This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 31 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by Patrick Gaspard, a great political strategist, expert, has served in some key spots in New York and national politics. Patrick, welcome.
Patrick Gaspard: Thank you so much, Perry. Excited to be able to chat with you.
Bacon: So I’m gonna start with—I mean, for the people who, a lot of people, I’m guessing, who don’t follow us as closely—but Patrick is a huge, influential figure in politics.
Worked in New York politics, worked for Mayor Dinkins, worked his way up there. He was later Barack Obama’s political director. He was the U.S. ambassador to South Africa. He was, until a couple of years ago, the president of the Center for American Progress. So Patrick is a big deal who’s had a lot of big, big behind-the-scenes jobs that have also, that have also become in front of the scenes, so to speak, too.
Gaspard: You’re hyping it up so much. I’m gonna be a disappointment Perry.
Bacon: And the reason I’m saying that is like, because Patrick, you know, earlier this previous year decided to start advising Zohran Mamdani. And to me, as a political person who’s been doing this a long time, that was a big get for Mamdani.
It was like, oh, this is — he’s an up-and-coming politician. He had a lot of younger advisors who have done a great job with him, but Patrick deciding to join up with him told me, oh, this is a serious guy interested in winning, interested in developing, you know, building his base beyond the sort of core DSA group.
So Patrick, first of all, talk about how you got to know Zohran, and how you got to be working with him.
Gaspard: Well, first, thank you for all the kind words, Perry. I will say that it’s my great good fortune to be a fellow traveler, not just with Zohran, but with those young leaders who helped create what really is a movement — more than a campaign — around this candidate.
There are, right now, today, over 80,000 people fanning out across the five boroughs of New York City who are volunteering their time to canvass and go door to door. If you’ve spent any time in political campaigns, if you’ve spent any time in movement organizing, you know how hard it is — especially in this era where everybody’s online — how hard it is to get people to get up and go and talk to their neighbors, have difficult conversations of persuasion.
To get tens of thousands of them, mostly young people, doing that is an extraordinary testament to what’s been built here.
So I first met Zohran, when I was U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, sometime towards the end of my tenure. The director Mira Nair made a movie called The Queen of Katwe. And she came to South Africa to premiere it, and I was pleased to be able to be one of the co-hosts for an event for her.
And she came with the young music producer for that film — turned out to be her son, Zohran. And I met him and then reconnected during the course of him launching his political life in New York.
And he’s one of those people that if you get to spend just a little bit of time around him, you realize that this is a unique talent — somebody who just brings this kind of spirit of can-do and affirmation into every room that he walks into. His intellectual curiosity really is impressive.
And his ability to extend grace to people who he does not necessarily agree with on every issue is also something that I find to be a unique trait in our polarized, algorithmic existences. So it’s been wonderful to get to know him both as a person, but also as a really preternaturally talented political athlete.
This person is just really nimble — uh, has a sophistication about the world around him, but also is grounded in the plain, workaday concerns of average folks. And he does a thing, Perry, that doesn’t happen much in politics: he gets caught listening to voters around their central concerns, and then he’s seen to be acting around those.
So it’s just been great.
Bacon: So you said a lot there. Let me break down a couple of things. So you’ve known—it’s not as if you started working, advising him in the last few months—you’ve known him a long time. Did you know, did you know him before he started the primary campaign, even?
Gaspard: I met him before he started the primary campaign.
Bacon: So talk about... so the thing that I’m interested in that made me wanna talk to you today was—you’ve been quoted, I think it was The New York Times, maybe somewhere else—and I think you said something to the effect of, like, the Gaza issue and Zohran’s position on it is equivalent in some ways to Barack Obama and Iraq in the 2008 Democratic primary.
Sort of unpack... this is an interesting idea. I covered both these campaigns, but I hadn’t really put that together, and so kinda unpack that.
Gaspard: Yeah. Thanks so much for raising that. You can’t believe everything that you read in The New York Times, but I did say that to The Times, and I meant that both from the place of my own personal experience and what I’ve observed in the base of the Democratic Party.
Perry, let’s go back in time a little bit, right? So, 9/11 occurs. Sometime after 9/11, Republicans and Democrats basically give George W. Bush a blank check with the Iraq War resolution and say, you go do what you gotta go do. Democrats look at the polling at the time, and they see that Bush is astronomically popular coming off of 9/11. And there are a number of concessions—political concessions, and I think moral concessions—that are made in that period.
Fast-forward some years later—we find ourselves in 2007, 2008—entering the presidential sweepstakes. The leading candidates in that race, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards, straight down the line, supported that resolution and were still basically defending it, at the start of that campaign.
Barack Obama, who had merely been a state senator in Chicago at the time, had been on the record and visible in anti-war demonstrations and declarations, even when it was the unpopular place to be in the country—and certainly in the Democratic Party. So by the time he rocks up to Iowa and South Carolina and all the early votes... in New Hampshire, all the early-vote states—
The war is not popular. Democratic base voters are saying, wait a second, we didn’t sign up for this. They see the body bags coming back home. They’re seeing the death counts from the Iraq-Afghanistan region. And our economy is not in great shape, and there’s profound concern. And Barack Obama finds himself in a place where people, voters, are able to hear him on other issues like health care, broad democracy issues, as a consequence of the open gate off of his moral clarity on Iraq.
Fast-forward to this moment, coming off of the 2024 horrific result and all of the contortions that Democratic Party leaders—including Joe Biden, most especially, and Kamala Harris—in that, the contortions they went through to tell us that the things that we were seeing with our own eyes coming out of Gaza were really not to be understood through the prism of our understanding, because they’re too complicated for us to understand.
Whereas average folks were saying, wait, I just see a—a lot of kids are being killed. I see broad collective punishment across Gaza. Yes, Hamas is reprehensible, and yes, Israel should not have endured that and has to defend itself from Hamas, but that’s not the same as using U.S. taxpayer dollars to drop 2,000-pound bombs on humanitarian camps, U.N. sites, hospitals, et cetera.
So there’s this revulsion to that. And too many mainstream politicians—mainstream Democrats—were still holding on to a kind of twentieth-century sentiment about our responsibility in the region, our allianceship with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, that just didn’t square with where the base was.
When Zohran enters this race, yes, he’s talking about affordability, and he is centering that. But if not for his clarity on Gaza—if not for his condemnation of that collective punishment and the use of U.S. resources to punish Palestinians, and to not promote peace—he doesn’t have thousands of young people turning to him, volunteering, on his behalf and moving the needle first on the doors and then in public polling.
And then with that astonishing result in the June primary, where he upsets the Goliath, in Andrew Cuomo.
Bacon: Let me unpack this a little bit more. So part of what I think you’re saying—but I wanna ask you specifically—is voters care about the issue itself, both Iraq and Gaza, but it’s also a trust issue too.
You will not just go where the party wants you to go. You will think for yourself. You will be... show—is that what we’re getting? Or you wanna show us some courage?
Gaspard: That’s exactly right. We believe that we are seeing a thing — there are a set of determinations that we are making as voters.
We see a truth and we have a clarity about that truth, and we’re being dissuaded from the evidence of our eyes by establishment figures who we’ve voted for in the past, who we’ve trusted, and they’re telling us something that is incongruent with what we are experiencing and seeing. And therefore, we actually can’t trust them on these bread-and-butter issues that they think that they’re going to focus on with some singularity in the course of a campaign.
So there’s a way that Gaza, in this instance in New York, was a litmus. Zohran Mamdani was able to kind of pass through that — it enabled him to better focus attention on the affordability agenda that he has.
I think it’s impossible to disaggregate these things. I think if Kamala Harris wins in November of 2024, I think if there’s a different posture from national leadership on Gaza, then Zohran Mamdani might not get to first base as rapidly as he did, irrespective of his extraordinary talents.
Bacon: The final point on this, I guess the Iraq War vote discredited a lot of Democrats in that period.
And your point is the, the, some of the Gaza behavior and the sort of, let’s not fight Trump too hard in January and February also is, and the numbers show this... Hakeem and... they discredit themselves to some extent and people are looking for new leaders.
Gaspard: I think when you have over 70, 75 percent of the Democratic base saying, we don’t agree with what Netanyahu’s doing in Gaza,
but you have U.S. senators and members of Congress from your party who are still voting to send arms, to that government and who are telling you that the issue is complicated when you’re seeing children being blown up—yeah, you start to, like, question them not only on that issue but on other issues as well.
And it can make you disinclined to participate.
Bacon: Why did he win this primary to ask you that? We mentioned the Gaza issue, so we covered that. I think social media is, well talk about that, like beyond the Gaza issue. Like I think we did a lot of theories of why he won this primary. So talk about your view of it as somebody who’s followed New York politics for a long time and worked in it for a long time.
Gaspard: Sure. So I’ll back up even further, and I’ll put another point of emphasis there. I raise Gaza the way I raise Iraq—as just, like, a point of entry. But that’s not why you win. It’s what gives you the opportunity to be heard and to have the conversation.
So early on in this contest, Zohran Mamdani enters this thing. Nobody knows who this assembly member is. He’s thirty-three years old. He’s a Democratic socialist. He’s Muslim American. He’s literally on the outside looking in every way into institutional politics. He’s in low single digits in the polls—the very, very low single digits. But he gets caught doing the thing that I described earlier, Perry—he gets caught listening.
The first moment where Zohran goes viral is immediately after Kamala Harris’s loss—maybe a week or two after. He goes into communities where he’s doing man-on-the-street, woman-on-the-street interviews with people who voted for Donald Trump. And many of them are people of color, and he’s asking them why they voted for Trump.
And they’re kind of unpacking what their concerns were, what their fears are, their anxieties, what their hopes for the future are. And he’s in conversation with them, where really interrogating this and perplexed that Donald Trump’s numbers could have improved so markedly—by, like, 18 points—in blue New York City.
And he walks away from those conversations saying, so it sounds to me as if you really are concerned about opportunity, about access, about the deep, profound pressures that exist around housing affordability in New York, food insecurity. And I wonder, if you had a local candidate who was centering these issues in their campaign, whether or not you might be interested in supporting someone like that. And these voters who had voted for Donald Trump say yes—they give that affirmation.
So you have this interesting contrast between a bunch of people who just voted for a man who, as we know, is slashing benefits in government, even as you and I are having this conversation. But they’re saying that their support for him came from these insecurities about the viability, the durability of their communities in the future. And he says, ‘I am going to listen to you, and I’m gonna organize the architecture of my candidacy around your core concerns.’
So he goes from that moment to being able to take issues that are not discussed on the center-left as much as they should be—which is, you know, the choke of our bureaucracy, the inaccessibility of government services, the failure to deliver.
And he produces a series of videos and conversations about how cost of living is directly tied to that inability to deliver clarity and empathy in our bureaucracy—or systems that have any efficacy or integrity to them. And he does it in really simple ways, with humor, and in ways that are absolutely grounded.
He’s not releasing 20-point plans, but he’s saying, here are three things that I’m hearing that you care about. Child care is way too expensive and inaccessible, uh, throughout our city. We have a mass transit system that, you know, lots of working folks who are utterly dependent on it can’t even afford—and if they can afford to get on it, it’s utterly unreliable.
And we have the downward pressure for people whose children are still living in their basements—who can’t go off and start a family because of housing costs in this city. So we’re gonna find ways to stabilize that, and to freeze rent for two million rent-stabilized households in New York, and to build more affordable units.
He sticks to those issues, and no matter what’s happening—there could be thunder, you know, there could be an earthquake coming down, a tsunami coming—and he’s unshakable. Keeps going back over and over and over to those issues. And he demonstrates that he has a talent for talking about them in short-form videos, in longer addresses, in a two-hour podcast.
And he’s willing to go everywhere. He goes into communities like Maspeth, which is a community that Donald Trump did extraordinarily well in, in 2024. And he says, I hear you, I feel you—and you might disagree with me on a bunch of other things—but here are some core essentials where we have communion, and let’s go figure out together how to affirm that.
Contrast that, if you would, Perry, with Andrew Cuomo, who came in as the prohibitive favorite, with a huge lead in the polls earlier. But he describes New York in the same sort of dystopian terms that Donald Trump describes New York. He describes a kind of nightmare of insecurity. He makes the mistake of looking at the early-issue poll preferences. He believes people care more about law and order than anything else. And I’m gonna over-index on Donald Trump’s approach to law and order in our streets—and how we’re gonna crack heads—and that’s gonna be the thing that is gonna get me over the top. And folks were like, that’s not what we’re feeling, man.
We can’t afford to pay our bills. And you, and so many other institutional Democrats, establishment figures, are saluting the systems, the institutions, the corporations who have had their boots on our necks for all this time. And we’ve had enough of that.
Bacon: How important was it—‘cause you used to run a think tank.
I’ve covered politics for a long time—that his ideas are ‘freeze the rent,’ ‘free childcare,’ not ‘you will pay 7.3 percent for childcare, and unless you make more than $200,000, then you’ll only pay 4.3.’ Is that distinction really important here, or is it maybe it doesn’t matter that much?
Gaspard: Yeah, it actually turns out, Perry, that it’s important to speak English.
Yes. That does matter to working-day folks. So there’s a—there was a plainness to the approach. He centered a number of really simple things that people feel in their lives, that were proximate to their pain points, and that they could say, yeah, okay, yeah, I understand what this person is trying to solve for.
I understand on whose behalf he is fighting. And even if I may disagree with one approach or another from him, he’s actually engaging in the space of ideas. And that’s an exciting thing and makes me, as a voter, wanna lean in. There’s a thing to engage with, there’s a thing to debate, there’s a thing to rally around.
I’m being led in some fashion that I can react to. That is really essential. It’s also really, really important, I think, that if you look at all of the policy prescriptions that Zohran is lifting up in this campaign, there’s a way that all of it adds up to trying to get dignity in outcomes for average folks, right?
That’s very, very, very, very clear in his housing proposal, in his public transit proposal, in his food insecurity work, in how he thinks childcare ought to be organized and provided for in the city. It’s all about dignity in outcome, integrity in the system, reform and innovation in spaces that don’t work.
He’s never standing up there and saying government is perfect and that’s why only government investment works here. He’s saying these systems have not been in the service of working folks, and we’ve gotta reform them—but we have to reform them in a way that is driving toward participation and driving toward dignity.
And he’s doing it with, like, a real simplicity. It’s not a 10-point plan. It’s not a series of litmus tests that you have to, like, you know, be able to bring back the broomstick of the Wicked Witch in order to get access to childcare in the city.
Bacon: I wanna ask about the general election, which I’m interested in because I think it’s been—and I wanna ask about two aspects of it.
It feels to me, and I’d be curious what you think, two things are going on. One, he’s doing a lot of outreach, including to people who probably were never gonna—he’s, you know, he’s trying to... my understanding is he got a phone call with Barack Obama. He’s talking to people who are, like, elites in the party, but more importantly, I would say, he’s talking to people who obviously maybe are not going to vote for him, or maybe who are not in love with him.
Michael Bloomberg—he reached out to. A lot of business leaders in the city. A lot of police unions, police members—people who maybe are not gonna vote for him. It seems like he’s really gone out of his way to say, I might be your mayor, and that probably is helping.
The second thing, though, is I don’t perceive him as flip-flopping a lot. A lot of politicians probably lose credibility when they say one thing in the primary and one thing in the general. And even on Israel-Gaza—the hard issue there—it feels like his actual positions have stayed the same, even if maybe he’s changed some parts of his rhetoric or globalized intifada the obvious one.
But—so talk about that: both the outreach and the not changing positions.
Gaspard: Outreach and not changing positions. I’m gonna answer, Perry, but—two seconds on your previous question. I think what you’re saying is so spot-on about the directness of his appeal. I wanna just add that, and contrast that with, you know, the way some of us were going around last year in the national election, trying to explain things like the Inflation Reduction Act or the infrastructure bill.
And we had a really difficult time landing that in people’s lived experiences and concerns. Imagine if the infrastructure bill had been a housing bill instead—how that would’ve been received in communities and how it would’ve been translatable in ways that our alphabet soup just was not, at all, on the trail.
So I’m glad you asked that question. So, on outreach—you know, here’s what I found to be really interesting about Zohran from day one of this campaign. This was never a person running a lefty, symbolic race. He wasn’t just trying to change the conversation—he wanted to do that—but he actually wanted to shift the way... shift who has power in the city. And the only way you can shift who has power is by winning.
So early on, he knew that I couldn’t just hang out with the friends that I have here in my living room when I’m telling everybody that I’m prepared to govern a city that has more than eight million people in it. So right from the very start, you know, there’s high-profile outreach now to the Bloombergs of this world, Cardinal Dolan, people like that, for the general election.
But he was always going into communities that had voted against candidates like him in the past, who had given Donald Trump a lot of support, and trying to break down the differences to get to the heart of what we needed to fix in order to make our city governable—but also to maintain people’s hopes and aspirations for what they wanted for their communities and their children into the future.
That was always a part of his political DNA. He is, instinctively, an organizer, not an activist. Being an activist is a tribal thing—you’re just talking to like-minded people to mobilize them. Being an organizer requires you to engage in the hard, tough conversations and the work of persuasion, where you move folks—but you yourself might be moved a bit as well.
It’s, you know, the candidate in Maine now who is attracting a firestorm—Graham Platner—said something interesting the other day, where he said, I wanna invite your discomfort about my candidacy, and let’s have a conversation about that. I think Zohran is comfortable being discomforted himself. And that’s a really important thing when you’re trying to lead a place as complicated as New York City.
So that was always present. You’re right that, in the general election, as he’s talked to billionaires who are funding the super PAC against him—a super PAC, by the way, that is ending this campaign with the kind of bigotry that, you know, we’ve seen from Republicans in the past—it’s been pretty, kind of grotesque. But as he’s done that outreach, he has not shifted from his moral clarity on where we’re at in the nation as an economy, where we’re at on the use of U.S. power in the world, where we’re at with corporations that have more power than most nation-states, who are paying tithe and tribute to the would-be authoritarian in the White House.
He has not changed or shifted in any way. He’s the same guy who confronted Donald Trump’s border czar when this person was showing up in our city, making corrupt deals with the sitting mayor in City Hall to literally disappear people from our streets. Zohran is still that same central character, that central figure, who’s got a moral clarity on these issues.
And he’s gonna, like, speak out on them and then make it very clear that, as he organizes across communities, organizes across differences, he’s going to be clear on the outcomes that he is trying to achieve. But he’s not gonna have a religiosity about how we get to those outcomes.
And he’s gonna be kind of nimble in a space where you have to negotiate with a governor, you have to negotiate with a state legislature, you have to work closely with the City Council, and again with those very same business leaders—to govern for impact.
Bacon: I know we’re in the midst of voting here, so this is a complicated question, but does 50% matter?
‘Cause I’m guessing we’re gonna hear if he doesn’t get that. Is that, what does that number mean? Does it, should it matter?
Gaspard: Winning matters. Bill Clinton was a two-term president of the United States who wielded his authority and his power to affect, you know, to, I think, great and proper effect for the kind of politics that he was trying to advance at that time.
Bill Clinton never achieved 50 percent in any national election in America. I think it is difficult to get to 50 percent when you are in a three-way contest—or a four-way contest, if you count Mayor Eric Adams, who’s on the ballot, not running for reelection, but whose name is still on the ballot.
So achieving 50 percent is going to be, you know, a challenging thing. It’s within reach, and it’s not unrealistic. If you look at—if he believes—any of the tracking polling, it’s not unrealistic to think that Zohran can come fairly...
Bacon: But he’s not lacking some quote unquote mandate if he doesn’t give the 50% of your view.
Gaspard: Absolutely not. Donald Trump, I believe, became president of the United States in 2016, having lost the popular vote by several million, claimed his mandate, and mobilized on his mandate. And it seems to me that all the institutions have bowed to that. So, no, I think that there are clearly, clearly millions of New Yorkers who are aligned with Zohran Mamdani’s vision.
There are hundreds of thousands who exercised their ballot in June that affirmed that vision—and many more still who are coming out, who are volunteering now, who are voting early, who are saying, I believe in this direction for my party and for my city.
So there will be a mandate to claim on the other side of a victory—but first, you gotta win. So there’s a lot of work to do still. But you just, you know, as the old Al Davis line goes: just win, baby.
Bacon: So—two more questions. I know we usually go half an hour, so we’re making a little bit over.
But I want to ask how, and it’s a two part question. The first one is like, how much has Zorhan’s primary win already changed the Democratic Party, and how much do you think he’s going and what do you see in the future in terms of his victory influence in the Democratic party?
Gaspard: Look, I think that you gotta telescope out.
We’re in a moment that—I love Zohran, I’m excited by the campaign and what’s being built here—but we have to telescope out. This is so much bigger than one election campaign, one candidate in New York. There is something that’s roiling the waters of the Democratic Party.
And I think that the fine, exceptional leaders that we have in that party have to recognize the moment that we are in right now. People are righteously angry that we blew last year’s election to a twice-impeached, thrice-indicted vulgarian who made it very clear that he intended to smash up constitutional norms and to kind of usher in a pretty dark and dystopian age in our politics. He was clear about what his intentions were. They believe—many voters believe—that Democratic leadership has not been clear. Kind of basically inchoate—we were inchoate going into the election last November—and that we have lacked the constitutional spine needed to fight back effectively against Trump, against MAGAism, in 2025.
So people are angry about that. They’re angry about how they’re living their lives. You know, Perry, I think that the most important political moment in 2024 was not the election but the response that we saw on social media and elsewhere to the brutal execution of the health care insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan—where we were seeing average people who were cheering for that murder.
Politics is downstream of culture. It was a hugely significant cultural moment that wasn’t a left-or-right response. It was an outsider-versus-insider response. And failing to heed that—and to pay attention to that sentiment out there—is a dangerous thing for any political party.
And, you know, I worry that the leadership of my party has not heeded the kind of pitchfork force and antipathy that exists about the party itself—that is seen as not responding to the needs in people’s lives, but instead responding to corporate donors and their interests.
Bacon: Last question. I’m excited about Zohran, I’m excited about what’s potentially happening on Tuesday. I’m a little worried ‘cause we made the Obama comparison earlier in terms of Gaza and Iraq. A lot of my friends, I thought, got overinvested in one person as opposed to the political system. You know, one person—Barack Obama—you know, brilliant person, great speaker, but also a great politician.
Great knowledge about policy, great values, but could not change the—you know, still couldn’t change the broader system in some ways. So talk about... do you see—talk about—one, do you see how Zohran compares to Obama? And then, two, is there any worry about overhype?
Gaspard: I’ll try to answer as quickly as possible, because I know I can be a little long-winded.
First, candidates do matter. You can’t be something with nothing, right? So while I appreciate, you know, the concern about getting overhyped about one individual, it really is important to have somebody who can kind of be a wind shifter in the popular political imagination.
It’s gonna matter in 2026 all over the country—certainly will matter in 2028. That’s one thing. The second thing is, I will tell you what makes me most excited about this Mamdani moment in New York. It’s not Zohran, but the tens of thousands of young people who are going out there—young and old people—going out and having conversations in their communities.
I have been, as an organizer, deeply concerned for a really long time about the institutionalization of our politics. How do I mean that? Every election we go out and we pay people to go and knock on doors. We pay people to, quote, ‘organize,’ on our behalf. The 80,000 young people who are going out there right now for soon-to-be Mayor Mamdani are not being paid. This is the spirit of old-fashioned volunteerism that used to animate our politics.
If we can replicate that in North Carolina, in Mississippi’s Senate race next year, in Arizona, and in incongruent places—the Nebraskas, the Oklahomas, et cetera—that’s how we’re gonna transform our politics in a way that’s gonna push up against the systems that have not been working for people.
We need average folks who are seized with these moments, who are building in their awareness, who are challenging this system with their energy in a way that I think will enable us to craft, create, and elect a new political class—which is necessary to build up that ground-up pressure.
So I’m not gonna over-index on one individual, but I will say candidates actually matter. Those candidates need to be beholden to a thing, accountable to a thing, and making sure that we continue to invest in the twenty-somethings to thirty-somethings who are excited about Zohran now, who could be a credible force for accountability into his mayoralty, matters.
I think that we failed coming out of the 2008 campaign to continue to invest in all of that autonomous, independent energy that existed and flourished in that campaign. We had folks who were so enterprising, who ran their precincts, who, you know, took time off from work and did—average people doing extraordinary things.
And then we sent them home after the election, and there was no accountability to that energy. That got folded into the DNC and into traditional Democratic Party structures. And I think that did not serve the Obama presidency well and was not true to the movement that elected him.
Bacon: Lemme repeat back these things ‘cause I’m thinking, as you were talking, it’s like—the parallel between it is true that I feel like my friends, people I know, are running outta our houses to volunteer and to vote for this person, to be excited about this. I felt like I experienced that in ’07 and ’08 with Obama.
People were very excited to volunteer. There was a month last year, after Harris replaced Biden, when a lot of my friends were like, How do I volunteer for her? How do I... And then it became—I don’t know what they did, but something happened. And then I see, with Zohran, my friends in New York, my friends who live in, you know, Nebraska for that matter, or Kentucky, where I live, actually, you know, are also very excited and doing everything possible.
So your point is that a candidate can help. You need the candidate, in some ways, to create the movement—and the movement is what really matters. But the candidate is a big part of creating the sort of movement.
Gaspard: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. How do we invest in the continued momentum of that indigenous energy that pops up in our cities and in our states and across the country in these unique moments? How do we invest in that instead of investing in traditional institutions that then kind of corporatize advocacy at the city, state, and federal level in a way that really is not animated, at its core, by the interests, the aspirations, the provocations of average people who came out and door-knocked in these moments?
Bacon: Patrick, this is a great conversation. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Great to see you.
Gaspard: Thank you, and love being on Perry. Thank you.
