The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 10 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this interview here.
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.
G. Elliott Morris: Hi.
Amanda Litman: Good morning.
Bacon: So I’m going to try something a little bit that I haven’t done before in my five weeks of this, which I’m going to give some takes—a little bit like we’re doing a goofy sports show, but it’s going to be serious. And then I’m going to give some views that I have where I’m thinking out loud about, and I want you to respond to them. And I want you to feel free to disagree because I think there are things you might disagree with. And also the rule might be if the person I called on first says 88 percent of what you were going to say, then you can just say, I agree with them. We’ll move to the next thing, just so we don’t have a lot of repetition here.
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.
Morris: Is it possible that the Democratic leadership’s strategy right now is the correct one? Sure. The problem is you don’t get to observe the counterfactual. If they pushed harder, would Donald Trump be a little more unpopular? Maybe.
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?
Morris: Yeah. Most Americans aren’t getting their sense of politics from Hakeem Jeffries. They’re getting it from the images they see on TV or, more relevant to politics today, on their phones. And images of citizens being deported, to use your example, troops in the streets mostly doing nothing are not necessarily evidently resonate with people. I think most people are viewing politics through—I hate to say it—a ‘normie’ lens, rather than the one we use.
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?
Morris: I would say probably on balance would not be as good for the Democrats as the position they’re in right now.
Bacon: OK.
Morris: But now we’re in speculation territory.
Bacon: OK, that’s what I think—their strategy seems to be based on speculation is my guess. Amanda?
Litman: I don’t think it really matters what Democratic leadership does symbolically because most of them can’t break through the attention ecosystem. They’re saying something is a distraction but nobody hears it—so who cares what they say? I agree with Elliott. I think what’s making Trump unpopular is what I see going viral on my For You page all the time: videos of moms with their coffee and their Lululemon leggings—and I say that being one of those—screaming at people getting abducted on the streets of L.A. and D.C.
Bacon: So what do you think about that distraction message normatively? Do you find it problematic?
Litman: Oh, I do. It’s not a distraction is the thing. It’s part and parcel of a larger story, and it’s as bad as what they’re doing to the economy.
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?
Litman: No. I think there’s actually a lot to learn from Mamdani’s race. A few things. One, more than 10,000 people signed up to run for office after he won. That’s a huge wave of people who are inspired by him to take further action and to look to his campaign as a model. So if anything, that is meaningful. The second is that even if you’re not ideologically aligned with him, the way he campaigned was really values first, voters first: affordability, clear messaging, repetition, [joy]. He really seems to love New York. And I think we see a lot of candidates try to create fear around the city they’re trying to lead. They make it scary. He made it fun and delightful. I think that’s really powerful.
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.
Bacon: Let me follow up on a couple things you said there. I think Zohran ran on his love for New York City. I got the sense Kamala Harris loved America because she said so every time she could, standing beside 97 flags every time she spoke. She downplayed racism in ways I thought were insane, but she was trying to show that she loved America. So that—and also you said it was important to focus on local issues. But isn’t that part of my question? I’m asking, Is there any national?… Focusing on your local community is great advice, but that can’t be great advice for the national Democratic Party.
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.
Bacon: Elliott, what do you think? Are you closer to where I am, that there’s not much to be learned with this?
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.
Bacon: OK. My third premise. A lot of my friends, a lot of people I respect, will say the tension in the Democratic Party is not about ideology. They say it’s about age, and it’s about whether you’re willing to fight or not. And the tension is between—the Democratic leadership folding and then there are fighter. We could name them. AOC’s a fighter. Mamdani is a fighter. Bernie Sanders is a fighter. Adam Schiff is a fighter. But Hakeem Jeffries and Schumer are not fighters. And then there are people—I think Amanda’s in this group—who talk about the age difference. There’s an older generation who’s stuck in their ways and there’s the younger generation.
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.
Litman: I think it’s a little bit of both. I think that there’s certainly older leaders who can fight and certainly younger ones who cannot. But generational divide is a way to shortcut for a bunch of things: of when you came of age in politics; of how you understand the Republican Party—are they good-faith operators or are they trying to burn it down; of how you engage in communication tactics. Often, it’s a shortcut to account for class and the way that you understand class politics and whether you’re working class and have access to wealth or not. Obviously there are older leaders who are great and younger ones who are not.
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.
Bacon: What do you think, Elliott?
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.
Bacon: You’ve both mentioned the attention economy—in this question and the first one. We don’t actually think Mamdani won the primary because he was better at viral video than Cuomo? Or do we? When we say attention economy, are we literally saying that politics is now about who uses YouTube videos better? What are we really saying when we say that?
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.
Bacon: OK. So I meant viral videos. Video doesn’t necessarily work, but viral video inherently does.
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.
Bacon: I see all these Democratic congressmen doing videos in their cars, ’cause they’re trying to simulate something. And then I look at the video and the audience numbers, the speaker of the House or the minority leader got 3,000 views. I’m guessing some kid in my neighborhood could have get that too. So I feels like attention economy does not mean use new media in a boring way. The video needs to go viral is the key.
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.
Litman: It’s the same thing that’s happening in media where people are drawn to personalities, to creators, to journalists, not necessarily to institutions. It’s the same thing that’s happening in politics where you may not like the Democratic Party but you like Zohran Mamdani, who’s running as a Democrat. You like AOC who’s running as a Democrat. People vote for people. Literally you vote for the person who has the lived experience and the story and the communication skills and the values. And if you know them as a person, you don’t actually have to agree with them on every policy to still align with them politically.
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.
Morris: The response I would say is I’m not a genius. I’d say that as the first part of my response. It’s very easy to see these things come. The only preparation I did for this was I looked at some Pew numbers showing 70 percent of Democrats today say they want Democrats to compromise less and stand up for their values, which is the highest level that number’s ever been. And it used to be less than Republicans. Now Republicans are more likely to say they’d rather have their leader compromise than stick up for the things they believe in. It’s still about a 60–40 split, but they’re relatively more likely than Democrats to support compromise. When you’re in that opposition mindset, maybe you really want a party to stick up for you. Because they understand they might not be getting the policy they want out of Washington, so they really want to feel like they’re having that legislator representing their interests. And maybe in this case Chris Van Hollen’s not a very slick-looking guy, but he has a video that’s resonating with them, I would guess. I like the guy personally, but I have a pretty dry sense of humor so that’s probably where that comes from.
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.
Morris: So three things. First off, I think he actually does care about his approval rating, or at least he cares about seeming to be popular if he doesn’t care about the actual number itself. And he’s citing these ratings constantly, making up the numbers now because he doesn’t have the numbers in the actual public. So it’s not obvious to me that he doesn’t care about his popularity, or that he wouldn’t change course. One example is that the administration did change its course in 2018 in response to public opinion on family separations. That was a pretty big firestorm. Trump 2.0 is not Trump 1.0. Maybe he cares less—I would buy that. We could go around that. But the bigger issue is, why should you care about polls? Because we live in a democracy and what the people think matter. That doesn’t mean you should be prescriptive about every single policy based on one or two polls.
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.
Bacon: Amanda?
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.
Bacon: So last thing, I don’t know if Elliott has written a full piece about this, but he had this idea that the Democratic Party is suffering from nationalization. So the idea would be to have—instead of the DNC every four years, you also might have every couple years a regional.… The Democrats of the South should have a convention. The Democrats of the North or the Northwest should have a convention. And so therefore you reinforce these and maybe at the South when Andy Beshear and Roy Cooper talk, it reinforces this Southern Democrat, which is maybe different, more Christian, more culturally conservative, we can debate what that looks like. And having seven or nine regional conventions might help the party. So I was curious if Elliott thinks: (a) does that actually help the Democratic Party as a whole? And (b) should Republicans be doing that in the Northeast or the West to make sure California Republicans aren’t tagged with Trump? Is nationalization a problem for both parties or just the Democratic Party? And just explore that idea a little bit. I’m dubious it’ll really work, but I thought it was interesting. It was one thing that I haven’t heard from anybody recently. So Elliott first and then Amanda hopefully respond to it.
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.
So this is a problem for Democrats, especially now because they can’t win in places that are really rural, and we have a Senate. So they’re going to have to compete in the Senate. There are all these short-term problems we’ve been talking about so far, but the long-term problem is that Democrats are going to be locked out of power in the Senate in five or six cycles—perhaps even facing a filibuster-proof Republican majority in the doom scenario. So they have to do something about that. The way you do that is to incentivize independents to run by not standing candidates in places like Nebraska or fully decentralizing the image of your party. Again, somehow—I don’t think anyone knows what that is, but you have to be bold and regional conventions are one way to do it.
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.
Morris: They don’t call it that.
Bacon: But whatever the term is, that’s a regional party that exists.
Morris: Yeah. You want to think even smaller. Montana and Kansas are really different. You might want to have a Mountain West Democratic Party convention and then a Central Plains and a Midwest or what have you. And you just highlight the candidates that are really popular in that area—maybe in your Kansas, Iowa, whatever collaborative Democratic party caucus you have. This state legislator Drey just won her special election last two weeks ago—time is a weird circle. And then people start to associate the party brand with people in our local community, not who are really far away and might not share their values.
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.
Morris: I think it’s a creative thing they should try. They’re going to run into bigger problem, which is that party images are really like established by media and social media coverage. That’s probably the larger effect here. But having an extra Democratic national convention where you’re highlighting all the figures of Democratic Party politics over the last 60 years is probably not a good idea, I would think.
Bacon: OK. I guess Ken Martin started the new convention. Is that how this was brought about?
Morris: Right. That’s what started the entire discussion.
Bacon: Amanda?
Litman: I wouldn’t do regional conventions. I would try and I would build up individual profiles as much as you can. Don’t make it about the Democratic Party at all. Make it about the person. Make it about James Talarico and Mallory McMorrow and the woman who just announced she’s running for Senate in Florida Jennifer Jenkins. Make it about Graham Platner. They are the local leaders who can rise up and define the brand. And yeah, they happen to be Democrats, but that’s the least interesting thing about them. I would prioritize the people, not the party convention or put it under the party brand. Because the rest of it, they can bring out other voters in states like Montana or Idaho or even places like Louisiana or Mississippi. One of the things in running for something is really thinking about long term. Post-2032, where could the battlegrounds be? And where are the places where we today need to be fielding as many local candidates as we can to build a bench of talent for those places to try and win back at the city, county, municipal, school board level, knowing that ultimately that’s the only way we’re going to be able to win by the margins in some of these places? Can we give the Democratic Party a different face in those places? And can we make them compelling enough that their personal brand overcomes the toxicity of the party brand?
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?
Litman: I just think it’s fading the way that people’s relationships to institutions is changing. And I think in particular, think about what’s going to happen to the Republican Party when Trump is no longer on the ballot, which he will not be, again. That coalition is going to crumble because none of those individuals—JD Vance is not going to walk into that primary without a fight. Marco Rubio doesn’t have the juice. His numbnut sons are going to run. Kristi Noem is going to run. Which person can hold that coalition together, I think, is going to be its own cluster fuck. And the Republican brand is actually no different than the Trump brand at this point. So how are they going to navigate that while we are trying to redefine what the party means is I think really the question of the next couple years.
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.
Litman: They’re going to have to go through a full rebranding exercise the way the Democrats had to do after Obama and we saw how that works. It doesn’t go that well when you don’t have the unifying figure who can bring together unique parts of the coalition you need.
Bacon: I see.
Litman: I’m not saying that means that Democrats will absolutely win. You need a person on the other side who can be that unifying figure. But especially when you think about congressional races, local races, state legislative stuff—yeah, a party is a heuristic that people use when they go to the polls if they’re not quite sure who to vote for, but ideally we can empower candidates to have enough of a personal relationship with voters that they can supersede the party brand. I also think on a more practical level, there’s not going to be money for any of that shit. So it’s a silly—it’s not a silly hypothetical. All hypotheticals are worth exploring, but there’s not going to be money for that stuff.
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?
Litman: I don’t think—is it good? No, probably not. But it’s where we are. It’s where we are. And I do think one of the things that the pundit class, the chattering class [have to do is] we actually have to actively refrain ourselves from applying everything through the lens of the 2028 primary. That’s on us. That’s our responsibility.
Bacon: My friends are doing it now. I would expect it’s not just—
Litman: We got to pull them back. That’s the thing with the elites. Part of the reason that being able to wield attention right now matters is because we want to set the narrative playing ground that the 2026 midterms will be on. So the more that you have people right now who can break through and talk about fighting and actually wield power in any meaningful way or can make it about the issues we want the 2026 election to be about, the better. That’s what the attention matters for this moment and that’s why conflict gets attention. So that’s why fighting is—one of the reasons why along with morally it’s so important in this moment.
Bacon: OK. Elliott?
Morris: House elections now are predicted by previous presidential performance in a district more than they’ve ever been before. Though, there’s fewer crossover districts than there’s ever been. That tells me that how people feel about presidential candidates and parties is more important than ever to their voting behavior at a local level. And that is mainly a consequence of national media coverage, of politics, and also of a perpetual focus on the next presidential election, including the primary. It seems to me that we do now have a really good way out of that trap, which is social media, direct communication with voters on their phones. As much as I hate phones, that’s probably good for democracy if we can kill those stranglehold that corporate media has over politics ’cause it hasn’t gone well in general. If Democrats are able to increase the profile of personal candidates over party brand, that’s exactly what they need to be going for to win the Senate long-term—and also probably House races if gerrymandering is going to keep going the way that it’s gone the last four months.
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.
Morris: Thanks, Perry.
Litman: Thank you.