This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 11 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 the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by Michael Podhorzer, who’s a longtime labor leader who now writes and comments about politics. He writes a great newsletter called Weekend Reading that goes through and analyzes a lot of political trends, and really, he’s been a great advocate for defending not just the Democrats but democracy—in a very important way.
So, Michael, welcome.
Michael Podhorzer: Great. It’s great to be with you again, Perry.
Bacon: So we’re going to dive into the election results. I know we—people—wanted to go through, you know: We had the results, blue wave, obviously. We wanted to dive in and look very carefully at what happened and what we can learn from that.
So we’re going to go through and look at the states a little bit individually, a little bit combined. And so what I want to start with—and I want you to react—I’m going to give one takeaway I had and then get your response to it.
The first one was—the first takeaway I had essentially. looking at the data—that either the racial realignment never happened, or it already ended. And what I mean by that is, there was a lot of talk after 2024 and the run-up to it about Black voters—particularly Black men and Latino men—and also voters under 30 moving to the right. So we’ve had this whole discourse about: You have to have a Joe Rogan of the left and like, the wokesters have gone too far—and so on.
And so let me go through these data briefly here. According to the 2024 exit poll, Trump won 13 percent of Black voters, but in New Jersey, 5 percent; in Virginia, 7 percent. In the the last-week election, according to exit polls again, Black men—21 percent for Trump in 2024, 7 percent in New Jersey, 11 percent in Virginia.
Voters under 30—43 percent for Trump, 31 in New Jersey, 29 in Virginia. Latinos—46 percent for Trump nationally in 2024, 31 in New Jersey, 33 in Virginia. Latino men—54 percent for Trump in 2024, 38 to 47. In other words, big drops with Black people, Black men, Latinos, Latino men compared from 2024 to 2025.
So in my idea, that suggests maybe The New York Times and everyone else interviewing every Black man that voted for Trump was a bit of a mistake and an overreaction in the last election.
But Michael, what’s your response to what I’m laying out there?
Podhorzer: Sure. No, I think you’re raising something really important, and something I think folks who are joining in should know. You were saying before, and that’s really important. I think some people are talking about: Will this blue wave bring accountability?—which they generally mean as, will it constrain MAGA or Trump?—but it would be great if this could also be an accountability election for the commentariat that keep telling us the wrong thing about what’s going on in America.
That once again—they’re sticking to their prior mistakes. And so they just really got dug in on this narrative about how, as you say, young people, young Black men, young Latino men were moving right. And they based that on the conclusion that because Trump did better, it wasn’t Harris doing worse.
And as I’ve written a lot about—as you know—we’re in this period of people really being dissatisfied with the way the government works, with both parties, to a degree that really we haven’t seen before. In the last 10 elections, nine times the party in power lost.
So essentially, I wrote this the week after the election: The Democrats had just taken the most important step toward winning the next set of elections—by losing the one that just happened. And so once that happened, those voters shouldn’t be thought of as being in those demographic categories but being a group of voters who are completely dissatisfied with the way politics is helping them in their lives.
And if we thought about it that way, we’d have a much better understanding of what’s happening in American politics. You have about 30 percent-ish on both sides—only— that actually like Democrats or Republicans. But we just ignore this unprecedented level of dissatisfaction with both.
Bacon: What are your takeaways from New Jersey and Virginia? Or it’s just, those two, say specifically, let’s start with there.
Podhorzer: Well, I think it reflects what happened almost literally everywhere.
The Georgia public utility elections, way downballot elections all over the country—the Pennsylvania Supreme Court retention elections—and it really speaks to something that you’ve written about and we’ve talked about, that I think we shouldn’t lose sight of. For the last however many months, there’s been this big war about Should Democrats be moderate, should Democrats … wins over replacement, and how much is the moderate premium?
And even the folks who are bullish on moderation are talking about maybe two or three points or whatever. And we just saw like a 10-point win, no matter where you fit on that continuum. And that’s what’s clueless about the people who are engaging in that debate because it’s basically—the debate has been captured by—use a sports metaphor—by people who think the only thing that matters in winning a football game is how well you can kick extra points and field goals.
That like, no, we’re not going to talk about how to win touchdowns. There’s a group of analysts and strategists who have lost sight of how you actually win elections and how you actually make big gains.
Bacon: And what should the discourse be about instead?
Podhorzer: The discourse should be—and should have been for at least the last 10, 15 years—about the threat, and now more than a threat, being posed by this rising fascist movement. And the debate, as it’s carried on—the discourse, as you say—as it’s carried on right now, flattens that to a messaging question.
Bacon: I see.
Podhorzer: About how to talk—whether you should talk about Trump and that sort of thing—rather than actually see that it’s dismantling the things that people in this country really want, right?
Bacon: One thing you’ve taught me a lot—and reading you has helped me understand—is that in an election in which there’s a wave, usually there’s a big debate in this discourse I’m describing between what’s called persuasion and what’s called turnout.
And so the more moderate side says you win elections with swing voters, and you persuade them. And the more progressive side, at times—although it’s getting better occasionally—will say you win elections by just turning out the most people on your side.
But if you look at the exit polls and other data in Virginia and New Jersey—and probably in other states too—from last week, what you see is that there are certain counties and exit polls suggesting actual people who voted for Trump did change and vote for Spanberger and Sherrill.
You also had what’s pretty fairly clear: that the number of people who voted for Harris, as a percentage, was large, and that the people who voted; there—there was more turnout for the Democratic voting base than the Republican voting base. So you had turnout and persuasion changes, and those are not contradictory.
But if you think about these elections as being backlashes, or about something broader than what the message is, then it’s not surprising that you have turnout and persuasion would go the same way.
Podhorzer: Right. And I think the one thing I’d offer to make better sense of the persuasion-turnout conversation is that these are words, really—especially right after Clinton lost in 2016, as you said—that have become so ideologically loaded.
And so if you’re a progressive, you think, well, it’s got to be turnout. And if you’re a moderate, you say it’s got to be persuasion. And both, you know, ask us to think of the sort of avatar of each, which is what makes their arguments convincing.
But if we go back to the beginning of this conversation, we’re saying that actually the people who went back and forth in the elections you’re talking about aren’t really progressive or moderate—they’re just pissed off.
And so using the word persuasion, which implies that you’re having a rational conversation, in which you’re trying to convince one of these voters that you’re going to do a better job, completely misses the mark—because Trump didn’t convince those voters he’d do a better job in 2024.
And that argues, sorry for some people, that neither did Spanberger or Sherrill, right?
Bacon: You know, we didn’t get our Spanberger for president shirts yet. You’re saying we should hold off on that.
Podhorzer: Right? It’s like being in the right place at the right time and not screwing up. But again, it’s absolutely true that voters, this group of voters, has been swinging back and forth, but it’s not true that it’s because of a great message.
It’s because of external conditions.
Bacon: So I guess that part of it is like, your position is almost akin to: What did we learn from last week? In other words, part of what you’re saying is there’s not a magic word that Spanberger or Sherrill used that we can learn from for 2028 or 2026?
Podhorzer: Right.
I mean, what we’ve learned is basically: Gravity works, right? I mean that, my guess, once again, why it’s a different way of understanding politics and elections that has been reliable, certainly throughout the twenty-first century worked again..
Bacon: Let me ask you a different question. You and I—I assume you think that a lot of people cannot afford goods, and affordability is an actual human problem for human people. But you—I suspect you are not sure that Democrats have solved the affordability issue based on last week.
Podhorzer: Not at all.
Bacon: OK.
Podhorzer: Right. I mean, I—and another polling-enabled misstep in the political discourse is this idea that you win an election, and it must be for the thing you wanted to have won the election for.
And so I think there’s a lot of that going on. If you look underneath, in some of the exits and more broadly in the polls, there wasn’t just a sudden boost in people’s confidence that Democrats can deliver lower, more affordable prices.
There’s just no confidence in that. I mean, they’re basically winning despite people not really believing their rhetoric. And that’s the problem.
Perry Bacon: I want to talk about this racial realignment idea more generally, because I think that was important. I mean, there is—well, how do you see the role of … you are somewhat skeptical of this whole thinking about race as a category of American politics, as opposed to other parts of it.
How did you—I guess the context has been: Asian, Latino, and Black voters are going to become Democratic, and that’s going to create this perpetual Democratic majority. And now that’s been rejected. And you have people saying the Republicans will be the working-class majority that’ll include—and I guess your view is both these things were nonsense the whole time.
Podhorzer: Well, 90 percent—I think that what’s important in someone voting is the dominant identities people feel for themselves, right? And those are mostly not the demographic characteristics that are imposed on them by pundits and commentators and pollsters.
The one exception continues to be Black—because, unlike other quote minority groups that get rolled in with it, you can’t live in America and decide, in the same way you can with other ethnicities, to be white. And because most of the rest of America doesn’t cooperate with that. So, for that reason, we’ve seen 90–10 for generations.
Right. Because in that one instance, the demographic category is actually pretty correlated with people’s sense of identity.
Bacon: But Michael, it was 86–13 last time, so everything has changed.
Podhorzer: Yeah, but that’s still—that’s still a pretty … I mean, look—for other groups, there are only two groups of any size in American politics that are over 75, even. And that’s Blacks and white evangelicals.
Perry Bacon: Those are the two groups. But identity does tell us a lot.
Podhorzer: Right? And to go a little deeper with both—it’s not just that demographic kind of marker. It’s that, in both instances, most of the people in that group live within a social ecosystem that is pretty homogeneous.
If you’re a white evangelical, you’re probably going to church at least once a week. You’re in a place that’s very dense with people who feel the same way, and that’s very reinforcing. And as you know, there’s a great book called Steadfast Democrats that goes through the same thing in explaining that cohesion in Black voting.
And if you look at both—and this gets, I think, to your 13 percent—is that, in both instances, the rates are much closer to 90 or above, where people are geographically clustered. And so, a white evangelical in Boston is probably 60–40. Whereas if they’re in Alabama, they’re 95–5. Right.
Bacon: I want to go to New York, and this is more of a Democratic-versus-Democratic race. So I looked through the exits a little bit because I was curious, and because I guess part of it is I’m skeptical of … I would like politics to be more about the concerns of what I would call income … Americans who are showing four things.
I think the working class can be a real thing—and politics can help that. It can also become, like, a code word for a lot of things going on. So, and I guess in this case, Zohran won, and he campaigned and talked to the working class a lot—and so did Bernie Sanders. But the results show something a little bit different, which is that the core groups that Zohran won were based not on income or degree but really ideology and age.
So Zohran won 75 percent among those 18 to 29; he won 65 percent among those 30 to 44. Among those with no college degree, he won 42 percent compared to Cuomo’s f47—so about a tie. Among those whose income was below $30,000, Zohran won 47, Cuomo 44—so about a tie.
Among renters, which is a good sort of proxy for income but also a proxy for age, Zohran got 59 percent. And then, ideology: Zohran won 78 percent of liberals, but only 33 percent of moderates in New York. He won 68 percent of self-identified Democrats.
So the reason I say all that—and also looking at the results in Minneapolis, where the socialist candidate lost, and in Seattle, where there’s a very close race—I’m not sure if Zohran has solved the Democrats’ challenges in some way with the working class or with lower-income people.
I do think he did very well with younger people and with people who are pretty liberal, and I think that might be a more honest take than that he, by talking about rent freezes, won the entire working class. So I’ll stop there.
Podhorzer: Yeah, he did, like, find one really important key to winning elections like that—which is running against a failed governor who was enormously unpopular and completely discredited. And it’s kind of a controlled experiment, because the other races you’ve talked about didn’t have that—didn’t have a Cuomo.
Bacon: Yes.
Podhorzer: So I think that New York’s a little different because it’s just New York, right? And I happened to be there the week before the election, not for the election—but to his credit, I’ve really barely, in the last 20-whatever years, seen people actively just be happy that …
Bacon: He did a great job.
Podhorzer: Right. It’s like Obama-level enthusiasm. Exactly. Right. It’s like—those are the only two times I’ve really seen a thing where you just, walk up to people and say, “Hey, like, what about the race?” And they go, “Oh, I’m—” you know?
So I think it’s, like, really a one-off in so many ways that trying to take lessons from it is tough. I’ll do one thing, though—in, like, pulling something out about what you were saying from the exits—that speaks to a larger problem with how polling is looked at to try to get underneath it.
Because if you go to whichever exit poll sheet, and you look in all of it—really, almost everything is one-dimensional. Everything you listed was on this income, this age. And I don’t know about you, but I’m a bunch of things together, right? And that explains me better than any of those categories.
And so one of the things—
Bacon: Well, I’m Black, as we noted, so you, so people went up and assumed that I voted for Harris last time.
But anyway, go ahead.
Podhorzer: Right. But one of the things I did notice that happened—actually to combine a few, but in a different kind of way—was by how long you’ve lived in New York.
Bacon: Oh, that’s interesting. OK.
Podhorzer: And there it was that really sharp line. Right.
Bacon: Who does better among … I don’t actually, I didn’t actually look.
Podhorzer: Oh no. If you’ve lived there the longest, you were least for Mamdani.
Bacon: Oh wow.
Podhorzer: OK. The more recently you arrived, the more you were for him.
Bacon: So that’s, that’s capturing age. That’s probably capturing immigration status. That’s …
Podhorzer: Capturing a bunch of things. Right.
Bacon: Renters probably. OK.
Podhorzer: That’s—yeah. In a way that is sharper—you know, more lopsided in each category than the ones you’re talking about.
And for me, like, before I then think about whether we should look at a particular category as a serious thing, it’s really got to be at least three-to-one one way or the other. Because if it’s less, then there’s lots of other stuff going on.
And so to then pin it on that name thing is just misleading yourself.
Bacon: Is there much we can learn from—so your point is, run against Andrew Cuomo, always good. If you’re in a Democratic primary. So there’s not—OK, so I worry there’s not…
Podhorzer: No, I do think there’s one really big thing to take away from this.
Bacon: Yes.
Podhorzer: That when we listen to the moderate-industrial complex about all of this, what’s really important is that in cycles like this, you really have to be much more ambitious about how many races you put in play because you don’t even know where this is going to pan out at this point.
I keep hearing how Democrats have to be like Rahm was in 2006. And that is such a misunderstanding of basically how he screwed up in 2006, in this way.
So, for folks who don’t know what I’m talking about: The basic idea in 2006 was Rahm Emanuel became head of the DCCC and said, We’re going to go, and we’re going to get these, you know, military candidates—we’re going to get really conservative people—we’re going to really be focused and disciplined. And Democrats had a great 2006, but what really isn’t understood is how he, by himself, narrowed the battlefield.
Because—and this is a great story, the arc of things. So I, as Perry said, I think at the beginning, before I retired, I was political director of the AFL-CIO, doing this for a very long time. Anyway, in 2006, there was a candidate that the labor movement was supporting in Minnesota that Rahm was just ripping us to not waste—he actually said his money on—even though it was our union members’ money. Yeah. And that Minnesota candidate was Tim Walz.
Bacon: Yes.
Podhorzer: And the—right—and there were about 13 Democrats who came within three points in 2006 and lost, which is very unusual in a wave year. Most of the close races go to the party that wins—and half of them won in 2008.
I mean, he actually reduced the number of races Democrats could win in 2006. And so if there’s a lesson, it’s like, don’t let that happen again. Right. Don’t, like, try to suppress folks. Don’t try to drain them of resources. Because what we’re going to find, if this continues—and if the elections aren’t subverted and all those kinds of things—is that it’s just going to happen all over the place.
Bacon: In other words, if we’re having a wave election, an anti-incumbent, anti-president wave is going to hit a lot of places—some of which are going to be surprising to us. And it won’t necessarily—and, and a quote-unquote lefty might win, or a moderate. The kind of people who will win will not—you know, actually, my congressman here in Louisville for a long time, his name’s John Yarmuth.
Yeah, he also won that year. He also faced the Rahm-wants-to-have-some-kind-of-veteran one. He was more progressive—he had run a newspaper before—and he also won that year. He won the primary, won the general, despite Rahm, too, in the same way. Because it was a wave—and the wave hit everywhere.
Podhorzer: Right, and in a way I hadn’t really thought of, Tim—or talking about Yarmuth, too.
I mean, one of the things that we, like, really learned from this last election was that Democrats—the problem was they couldn’t reach people in the media they were in. And so the people who were checked out and all of that—and we also know just how little local media there is anymore. Right.
Well, that just makes it even more likely that people are going to vote for the “D” downballot. Because they don’t even hear about whether he’s a leftie or a—oh, you know, whatever. They know nothing, but they know that they’re mad. And so, yeah, it becomes candidate attributes one way or the other not going to make much of a difference.
Bacon: Well, I guess that makes me ask our last question here. So, I guess Zohran got a lot of credit for being innovative in media—videos and et cetera—and I think people have talked about that being essential.
Is that essential in New York, or is that essential—these can-you-go-on-a-two-hour-podcast kinds of things? Like, I’m dubious of the idea that the average House candidate needs to be going on a two-hour podcast—or that they even get booked on a two-hour podcast—because Joe Rogan is not interviewing random House candidates.
But do you think—how important is this media-skills part of it, in this world where I agree local media is declining or dead in a lot of places?
Podhorzer: I think it’s one of those things where—and this is the problem with looking for lessons—is that there are some things that, if you’re in the top one percent of doing something, it’s not about that particular channel. It’s about you.
And so the fact that he can do that is—yeah, he understands TikTok. He also has a natural ability, right? That means that, like, if you or I tried to run a race and just really knew how to do TikToks, it wouldn’t help them.
Bacon: Or Abigail Spanberger’s staff does not have great TikTok strategy.
Podhorzer: Right. And so, like, it’s hard—you shouldn’t confuse it. And the other thing that I think is really important, because this is a mistake I’ve seen made since, like, 1973, is that tacticians confuse the power of novelty with something inherent in the tactic.
Right. So, in 1972, the McGovern campaign, right, did really well because they sent letters to voters that were, like, two or three pages. And that really worked because no one ever got letters from political candidates. Right.
And you remember how, like, the first time you got an email—a long email—about this stuff, you thought, Oh my God, email really works! And then texts, and then whatever. No—it’s that you basically ambush people who aren’t expecting political content in that channel. So they pay attention for the first X times the—
Right. And then everyone else does—it burns out the channel—and then the next thing comes along. But really, the through line is novelty. It’s like showing up where you’re not expected, rather than the channel itself.
Bacon: I’m going to reflect on that.
Because I know all my friends complain, I get text messages from the Democrats constantly and it’s annoying to me. And I think that tactic was innovative.
Podhorzer: Oh my God. The first time you got texts—the ROI on the first, like, year cycle of text messaging was enormous. And then it just gets burnt out.
Because it isn’t that you’re texting—it’s that, at the beginning, you didn’t expect to find that text on your phone. Now you see even things that ought to get your attention, and you just roll your eyes and hit spam.
Bacon: Any final thoughts about the election results? I think that’s a good, you know, just want to let you go here.
Podhorzer: Yeah, it’s great talking and, hope folks really follow you, at The New Republic. You do great work.
Bacon: Thank you. And thank you for joining in Michael. Good to see you.
