably with both of you here.
That is not what I see. When I want to find a nonfighting, blah, 1997-style Democratic statement, I look at Elissa Slotkin’s Twitter page because she’ll come up with exactly what Bill Clinton would’ve said. And I think she’s forty-five. And so I view the divided Democratic Party as very much about ideology. The Indivisible people who are leading the ‘fight wing’—if you listened to them in 2019, they favored Warren over Biden. I just want to say, in a certain way, can we just be honest about it? The young people, the fighting group are more likely to be “progressive.” The less fight, older group is more likely to be “centrist.” And I think we are still on some level having the same ideological fight we’ve been having for a long time. And that is the real question here. I think Amanda might disagree, so I want to hear what she thinks.
But I would say, generally speaking, most of the folks who are shitting the bed in this moment are people who’ve been in politics for a while, who have been a little bit older, who don’t know how to wield the attention economy in the same way. And most of the ones who do are younger. They’ve came of age in politics in the last ten years since Trump. And actually, I’d add another dimension to the fight, which is: Is it fight and transform? Do you want to both fight the Republican Party and transform the institutions that have failed to serve us? Or do you want to fold to the Republican Party and return to the norms we had before? That is actually the quadrants that we are currently at. And I’d say maybe Elissa Slotkin is more fight-but-then-return. And then you’ve got someone like AOC or Mamdani who’s fight-and-transform. I think that’s more the axis we’re on at the moment.
Morris: I’m all in when someone starts putting things on quadrants for me. That’s great. Look, I think there’s like a very classic political science answer to this question. I hate to be that guy, but I’m going to put that hat on. There’s a divide in politics that manifests itself among the masses, among voters—and there’s a divide that happens among elites. And I think there’s probably another thing that’s going on here—not to disagree with Amanda—[which is] that there’s a divide with the elites that gets covered in the media. And that is the fight versus fawn framing. And then there’s another divide among voters, especially among general election voters that is less attuned to the fights going on in the elite level of the party and much more about your traditional—I hate to call it—left-right ideology, the traditional ideological components that Perry is bringing up. So if we’re talking about the divide in the Party, with a capital P, the one we interface with in the media, then it’s going to be more steered by this non-ideological component of conflict within the Party. And if we’re talking more about what’s going to cause people to actually change their votes, then I would say it’s a much more ideological and the causation would go from progressivism probably towards your orientation toward fighting as you brought up.
Litman: I think Mamdani won because he had viral videos that were talking about something that really mattered to people’s lives. It’s not just that they were fun or engaging—they were—but that the substance of them, which was talking about the cost of housing, childcare, transportation.… The fact that he was able to make that so compelling is what broke through. That I think is what mattered.
Litman: It’s the fact that it gets attention because what is an election but trying to use attention to move people to action in the same way that like an influencer or a content creator tries to create compelling content to move people to buy a thing, cyberbully someone on the internet, engage in some kind of action. That’s what a candidate campaign is at this point. And everything that they’re doing, all the tactics the videos, the ads, the campaign events, the rallies, even the door knocking—it’s the same theory even if it feels different.
Morris: I think the thing you’re tapping into is the authenticity of the candidate. It would not work if Cuomo was trying to make these viral videos, [like] did a wetsuit on Coney Island ’cause it would’ve just been quite disgusting probably in one sense. And that’s why a 70-year-old politician making a TikTok in their car doesn’t resonate as much either. ’Cause it doesn’t feel authentic. As much as our modern economy is about attention, it’s also about parasocial relationships. And people have developed those with their Congress people. I think in order to develop those relationships, you have to be a person. It gives way to a type of politics that’s different than the one you had when the only media attention you got was from a debate on TV or the TV ads you were spending millions of dollars on—or maybe in the very off case that you ran into a constituent at a actual event in real life.
Bacon: So I guess the example I’m thinking of now, based on something Elliott wrote earlier in the year, is that I lived in Washington, D.C., for a long time and worked in politics, so I knew who Chris Van Hollen was. But my friends are now asking, Why won’t Chris Van Hollen run for president? And I think he’s old and dull in a certain way, but I think what they’re responding to is Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador and did something they remember, and he captured their attention in a way. Elliott was arguing earlier in the year that immigration is not an issue Democrats should be afraid of but in fact an issue where the poll numbers can change. And Elliott looks like a genius, because we’re now seeing polls everywhere suggesting that the American public’s views on immigration have changed.
Bacon: Let me move my fourth premise: polls. We should look at polls less, and I’ll start with Elliott on this one, obviously. I guess I have two comments. The first might be we’re all now saying the National Guard going into D.C. is bad and polls show it’s unpopular with the public. I would’ve thought the National Guard going to D.C. was bad even if it polled in the 80s. I’m leery, I’m a little bit nervous. And two things: One is we don’t want polls to dictate how we view the world. I don’t know how Jim Crow polled in Alabama in 1930 but my guess is the number might’ve been somewhat higher than I’d like it to be. We don’t want that. And then, two: Since we have a lame-duck president behaving as an authoritarian, we look at his rating each day. Do they matter? He doesn’t care. He’s not running for reelection. So talk to me about why I should be reading poll numbers about approval ratings and about his actions. Those aren’t really self-actualizing.
And I think, and I’ve written about this, there’s a tendency to deliver very shallow reading of the polls today, especially in one side of the Democratic political spectrum. And that is particularly damaging not because of the ideological content or the polls themselves, but because of the lazy polling analysis people are doing. So when you say, Oh, the polls say this, Democrats should do that, without acknowledging that opinion might change, that’s just bad strategy regardless of the thing you’re anchoring it to—in this case being the polls. And I’m going to put on my author hat here and say, the case I make in my book is that politicians should make decisions with a variety of inputs, polls being one of those inputs but not the only one.
Litman: I think that last point is one of the most important, in particular, as we were talking about earlier, the need to be authentic. It is the tension between saying what you actually believe in, what you truly are mad about, what reflects your values, and what the polls might direct you toward. And I want candidates who are strategic, but I also want them to be themselves. And that rub of, Actually the thing you’re mad about—and I think this is where Van Hollen’s [trip] to El Salvador was really powerful. ’Cause it clearly fired him up. It wasn’t poll-driven. It was genuine fury regarding what was happening. That’s the kind of thing that breaks through and then can affect poll numbers, which is a useful thermometer but it shouldn’t be the thermostat.
Morris: Yeah. So I don’t know if it’ll work, but I think Democrats probably need to be trying everything they can to be creative in this way. The idea here is if you are the party that gets drawn out of representation in congressional redistricting, for example, because all your voters are clustered in cities, and you have a popular majority in the polls and a numerical majority of the things like the popular vote but your coalition is so concentrated that you can’t win power in geographic systems of representation, then you need to do something to win other voters, even though you’re at a disadvantage. In this case, that’s the Democrats today. And in most democracies, it’s the left-leaning party, but it doesn’t have anything to do about Democratic versus Republican. It just happens to be Democrats today.
Bacon: The convention is like Montana, Kansas, that whole middle of the country where there’s all these senate races where the Democrats lose by a thousand points. We should call it the Free Soil—wrong term, whatever that party is called.
Bacon: But whatever the term is, that’s a regional party that exists.
Bacon: Isn’t the Republican running going to say, Laura Kelly, [who] is the governor of Kansas, is just an imitation of AOC. At the end of the day, you’re still saying, I’m a Democrat and you’re still going to have Mamdani running in New York.
Bacon: OK. I guess Ken Martin started the new convention. Is that how this was brought about?
Bacon: Amanda?
Bacon: You said a couple different ways, and I’m thinking about this now that candidates and the individual races—I am focused on the national brand of the party because that’s what media focuses on, so on. But I think your point is, even [in] the presidential race, you don’t vote for the Democratic brand. You vote for Barack Obama or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. So is your point that this party brand question might actually not—you’re not quite saying this, but is this party brand question maybe not that important?
Bacon: Follow-up to ask a question. The Republican Party brand will probably win in Alabama. Your point is though, in a national election, once Trump is gone, their reputation is not going to be the same—OK, I see.
Bacon: I see.
Bacon: And I assume, Elliott—I guess I’ll be honest and I’ll end here: I like institutions. I like the idea of a party representing in the same way that The New York Times exists, even if I have concerns about what it does. So I think in a certain way I probably prefer a more institutionalized solution. ’Cause right now, anytime Gavin Newsom something does something good, all of my friends are like, I will not vote for him in 2028, and it’s because he did his thing. Is every moment part of the 2028 primary? My worry is if candidates matter, which I agree with, doesn’t that make every day part of the 2028 Democratic primary, which is not helpful? I would argue in this: We’re trying to fight fascism. Can we debate whether Andy Beshear or Pritzker or Newsom or AOC is better in December 2027? And my answer to the question, I was like, Yes, but you’re hinting that these individuals matter so much so maybe we should be debating the individual merits all the time. I guess the question I’ll finish with Amanda is, Does it take us too much into this primary? Does the individualization have some negatives? And then for Elliott, do we think parties, brands still should matter even if they don’t matter?
Bacon: My friends are doing it now. I would expect it’s not just—
Bacon: OK. Elliott?
Bacon: And with that, this has been a great conversation. I’ve a lot of new thoughts to have. I appreciate you guys joining me. This was very good, very substantive chat—a little deeper than those I’ve had recently. So thanks for joining me. And then thanks everybody who watched us, and hopefully you’ll join us next time here on Right Now. Bye-bye.
Litman: Thank you.
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