This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 17 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 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.
He now has a great Substack, Off Message, and is one of the most insightful writers about liberal and democratic politics. Welcome, guys.
Brian Beutler: It’s good to be here, man.
Will Stancil: Absolutely.
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.
It’s the defining issue, and if Democrats figure out how to win on that issue, they will win. And so I want to question—talk about—that assumption, because I think the three of us are not sure that’s quite correct. I want to sort of unpack that a little bit. I’ll start with Will: Is affordability the defining issue of politics? And if Democrats win on that, will they be in great shape?
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.
Bacon: When you say other issues, do you mean like healthcare? Do you mean the economy? What do you mean by that?
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.
So some years it’s health care, some years it’s jobs, some years it’s affordability or inflation—which is literally just affordability by a different term. And the issue itself kind of rotates, but they all have these similar qualities. And it’s every single cycle this gets brought up. And you don’t notice a lot of difference in the election outcomes when Democrats focus on these things. I mean, I just don’t really see what the evidence is that this is moving a lot of votes.
Bacon: Brian?
Beutler: Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything Will said. I think that there’s maybe a couple distinctions between Democrats focusing on affordability as a concept and focusing on other kitchen-table issues where there are, in theory at least, policy solutions that they could bring to voters and say, “Look, you have concerns about health care, you have concerns about prescription drug costs. Vote for us, we’ll lower your health care costs. We’ll lower your prescription drug costs in these fairly straightforward ways.”
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.
So, I mean, what I see happening is, like in 2018, Democrats are very likely to win because of backlash to Donald Trump. Democrats will reverse-engineer a different story where they won because of their brilliant political commitment to lowering the cost of living.
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.
Bacon: Let me make sure I understand the problem with it. You basically said affordability is not a concrete thing. But I think, in theory—like, how much can I afford my house? Can I afford my groceries?—that is obviously real. So explain what you mean a little bit.
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.
One interpretation of that is that it’s literally true and they want to see the numbers go down. Another, on the completely opposite end of the spectrum, is that they have sort of free-floating antipathy to Donald Trump over the economy, but maybe a variety of issues.
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 then I think that there’s like a middle ground, and I think this is probably where I put my money on the true opinion of the public—to the extent that something like that exists—which is that voters are unhappy with Donald Trump for a lot of reasons, but they wouldn’t be pinpointing prices per se if their real malaise wasn’t, in some sense, economic in nature.
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.”
And what you need to do is say: If people are just kind of unhappy with the state of things or how secure things feel, what are they really asking for? I as, like, a man of a certain age—I’ve lived through 9/11, the Great Recession, the COVID pandemic, and sometimes I feel like I don’t want to go through another one or two of these things before I reach retirement age. And I’m not sure I could weather it financially if that kind of thing happened.
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.
But that’s not really how Democrats are interpreting these repeat findings about affordability. They’re saying, We can’t attack Donald Trump on other issues because we have to remain laser-focused on affordability. And they’re actually trying to make prices go down, like literally down.
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.
So I just think that if they’re going down this road, if they’re going to commit themselves to devoting X percent of their messaging energy to affordability, they need to be clear in their heads about what all this stuff means. Or they’re going to either fumble the ball before the midterms or else run into the end zone and be like, “Now we don’t know what to do with the power that we’ve won because we made promises we can’t keep.”
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.
He ran on “I’m going to lower prices,” and there was no idea really what that meant. It was this kind of foggy notion, and then it became impossible for him to say that he’s done so.
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.
So that’s higher than usual, but it’s still a lot lower than it was in 2022 and 2023. And so prices are up 3 percent. But the problem is [that] because this notion is so vague and so foggy, anyone who’s mad about any price anywhere in their life, anything that they just think seems unfair. Oh, I hate having to pay for college for my kids. I hate having to pay my mortgage. Rent sucks. I mean, I’m a renter. Rent does suck.
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.
And Donald Trump walked directly into that trap. So I don’t have a lot of sympathy when he’s out there saying, “Well, inflation’s not that bad. Like, why is everyone so mad?” He did it. But also, he’s not totally wrong. It was the same thing that Biden was saying a year ago, where he’s saying, “Inflation is down. Why are you so mad?” He’s not wrong. It isn’t that bad, using the measures that we typically use.
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.
I’ll say that the platform of “Let’s improve the safety net, let’s help the people the least fortunate, let’s make sure that [we] reduce precarity in American life”—that’s just what Democrats have been running on for my entire life. I mean, that is literally just like the standard Democratic platform. And so while I think it’s great, and I’m all for it and I’m a Democrat, if this was our electoral gold, I think we wouldn’t be in this bind. We’d be winning every election 80-20.
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.
I’m saying that the mistake would be [saying], “This is $9.99 a pound; we’re going to make it $8.99 a pound with policy hocus-pocus.” And then they win because they’re capturing the bad vibes of the people and turning them into election victories. But they can’t actually bring the prices down.
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.
And so, like, I don’t have any sympathy for him. I think it’s totally fine—I like turnabout being fair play here—for Democrats to be like, Look, he said he’d fix this on day one. He was lying. It’s like the latest in a thousand lies he’s told you. We can’t let him keep getting one over on us in this way.
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.
Bacon: Go ahead, Brian,
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?
I think that the campaign against Donald Trump should be straight-up confrontation with all the ways he’s failed, all the ways he lies, all the ways he’s corrupt. And you see in Democratic communications that they are instead going to rerun the play they ran ahead of 2018, where every year—every few months or something like that—Al Green, the congressman from Texas, introduces an impeachment resolution against Donald Trump.
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.
I think that’s wrong. That’s evidence that they are treating affordability as a kind of panacea that frees them from the need to be confrontational or to think for themselves, or to actually kind of understand what is driving public opinion and how to either surf it or change it. It’s just like plug-and-play, like it was six years ago or four years ago—whenever that was, six years ago, eight years ago. And time is a flat circle. And that is super disappointing.
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.
Like, probably there is something—I just [think], like, something ambient—that is making voters feel economically insecure. And what are the things you can do to try to alleviate that? And I think that the answer to that question lies in safety nets more than in, like, price controls or engineering a recession so that you get deflation or anything like that.
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.
James Carville says, “it’s the economy, stupid.” And if you listen carefully, both the sort of left wing of the Democratic Party—Bernie Sanders and so on—those people think elections are about the economy. Democrats need to win the working class back, and that’s kind of where they go. The center-left—let’s talk about Joe Biden—also thinks elections are about the economy.
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?
Beutler: Correct. I can put some meat on those bones, which is that they defeated Donald Trump’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in April or May of 2017. And then a whole bunch of stuff happened that did not include the repeal of the Affordable Care Act; the Affordable Care Act was intact. And then 18 months later, they won an election and they said it had everything to do with health care.
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.”
Stancil: I’m not a guy who knows all the logical fallacies by heart, but you can see what they’re doing here, which is that they’re starting with the conclusion that the economy must explain political outcomes—that voters are always and forever primarily voting on the economy. And I think that, like you said, people across the political spectrum on the left believe this for various reasons. People on the very far left—I mean people who are on the sort of socialist left—believe it because their ideology is sort [of] premised on the idea that every…
Bacon: You’re saying Marxism is based on this kind of working class, proletarian.
Stancil: People in the center-left believe it often because it’s a lot more convenient than acknowledging that social issues are real. They don’t want to talk about race, they don’t want to talk about gender, they don’t want to talk about controversial cultural stuff. So they say, “It’s really the economy.” That’s a nice, policy-sounding thing we can talk about. That sounds moderate. And so they feel much more comfortable talking about the world in those terms, as they start with the premise that everyone is essentially making political choices based on the economy. Then they observe what’s happening in politics and they go looking for the economic argument or the policy argument—that’s sort of kitchen-table, economic-related—that explains it.
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?
Bacon: Let’s move the timeline a little bit, though. 2021, 2022—Joe Biden becomes very unpopular. Is this the one place where we would concede that this is an economic story about inflation?
Go ahead, Will.
Stancil: All right, Perry, I know you know the answer to this, because when did Joe Biden become unpopular?
Bacon: Joe Biden became unpopular. He lost eight points in August 2021, which was not actually a high time for inflation.
Stancil: Or what happened in August 2021?
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.
But Brian, I don’t want to dismiss the idea that high inflation was part of what was happening. I’ve written that the Afghanistan timeline makes more sense—but I don’t want to dismiss inflation hurt Biden.
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.
Then there’s this other question of, like, what all was in the mix that made public opinion detach from measured economic circumstances, right? For decades before 2022, people’s views about the economy synced up really well with macro indicators that the government measures very precisely. And then that relationship stopped, at least in the United States. Right. I don’t know—I’d be curious to know if the same thing happened in Finland, where they have a stronger safety net.
Stancil: Economic data is part of the problem.
Beutler: Yeah. So, my hunch is that this extended period of malaise—where you have a good economy throughout basically the whole Biden presidency, but everyone’s miserable; they believe that there’s a recession when there’s not; they believe that every part of the country outside of their community is suffering mightily because they’re picking it up from various sources of vibes or whatever—like, why did that happen? And to what extent is there an actual economic component to that thing happening? And I would buy that having 12 months or 18 months of inflation maybe contributed to it. I definitely do buy that algorithmic information consumption has a lot to do with it.
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.
But there’s not an on-off switch and it’s not something that they can fix, within the first month of coming back into power in 2029. And so, like, basically what I would like to see is Democrats acting less like they think that they found [a] silver bullet to [win] elections, and more like they have put their finger on a problem and they’re really reasoning through how to solve it while also just doing partisan fighting to win the proximate election.
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.
I’d be curious to hear Will’s take. If your view is that really, this is all hallucinated and, like, there’s nothing about the economy that’s really driving this; it’s all recursive—people hearing affordability, repeating affordability and material conditions play [no role]?
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.
Beutler: But let me just say something purely subjective from my point of view. If I wasn’t a writer, if I didn’t make arguments with the hope of persuading people for a living, and I was just the guy who had the same ideological views that I hold, working at a coffee shop or at an accounting firm or whatever, I would have felt less economically secure on November 6 or whatever, or 8 of last year, immediately. Because I lived through the first Trump presidency, I know that him being in office is an existential danger to public health, to the economy, to global peace, instability.
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 it’s only by luck and grit and circumstance that I have made it through that financially, but things could have turned out way differently for me. And I don’t know what will happen if this happens again. I do know that unless the society I live in takes me more seriously, provides me more of a safety net, then this looming uncertainty is just going to be with me until the next pandemic or whatever.
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.
Stancil: We can look at how people felt about Trump’s economy back in his first term, and most people didn’t feel that way, at least for most of them. Most people were pretty happy with the economy.
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.
But there was generally a pretty positive impression of the Trump economy.
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.
That some economic sentiment would go way up. And so I’m admitting that I was completely wrong about that. That whatever is driving it is not just partisanship. Because it has remained in place, in fact, maybe stronger than ever, as Trump has been in office, even though the economy has been substantially worse, people’s reports of the economy.
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.
Bacon: Let me jump in here and ask: How do you all explain the 2024 elections? I think there’s a history here of trying to understand how because I think the criticism is that prices were high.
Joe Biden and Harris were blamed for prices. What do you think determined what happened, at least at the national level?
Stancil: I think that there’s a cultural malaise. I mean, I have my theories about where it’s coming from. I think it’s a lot to do with how we communicate in our information environment.
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.
We look at the country, we look at how we’re going economically, we’re looking in America, and we make a decision about what we think is happening and what we should do. And I think that is a terrible model for thinking about how people think of politics. The way people think, in my view, is that we talk to each other and we form opinions in consensus.
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 this consensus was remarkably widespread among kind of people of all ages, across geographic and cultural and age lines. And so it was sort of this independent, free-floating notion existing in American society. And I think that this is a different sort of model of how voters think than the ‘we look around and just decide based on what we’re observing in our lives.’
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.
So, I think that it’s just our entire notion of conceiving how voters think about the world is just not quite right at the moment. We’ve been working with this like, oversimplified approach where we’re thinking of everyone as kind of a totally independent individual, but people don’t move individually.
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.
Bacon: So you’re saying vibes with a shift?
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.
People have been talking about this for centuries because there’s something there that is difficult to describe, and whatever it is, it’s not mysticism. There is some process here through which people’s opinions are being formed and influenced.
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.
And I think it’s worth kind of trying to delve in and explain what the mechanics are there.
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.
Pretty much every leader of every westernized country is unpopular—Britain, France. We can go through a list of those. We can define Western however you like. I think from roughly 2005 to 2025, the American president has been unpopular, minus maybe Obama’s first couple of years and Biden’s first six months.
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.
Is there something about our informational environment in the West, let’s say, that is making leaders unpopular?
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…
Bacon: I know you keep saying this and people do not like it.
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.
Bacon: Let’s go, Brian. Just any reactions.
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.
But other big contests, like who should control the House, have become something like a reality TV show contest between factions in the country, right? And so, like, Donald Trump is really good at that kind of positioning. And the Democratic Party is really not wired to win that fight regularly. They do it every 20 to 25 years, when they come up with some handsome, new, charismatic person who, like, shows up and shakes things up. And they’re going to have to try to find that person to run in 2028.
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.
Stancil: There’s some even that love Creed now.
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.
And how did they blow it? I think that some of it was, like, the way her campaign—plus the big PAC supporting her campaign—chose to go about contesting the [election]: “You’re winning. Don’t take big risks, don’t blow your lead. Like, don’t get so comfortable mocking Trump and Vance that you say something offensive, or we don’t want to accidentally have another ‘deplorables’ incident this year.”
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.
Bacon: Let me jump forward here. So, 2025 did Mamdani win because he was on affordability. Will?
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.
Bacon: Are you saying zero percent on his policy platform, or like 10 percent or 40 percent? I’m trying to drill down a little bit, because I think it’s worth asking.
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.”
Now that I’ve established that he’s saying the things that sound okay—“Sounds like he kind of wants to help people like me”—do I trust the guy? Do I like the guy? Do I really think he wants to help people like me? And so, yeah, probably if he’d gone in there and just been ranting and raving about, I don’t know, pick a far-left thing—something that the most DSA member would want him to talk about—then yeah, that probably [would] drag him down some, right?
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 …
Beutler: I see Brian. So, I think what I’d say is that, like, getting a Democrat elected mayor of New York—getting a progressive Democrat, even, elected mayor of New York—is, like, a solved problem. And so there’s almost nothing ever to learn from how a Democrat becomes mayor of New York.
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.”
Right? Right. But the only way to actually know one way or another who’s right—or if anyone’s right—is to (and I’m not even sure you could do this accurately anymore) survey Cuomo voters and essentially ask them how would they have ranked the candidates if they had had ranked-choice voting. How many Cuomo voters were Cuomo-Mamdani-Sliwa, and how many were “Never Mamdani”? My hunch is that if that election had been done on a ranked-choice ballot, Mamdani would have probably done identically to Bill de Blasio—very, very … 60-some percent of the two-party vote. And thus we would say he can’t learn anything about how he won. Like, his policies seemingly did nothing. The fact that he’s charming seemingly did nothing.
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.
Stancil: It’s worth noting that this goes for affordability, but also goes for safety net stuff. The “wrong” people are voting for affordability often. Like, the idea here is that people who are having the hardest time affording [things]—people who are struggling the most—will be won over by these pitches. And I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that talking about affordability, or talking about economic issues, or talking about the safety net, wins you the votes of people facing the most precarity.
Bacon: to put this in terms black and work, black and Latino working class people vote for the moderate class black.
Stancil: Yeah. I mean, and of course this is sort of, I mean, a lot of ways this, this is the DSA, the socialist view of how you win elections is you, you appeal to these groups and then they’ll all support you because you said you’re going to help them and then you win elections because there’s a lot of people in these groups,
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.
And not necessarily based on, on, responding to the policy, the policy, oh, well this policy proposal help me personally. And of course this is a concern that has gone back to the dawn of like, socialism. I mean, is this has always been the issue that, that socialism was an ideology that helped supposedly help the working class, but was promoted by, promoted by intellectuals.
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.
So let’s say you bump into one of these people who’s going to run for president in 2027, 2028, who’s trying to win the Democratic primary, but also trying to win the general election. One of you guys bumps into them. You’re skeptical that they should say affordability 19 times an hour—I can tell. So assuming that we are in this vibes culture we’re in, where there’s discontent we can’t measure and don’t exactly know where it’s coming from.
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.
Beutler: Yeah. So I actually think that the first month of the Harris campaign, it’s pretty close, right? Confrontational, but joyful. I just got back from a family vacation in Santiago. That’s where my mom’s half of the family is from; family down there lived through the Pinochet dictatorship.
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 the Marxists were really unhappy because the campaign that carried the day was this kind of like, milquetoast corporate, like rainbows and corny music. But like, the message of the campaign was a happy day is coming, right? Which says, we all know what is unacceptable about the circumstances now, and what we need to do is get to tomorrow where things will be better.
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.
But what you really want to be mindful of is that in two years and three months from now when you become president, you’re going to inherit a hobbled and corrupted government. You don’t even know what you’re actually going to be able to get done through that government because it’s going to be so degraded.
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.
I think like if that was the mindset of one of the leading candidates for president, that would be the person that I support.
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.
I know some of our friends are. I think liberal groups are good. But I also think they tend to want to make the primary about: Can you talk about your Medicare plan? Can you talk about your Medicaid plan? Can you talk about your wealth tax—or lack thereof? I agree with you that from May—if you’re the nominee—from May to November, you’re like that.
So I’m just curious: How do you win the Democratic primary like this?
Beutler: Sure. I mean, I think it’s less like, We will do X on day one and our health care plan is Y. For me, what I would need to hear to believe them is that they would prioritize various political reforms that they could actually get through.
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.
But I think that Democrats made a big mistake starting in 2008—and that I was actually a small part in creating this problem—of implying that the presidential primary campaign process should be a process of policy iteration and refinement and specificity. Such that every candidate is expected to have 60-page white papers on every issue under the sun. And then like a convincing explanation of how they prioritize them and how they’re going to get 60 votes for stuff.
Bacon: Sounds good to me, but, okay. I get the point.
Beutler: I mean, it really did force them into this situation where they feel like they need to make big and specific promises during the campaign, rather than saying things like, We’re going to do everything in our power to give everyone who lost their insurance to Donald Trump their health care back, and then some. Right?
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 it starts with like really doing a deep dive into the government that we’re going to inherit, and we need to be prepared for it to be radioactive, like dangerous, filled with saboteurs, dysfunctional. And like, if I spend the whole primary making specific promises for you only to realize there’s no capacity to do any of it, then I will have lied to you.
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.”
But like, what that person is saying is actionable and what this other person is saying about the public option and whether it’ll be pegged to Medicare and blah, blah, blah... Like, that’s not going to happen. That’s all bullshit.
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 ultimately you want people to like you and they want people to think of you as a good person that they—I mean, this is such a cliché, but they want to have a beer with, or they respect, or they think is smart.
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.
People are voting for their prom king, and so there are lots of ways to do that. Obama had a very unique character. He’s kind of intellectual. He was this great orator, but he’s also got this kind of warmness about him.
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.
And don’t do that. Don’t think that you can substitute... Don’t think that a policy proposal is a personality. And so that would be my advice. That’s obviously pretty open-ended, but like, it’s going to be different for everybody. Every single candidate’s going to have a different thing that’s going to work for them, and you just need to find that thing and sort of lean into it.
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.
Because now the party is filled with these very polished, suit-wearing, law school–educated figures of high rectitude, but without Obama’s charisma.
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.
Beutler: It’s not a good character.
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 I believed that, and I still believe that. And in a way I feel like, But these 70 bills that I’m going to introduce that solve all the world’s problems, like, I’m also going to do those things... Like, No, I don’t think you are.
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.
And to this day, there are very few people at the top echelon of the Democratic Party who have that skill, and she’s not going to run for president again.
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.
It’s because things can flip on their heads really quickly. I mean, Joe Biden had this sort of great image—it’s probably why he won in 2020—he was Diamond Joe of The Onion. He was this aviator-wearing, kind of gruff-spoken old hand. And then very quickly largely because of just TikToks being spread of him and social media videos of him staring into space.
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.
And so it’s like, you really need to be aware that the public is constantly forming an image of you, and then you need to be managing it to some extent so that it doesn’t get flipped on its head like that.
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.
And I think that like he’s got a lot to speak for him. And I also appreciate the criticisms of him and 99 percent of me thinks he’s got a good thing going and he’d be an interesting candidate to watch. Like, I personally skew toward people like Pritzker and increasingly Newsom who are willing to fight Trump more vocally.
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.
And if he doesn’t manage that well, it’s gonna snowball into this big dumb thing that could just actually ruin his candidacy. And yeah, it’s definitely true that candidates seem to be mindful of all the ways media narratives, dumb media narratives, can take shape and then overtake you. Because if you don’t, then like that kind of trivial nonsense can end your political career.
Bacon: Will gets the last word if he wants to.
Stancil: It’s funny because someone actually said that earlier and I laughed at it that. Honestly, my thoughts on Joshua is he changed his glasses. He has these terrible glasses that kind of just make him look like a Wall Street shark.
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.
So this is great. I encourage people to catch Will on social media. He’s on Twitter; he’s on Bluesky. He is one of the best posters. He keeps saying the economy’s pretty good, and people keep hating on him, but I respect that he is defending that point of view. Brian’s got a great Substack, with a lot of great essays there.
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.
