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.
Brian Beutler: It’s good to be here, man.
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.
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.
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.
Bacon: Brian?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 pick a fight, let Republicans vote it down. You keep your powder dry for whatever might happen next year. Say, look, this is going nowhere because Republicans don’t want [to] impeach him. Meanwhile, we’re laser-focused on affordability.
But I throw out this distinction between, like, “Well, should we credit public opinion with being sour in ways that must in some sense be tied to economics?” Because otherwise it’s a little weird that all the voters are lighting on this one critique about cost of living and prices.
Bacon: Let me shift it back a few years now, because we’ve referred to 2020 a few times. I think it’s worth unpacking that there’s a theory of democratic politics that kind of evolves from Bill Clinton’s election.
They think if you have infrastructure bills and so on, that will make sure Democrats win. I think you all are skeptical of both the center-left and the left position that the economy drives politics. So let’s go through some examples of this. So, Brian, your position basically is that in 2018 Democrats won the election because of backlash to Donald Trump, not because of backlash over health care specifically, right?
And so the timelines don’t even really add up. But they told themselves: “We beat ’em on health care. And then we talked about health care a lot, and then we won the election. Ergo, health care must explain everything.”
Bacon: You’re saying Marxism is based on this kind of working class, proletarian.
And it’s so funny that Democrats have always managed to find their good kitchen-table economic arguments in Donald Trump midterms, and then to a lesser extent in Donald Trump general elections. But when they are incumbents, somehow they lose their ability to talk about kitchen-table economic issues. And it’s like, I don’t know. Do you think that maybe it’s actually just these cultural incumbent backlashes that we’re seeing—and that we’re seeing these larger cultural beliefs—and you’re pinning a narrative on top of them to fit with your assumption about how the world works?
Go ahead, Will.
Bacon: Joe Biden became unpopular. He lost eight points in August 2021, which was not actually a high time for inflation.
Bacon: The U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the media covered it—the bad withdrawal—like it was the end of time. So that’s what actually happened. If you look at Joe Biden’s approval rating, this tracks with Kabul.
Beutler: Yeah, I feel like there’s two ways to look at this question. One is to ask yourself, like, why party leaders become unpopular when they’re in office, and trying to, like, always match the changes in their approval rating with some economic shock. And doing that usually yields nothing, right? There’s a lot of noise, very little signal. But we want there to be a high signal-to-noise ratio so that we can control politics, right? So we can fully grasp what’s happening and try to shape outcomes in the future.
Stancil: Economic data is part of the problem.
And then I could buy that the pandemic just, like, was a sort of straw-breaking-the-camel’s-back moment of reshaping public expectations of what the government is supposed to do. I feel like we’ve been living in this era of this divergence between sentiment and reality for long enough to assume that there’s got to be something in the economic lives of people that’s missing, that’s contributing to this new phenomenon. Which is why I feel like it’s not necessarily a fool’s errand for Democrats to look for ways to, in the long run, address it and try to bring those two things back into alignment.
Like, just do those three things at the same time and you’ll have more confidence from me that you know what you’re doing than with this: “Aha. We figured it out. It’s affordability. And, like, we’re just going to run on that and [put] all our eggs in that basket.” And, that’s what you can expect from us.
Stancil: I think maybe there’s something we’re missing in the economy that’s driving the disconnect. We’ve looked pretty hard. It could be interest rates.
And so if you asked me for my economic sentiment, sure. The day after he won the election, I would’ve put it lower than the day before. Part of it is about Trump, but part of it is also like, I felt exhausted coming out of the pandemic, and I actually felt like, man, my adult life has been bookended by cataclysms.
And if that is like a reasonably sensible view to hold after Trump gets reelected, well, you got to multiply that by some tens of millions of people. Right? Like, it’s not going to be a new thing.
I mean, that’s the mystery here: that you have 2019. I mean, after the pandemic things get—I mean there’s generally a pretty sharp downturn, although I’ll say that even after 2019, even after Covid, economic sentiments stayed higher than you would maybe expect, and it really collapsed once Biden took office.
I didn’t actually connect Trump to sort of economic precariousness, risk like that. Now, what’s interesting—and I fully, I totally missed this prediction—I thought that a lot of this was a sort of cultural connection of Republicans to a strong economy. That Trump would take office and the vibecession, so to speak, would just evaporate.
If you look at how people perceive the economy, right now it’s like worse than the 2008 recession. I mean, it’s unbelievably poor.
Joe Biden and Harris were blamed for prices. What do you think determined what happened, at least at the national level?
I’m willing to hear different proposals as to what’s causing it. But I think that essentially one of the things that—the way I see this is the way you conventionally talk about politics, people making political decisions—is that each of us observes the world around us.
And different groups may form these consensuses differently. But like, it became apparent, for instance, in 2023, 2024, that the thing you were supposed to believe about the economy, the consensus about the economy, is that it is bad and that no one can get by and no one can afford anything.
And I think that that consensus has basically continued with Trump being president. And in fact, I think that’s probably some of the stuff that Trump has dumped into society with the terrorists and the federal government has probably made it worse, somewhat, but like it still doesn’t really explain the giant mismatch we’re seeing.
They move in concert, they influence each other. And because of that you can get these large cultural—I mean, zeitgeist shift essentially, one way or the other.
Stancil: I mean, people like to say vibes and it’s like, they like to make fun of you, but you’re saying something more substantive.
You see it and it’s not just in politics. You can see it in fashion and in music and food and everything. There are these cultural shifts that happen over time, and they influence how people decide who they’re going to vote for, what they think politically.
Bacon: Can I ask one question—one theory that I think is related to what you’re saying—and I’m curious. So it looks like the data I see is that I think 47 of the 50 governors have a positive approval rating. So U.S. governors are popular.
So I think I’m agreeing with Will to some extent. A governor does not have the same media environment. If you want to compare the media environment and who—and liking it—the average U.S. governor has four reporters covering them, and not much scrutiny. And the U.S. president is much more like another world leader than a U.S. governor.
Stancil: I think so. I think that there’s something about the way we are communicating with each other about politics—something about the way information spreads today that is creating a kind of topography of popularity where national leaders are unpopular, or everyone’s always discontented. People are very discontented about the economy always. And people want to say they can’t afford anything, even though—again, I mean, this is not [going to] be a popular thing to say…
Stancil: Yes. Consumption of basically everything is higher than ever in the United States. So if you couldn’t afford things today, people could afford way less 10 years ago—and yet people [say they] can’t afford anything. And yet, you see other elements of this—whatever this information topography [is] as well—where governors are popular, [but] mayors are generally unpopular. Congressional members are popular with their constituents, but Congress is unpopular. Local elected officials are unpopular. I mean, it’s almost like this is the baseline. And it’s coming from something that is not just the economic trends of the immediate past.
Beutler: Yeah, I agree with what Will said. I think that social media has sort of accelerated this transition that we experienced where a lot of people now want to have sort of a parasocial relationship with high-level political leaders, right? And [with] presidential elections in particular.
Like, I have a story about how I went from, like, “Taylor Swift hater” to “Taylor Swift sort-of-agnostic” because of this pull from social media and my friend group on a kind of music that I don’t normally like. Like, you can feel it happen to yourself.
Beutler: It’s weird, right? Like, Creed had a revival, and it’s like the same kind of phenomenon. And she was part of the administration that had, like, lost the confidence of the public. The Republicans hated Biden and her, and a lot of Democratic Party voters, like, lost faith in Biden—for some, for good reasons, and some for bad reasons. Just, the vibe that he was this enfeebled loser, ate way into his own support and the support. So that was something she had to overcome. And then she became the nominee, like, very abruptly in July. And she was ahead, and I think the story of the election was that she was actually ahead and then her campaign blew it.
Like, there were a number of decisions that they made that, if they hadn’t made, I think the election could have gone the other way. But also, like, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had decided not to endorse anybody in the election, she might’ve won. It became a very contingent thing ’cause it was a very close-run election, just like 2016 in some ways. I think that, like, because of that, you can explain it with much less than, like, “The whole world has changed and we need to start from scratch when we think about how we run campaigns.” And just say they had a four-point lead and in 107 days they turned it into a 1.8 percent, like, deficit.
Stancil: No. I don’t know how to say this other than, like, look at the guy. I don’t live in New York City. I’m not a socialist, particularly. But I would see his social media stuff, I’d see people talking about him, and it was hard not to get a little thrill of excitement from the guy. You’re like, “Look how funny he is.” He does these videos. He would do these things. He’d be so charming. And I think it’s really hard for me to think about that campaign he ran and think that people were watching these videos and seeing him and seeing him give these appearances, and [that] the main takeaway they were getting from it was anything to do with his policy stance. I think [it was] his personality, his celebrity in a way—and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but he’s a person who has a natural celebrity and natural charisma.
Stancil: I think—this is just my view from running for office, I guess, but also being a person who listens to politics—when you talk about policy and stuff like that, people just kind of hear these broad terms. “Oh, he’s kind of talking about stuff that sounds okay. It’s okay to me.” It’s not like they’re going through and breaking it down and saying, “Oh, this is …” It’s just like, “Oh yeah, he’s kind of making the noise that sounds okay.”
Affordability is kind of a nice, safe place. It sounds good; everyone can kind of get behind, “Oh, you’re going to make things kind of better for everybody.” And then, having established that, you have room to run on the fact that you are, like, the most imaginable …
Well, I think the question I’m asking is not “Was it an upset?” but “Did it mean he won?” So the reason that I’m kind of, like, reluctant to put it like “affordability worked for him in X, Y, Z ways” is because, yes, I need to delve into the psychology of Cuomo voters, right? I’ll explain. Like, people who are highly invested in this question—like, “Was Zohran Mamdani’s victory extraordinary? And what won it for him?”—yeah. Like, the people [who] have strong feelings [about] that are typically fighting a factional fight between each other. So progressives, leftists will say it’s amazing: “He got over 50 percent in a three-person field! Like, who else could have done such a thing?” And then the people in the center, or moderates, want to say, “He ran as a Democrat—as a progressive Democrat—for mayor of New York, and he only got 50 percent of the vote. So it seems like his leftist positions cost him dearly.”
But it matters, right? Because if your expectation of somebody in Mamdani’s situation is that in a two-person race, they get 65 to 70 percent of the vote, but then there’s this confounding variable that he actually ran in a three-person field. And then if it turns out that he would’ve done even better than de Blasio, then you can maybe make some inferences about how his affordability agenda helped. But if it turns out that he would’ve done worse than de Blasio did because most Cuomo voters were like “Never Mamdani,” and he would’ve done worse than de Blasio in a two-person race, then you either have to entertain the possibilities that affordability hurt him—I don’t think Democrats want to do that—or [that] the fact that he’s an unrepentant democratic socialist might have hurt him. His old stances on the police. But you need that information before you can really do a solid analysis. And my hunch is that, like, he did just about as well as you could expect a Democrat in his shoes to do in a race like that. And if that’s the case, then it’s like, okay, like a lot of things can work. So don’t split up too much.
Bacon: to put this in terms black and work, black and Latino working class people vote for the moderate class black.
It doesn’t actually work like that very often. It’s the higher middle income people voting for these issues. And very often, uh, it’s, it’s the lower income groups, working class communities, communities of color are not necessarily voting for people making these, these appeals. And so, and so, not to say that these appeals are bad because of that, but because, but it, it doesn’t, it indicates in some ways that people are voting based on cultural affiliations and alliances and, and these sort of communities of belief and stuff.
Bacon: So with that, I’ve had some audio trouble, so I apologize to the viewers. I will work on that for the next one. So let me finish with this. There are a lot of people running for president who I would argue don’t have much of an actual ideology or platform. Well I’m not going to name any of them right now.
What should the plan be? If your analysis of politics in America is correct, how should a Democratic presidential candidate who wants to win the election—let’s assume they’re flexible ideologically, because many of them are—how should they proceed? I’ll start with you, Brian.
And so I have a personal interest in how that dictatorship was ended. And it’s actually kind of corny. Like, Pinochet agreed to a plebiscite. Everyone was going to vote, and if the plebiscite held that he should leave office, then he would leave voluntarily, no bloodshed.
And I think that like a campaign with that as its like lodestar will have an intuitive sense of how to attack Donald Trump, how to belittle him, and how to convey to people that getting rid of him will in and of itself bring a brighter day, right? So to that end, I’d be like, if you can like ding him because he lied about affordability and then made prices go up and had no idea what he was doing and cost a bunch of people their jobs, absolutely do it.
You need to let circumstances on the ground and in the country determine what your policy priorities are going to be, and you can’t possibly know them right now. So don’t make yourself like a vessel for people’s ill-defined affordability complaints right now, such that a year from now and two years from now, if circumstances say you actually need to be focused on something else, you’re too trapped in your myopic framework to actually address problems as they arise or speak to them or understand them or come up with solutions for them because there’s going to be big ones and affordability doesn’t nearly encompass all of them.
Bacon: Let me follow up and ask what they do in 2027 with that vision, which is basically policy—almost not just policy-agnostic, but I’m a little bit policy-resistant, even. So what do they do during the Democratic primary? I’m not an anti–interest groups person.
So I’m just curious: How do you win the Democratic primary like this?
I know that this is probably not what either the groups want to hear or maybe certain—I think more and more primary voters want to hear: We’re gonna fight. Like, We are going to get in, change the rules, kick ass. There’s going to be accountability. And that is actually like a predicate to addressing the material problems that Trump has created in your lives.
Bacon: Sounds good to me, but, okay. I get the point.
We don’t know what that’s going to entail because we’re going to have to root out all the people that he put in the government and we’re going to have to get to a 50-vote process to pass a new health care bill. And we’re going to have to tax the billionaires who put him in office to fund all this. So the details are going to be a little bit TBD, but that’s where my North Star is: fixing these problems.
And that’s not—that’s not how I’m going to run for president. And if I saw somebody running that way, I would tell my readers like, “That is credible.”
Stancil: I don’t have a magic solution. Winning a presidential election but don’t lose sight of the fact that this is a social contest and that everyone in the country has an opinion about these people.
And well, one of the things is that so many of the things that Democrats do that are focused on policy, economics, and just on issues, like, don’t really move the needle one way or another in that kind of contest. And it’s interesting, you see, even when they put out the 60-page policy papers, like Elizabeth Warren was. I was a big Elizabeth Warren fan. I still have her sign on my wall over here. I love Elizabeth Warren. But she put these policy papers… I liked her, not because I was reading the policy papers and like being, “Oh, what a good policy.” I mean, I read through a couple of them, but honestly I didn’t read them all. I liked that she was the person putting out the policy papers. Like, I liked that. I liked that that was her character. And I liked the character that that made her into, and I wanted that character to be one of our leaders.When you are running in a national election, particularly, you’re a character in a soap opera. The best analogy is really just like, I think, is pro wrestling. You’re a character in a pro wrestling match, and the crowd is going to have some sort of response to you, and they think of you as a villain or a hero. And separately from that, they may like or dislike you.They may enjoy watching you, they may dislike watching you. And so you need to think of ways to make people like you, and then also simultaneously think of ways to make them genuinely dislike and detest the other person. Now, I think you’re kind of playing on easy mode when the other person is Donald Trump, frankly, I think, or Andrew Cuomo in some ways.
Stancil: But that’s what I would think about is like, yeah, sure policy’s great, but never lose sight of the fact that you are engaged in something that is like a giant, greatly upscaled high school popularity contest.
He doesn’t come off necessarily as kind of an everyman. He just isn’t capable of doing that. And was a very effective character. Likewise, Bill Clinton had a very effective character, but it was a very different character. Donald Trump in some ways has a fairly effective character, although he is also, when you dig below the surface, just a... just a contemptible scumbag and moron. But it’s like a lot of times you get these Democrats who just have no character, they have no personality, they’re nothing.
Beutler: I do think that an underappreciated—like—black mark on Obama’s political legacy is the extent to which he inspired so many people who wanted to be active in democratic politics to model themselves after him.
Stancil: If you’re not Obama, you can’t be Obama. Don’t try. He’s going to be better than you. And so, with Warren I actually didn’t like her “I have a plan for that” thing.
I liked that she would say things like, “If you don’t realize you’re in a fight, you can’t win that fight.” And I knew who she was talking about and I knew the contrast she was trying to draw is that, ‘I see the opposition clearly, and I know the levers at my disposal to fight them, and I’m going to use ’em.’
And you were confusing the thing about you that like can appeal across the party, because there are people in every wing of the Democratic Party who would be relieved to have somebody that they could put into office and then have some faith that they were onto who the Republicans are and taking proactive steps not to get wrong-footed by them.
Stancil: It’s also one thing to note, and I know we’re short on time here, but I’m basically describing politics as an exercise in brand management, and I think that that’s not far from how politics works often.
Usually it’s just him like waiting to talk or something. It was like nothing was happening. Suddenly his image in the public eye became this decrepit old man who was barely even conscious. And it was irreversible. I mean, at that point he was doomed probably.
Beutler: Can I say something about exactly this point? Actually, I like Josh Shapiro pretty well, and I note that he has maintained very high approval ratings in a swing state that resembles America.
But, you know, he’s inching his way there. I think the fact that he clearly took tons of inspiration from Barack Obama—steps out, gives a speech almost exactly the way Barack Obama did—is one of these little things that’s going to become a big effect for him. In that like, if he’s not hyper-attuned to brand management and doesn’t see it coming in the same way that there was, like, Al Gore is beige and claims he invented the internet, like that is coming for him because of how he speaks exactly like Barack Obama.
Bacon: Will gets the last word if he wants to.
Bacon: Alright, well, this has been a great conversation. I mean, it’s been a great conversation. I’m a little depressed by—I like 60-point plans. I like policy. I mostly agree with you all politically. I mean, I think governing is about policy, obviously, but I think elections are not about policy, which is what you all are saying, and I think it’s hard to disagree with that right now.
He has a great recent piece about Hakeem Jeffries, who will almost certainly be speaker. Should he be? And I think it’s a great point that Hakeem Jeffries does not strike me as a brilliant politician, in the sort of category of Nancy Pelosi. So with that, great to see you guys.
Thank you. And thanks to everybody who joined us.
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