This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 12 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. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by the University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket. He’s a great scholar. I’ve known him for a long time. He worked with me a little bit at FiveThirtyEight. He’s an expert, particularly on political parties, and writes really well about both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
He interviews activists, he interviews scholars, and he does some really great work. He also has a newsletter called Tusk, which I read regularly, subscribe to, and learn a lot from as well. Seth, welcome.
Seth Masket: Thanks so much for having me on Perry.
Bacon: So what I want to start with is that you did a couple of posts last week that I thought were interesting and helpful. The first one—you called it, I think, a day of lawlessness.
You said the administration made three attacks on democracy in one day. You referred to ICE killing someone in Minneapolis, obviously; then Trump’s threats about taking oil from Venezuela, using the money from that, and spinning it out on his own. And the third was Trump talking about what we’re doing with Greenland.
What I want to get at with those three examples is this: I think it’s worth unpacking, as a political scientist, what the difference is between things I oppose as a left-of-center progressive and why these are violations of U.S. democracy, not just things liberals don’t like.
Masket: That’s a very good question, and I would say it’s important to think about: When we talk about democracy and threats to democracy, we need to be thinking about this more broadly than just, say, Election Day, right? That as long as people can vote, it’s a democracy. And if there’s barriers preventing [people] from voting, then it’s nondemocratic.
Democracy is way more than just the handful of hours we spend dealing with an election each year. There are things—and when I’m talking about threats to democracy, I’m referring more generally to threats to our constitutional order, threats to the checks and balances system between the different branches, the threats to basically the things that—in some ways—the Founders put in there to keep this country from becoming tyrannical, to keep it from becoming a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime. And that includes things like undermining Congress’s power for spending money or for deciding whether we’re at war or not. And in those situations, yeah, there is really the shared power agreement that the president and the legislative branch are supposed to have.
And Trump, in a number of these cases, has just either ignored Congress or basically [said], they need to do whatever I say. And with the horrible events that happened in Minnesota last week, we’re talking about this ongoing situation where you have masked, armed agents of the state, essentially wearing combat gear with machine guns, who seem to have just absolute immunity to go into different neighborhoods and to profile people by race or the language they’re speaking. Just to decide to make their lives hell as long as they want, or even kill people and just be backed up by the president for that.
Again, that doesn’t necessarily directly attack our ability to vote in an election, but it’s just more broadly this is not consistent with democratic rule. This is not consistent with the broader themes of our republic where people are essentially free to do what they want, unless there’s some very specific threat or some very specific allegation of criminal behavior. This really perverts that.
Bacon: Talk about Venezuela and Greenland in that context.
Masket: Yeah. With Venezuela, there were a couple things going on there. In—in particular, the thing I was mentioning in this piece was Trump’s claim last week that he was simply stealing—he was simply seizing—I think it was something between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil, Venezuelan oil, right? And just saying the United States would be selling that oil at market rates. And would be pocketing that money from it.
But that money would not go to the U.S. Treasury. It would go to some bank not within the United States, but is known to people. And Donald Trump said he would be controlling that money to make sure it’s used in the best interest of the people of the United States and Venezuela. That is absolute king stuff like that is not consistent with democratic rule at all. It is not consistent with the existence of a Congress. It’s just wildly outside that.
And we would just have to accept the president’s word on faith that he is not pocketing that money and that he’s using it appropriately with basically no oversight. It strikes me as beyond anything we’ve really looked at before here.
Bacon: Let me talk about the other piece you wrote last week. One thing that jumped out at me is what I’d call the we warned you argument—you didn’t put it that way. You were talking about political scientists and the political science community, in your view, and I think that’s correct.
What I read, going back to 2016, was political scientists warning that Donald Trump was not just a Republican, but someone who would break the constitutional order. And I guess you wrote a piece in 2021 that was angry about what happened—right after January 6 or January 7. So you republished that.
So talk about why—what political scientists have been saying. Does this come across as a collective view? I know political scientists are a very diverse group in a lot of ways, but when you talk about political scientists as a group, what have they been saying, as opposed to Democrats or liberals or journalists, for that matter?
Masket: Yeah, and this is a tricky area, and some of it is just like very petty on my part because I feel no one ever gives us academics any respect. Right. Everyone’s claiming we’re just fluffy-headed eggheads or whatever and we don’t understand the real problems going on. And I’ve seen some criticisms online or from journalists who [are] saying: Wow, political science really missed what Trump was doing. To a surprising degree.
This was discussed that political scientists—either in things [they] were writing in journals and books, to some extent, people were giving talks or posting on Twitter or other social media about this is real, this is a different situation from the past. This isn’t just about Democrats or this is Republicans. This guy is posing a real threat to a lot of things we associate with democracy. That he’s really very much from outside the norms of the system and potentially stands to do a lot of real damage. And I cited a few dozen examples in there of people saying these sorts of things from pretty early on, from 2015 forward, warning that this would pose some real dangers. And which I think culminated with January 6.
But that, as I said in that piece, even on that day, you know that threat is not over. There’s still ongoing threats to the legitimacy of elections that he has really introduced. I guess in some ways I was trying to settle a score, but I also wanted to highlight some of the research that has been done specifically on him. And this is also an area where political scientists, like a lot of other academics, are a little wary to—to take a public stance, take a side on something, particularly in an area… It’s an area that we research. It’s an area that we teach.
We have this norm that we’re supposed to be aboveboard—not necessarily neutral, not necessarily nonparticipating—but that we’re not supposed to just come out swinging for one party or another. And I think a lot of the scholarship in this area over the last decade has been about political science scholars explaining here’s why this area is different and here’s why I feel I need to say something about what Trump is doing. That doesn’t have to do with debates over abortion or debates over taxes or gun use. There’s something very fundamental to education and to democracy here that’s really at stake.
Bacon: I assume it’s getting more challenging. You teach at a university, and I assume you have some students who are not Democratic voters all the time—capital D, Democratic Party voters. How do you explain to people that democracy itself is a contested issue in politics right now?
Masket: That is something I’m honestly recalibrating from day to day. In some ways it was an easier thing to explain back in, like, 2017 or so because the students I had then knew that, okay, things were not quite always this way. It was just a year or two earlier, we weren’t talking about this same set of issues. And Trump did really seem like something new, something that was aberrant. My students today—their whole political awareness has been the Trump era, right? They don’t really know a time before that. They think of Barack Obama as some kind of mythical figure their parents talk about. And so that’s been tricky to explain to them that we’re the ones who seem out of date saying this is not the way things are supposed to be, right? This is the way they are.
We don’t get to choose that. But yeah, it is an area where I’m trying to… I just came out of a class teaching about Congress and congressional behavior, right? And how, what, where vetoes come from and how members can override vetoes. And my students do have some sense that, okay, here’s what the older textbooks say. Things seem different today. Why is there a gap between those? How can we understand them? And I view it as my point to try to explain. In some ways these things are normal. It’s not uncommon for a president to veto legislation he doesn’t like, for some reason, that his party wasn’t really in tune with.
It’s not unusual for the president to complain about a judge or to complain about the Federal Reserve or something like that. What is unusual is the way he approaches it: often somewhat more randomly, somewhat… usually with threats or even using the justice system. So I do try and parse where those differences are. And also to note that it’s not like things were hunky-dory in 2014.
Bacon: I’m surprised I forgot about the biggest news today, which is that if you were writing a piece today about lawlessness, you would include threatening the head of the Federal Reserve with an investigation for not raising interest rates. You’d say that was an example of a violation of democracy.
Masket: Oh, most definitely—particularly focusing on an office that is designed to be insulated from political pressure and is not supposed to be subject to the whims of Congress or the president. And here he is basically saying, oh, here’s how I can apply pressure using the justice system.
That’s a massive violation of what I would consider democratic norms and practices.
Bacon: You’re not necessarily a democracy scholar in the way some other people are, but there have been people talking about how we’ve moved from democracy to what’s been termed competitive authoritarianism.
Other people say maybe we’re not there yet, or maybe there isn’t a binary way of describing this. So when someone asks you, what is the state of American democracy like, what do you say?
Masket: I don’t think I’ve come up with the exact right term.
Bacon: Like, what would you say generally? You don’t have to be pinned down by a term.
Masket: I think flawed democracy is probably the right way to think about it, potentially. You can make an argument for competitive authoritarianism, and what that really means is that there are still elections. Voters still have choices. The majority party can lose, but a lot of the deck is stacked in the majority party’s direction—not just because of voter preferences, but because the president is trying to make it harder for people to cast an early ballot, to cast an absentee ballot, or to vote by mail.
A lot of states have come up with ways to allow people to vote more easily, and he’s trying to limit that. There are also a lot of longstanding imbalances within the political system that long predate Donald Trump. The Electoral College, we know, gives an advantage to more rural states. Those have tended, in recent decades, to be more Republican states. It gives Republicans a little bit of an edge. Even when they lose the popular vote, they can still sometimes win the White House. It gives them a little bit of an edge in the Senate as well.
So, yeah, there are a number of those things. We still clearly do have largely free and fair elections, but with some biases currently in Republicans’ favor. And now we have a president who is willing to try to erode some voting rights. And I think we saw right after 2020 probably the greatest threat, which is that he generally doesn’t accept elections he loses and is willing to employ violence to try to get his way.
That is probably the biggest threat. And we generally don’t see that in elections where he’s not involved. Even in a lot of the special elections in 2025, Democrats had a pretty good run. Republicans largely just accepted their defeats and moved on.
Bacon: That’s a good point. But those losses were also like blowouts, so that helped.
Masket: Yeah. But when he’s in the mix, he tends to say things like any election he lost was fraudulent. And a lot of his party will go along with him on that. And that’s a very dangerous place to be, when you’re casting doubt on the legitimacy of a major election.
Bacon: You wrote a book I really enjoyed about the post-2016 Democratic Party. It also draws out some historical lessons about how parties—particularly the Democratic Party—tend to learn from presidential defeats.
You interviewed a lot of activists after 2016 and discussed how they understood the loss, because how party actors—key party activists—interpret a defeat helps define the next candidate and the next primary. So I’m curious, jumping forward to 2024: Democrats lost.
One thing you’ve told me in the past—and let’s start there—is that the Democratic Party, whenever it loses, tends to think it was too progressive on quote-unquote cultural issues. That’s not a 2016 or 2024 insight; that’s a 1988 insight. Why is that true? Why is that such a persistent pattern? The party thinks it’s too—what we’d now call—too woke. But parties have always thought that.
Masket: Yeah, I honestly, you could find that back to the 1960s or even earlier where, anytime the Democrats lose, back then they were—they framed it as we’re seen as too close to the civil rights movement. We’re too close to Jesse Jackson. There’s always some version of it that we’re seen as too left, which usually means too tied to people of color. And we have to pivot away from that.
And so that was, like, Democrats came out of George McGovern’s loss in 1972 saying that, and pivoted a little more centric to come up with Jimmy Carter… string of losses in the eighties. That was—they perceived that as a—they were too close to the civil rights movement, so they pivoted toward the—the white South, came up with Bill Clinton as a more moderate candidate, and they won with that. So that, that is a pretty consistent narrative that Democrats tell themselves when they lose. And you could see it as recently as, going from Hillary Clinton’s loss to Joe Biden’s victory.
Bacon: It’s not necessarily—how do I say this?—it’s not totally wrong, in the sense that there are more white voters than Black voters. There is something reductive about that, though.
Masket: No, it’s not wrong, but I think it’s—first of all, it’s the same sort of people bringing this up over and over again. And I don’t know, one thing that seems to get lost in that is that there haven’t been that many presidents who have won two terms, both by majority of the vote. The most recent one was Barack Obama. And he did something that no Democrat had been able to do for decades. And at the time when he was first running, there was all this concern: I don’t know, his name seems strange or being accused of having Muslim ties and all this stuff.
He’s got a crazy preacher. But he was able to win just very large, comfortable majorities. And the party just seems to think that either he was a one-off or that is just something that’s not possible anymore in Donald Trump’s America. And it’s an aspect of the Democratic coalition that it negotiates away without ever even having a discussion. Obviously not completely.
The party did nominate Kamala Harris in 2024. I think for a number of reasons, but a lot of the party figured she’s got a good shot at it or at least a better shot than Joe Biden had. And I think that was a reasonable analysis. But these fears still do very much linger in Democratic activist minds.
Bacon: So what are you seeing post-2024? Because post-2016, I thought there was a clear narrative—whether it was true or not—that Democrats ignored the middle of the country. They ignored the working class. Hillary was unpopular, and maybe we shouldn’t nominate a woman. I think that largely resulted in choosing an older white man who had the veneer of being more connected to the Midwest. So the move from Hillary to Biden made a lot of sense to me.
What are you seeing right now? Because I’m a little confused. At least according to the polls, the person who’s benefited most in 2025 is Gavin Newsom, who has a lot of similarities to Kamala. I know he’s a white man, but I would not have thought that, after losing, Democrats would—under normal circumstances—say, let’s choose a different candidate from California.
I don’t know if Gavin would win or not. But I think it goes to the point that I don’t know the party has fully sorted out exactly why Harris lost in 2024. Maybe it’s the argument Kamala Harris has made—that she didn’t have enough time—and maybe that’s true. By the way, some people say we need better governance in blue places, which is odd if you think Gavin Newsom is the solution.
So I’d be curious what you think—or even just what you’re seeing. Yeah, first of all, I’m trying to decide whether I want to write this book. I don’t know. But it’s been interesting. I started doing a study right after the 2024 election, where I reached out to a bunch of Democratic Party chairs across the country to get a sense of why they thought Kamala Harris had just lost.
Masket: And I did a follow-up survey with those same people back in the summer of ’25, of course. Just to see how their views were changing. Yeah. And what really struck me is, first of all, their views were all over the place. Like you said there, there’s really no consensus. There’s people who believe Harris lost for being too far left or for being too far right. That she lost somehow because of Israel-Gaza, either because she was too supportive of Israel or not supportive enough. Some will just say that she lost because she was a Black woman and the country was not prepared to vote for that. Others will just say, you know what, it was probably a function of the Biden administration’s unpopularity.
It was a function of people’s anger over inflation and the economy. And she did better than Biden would’ve, but she was still tied to that administration, tied to that party, and there was really no way around that. And there’s probably some truth to that. But one of the things that really struck me in doing this study is that, first of all, right after the election, these answers were all over the place.
People had lots of different views. And six months later, when I did this follow-up study, the answers were even more dispersed. Like they had come to no—oh, that’s interesting. Not only had they not come closer to a consensus, they’d actually moved farther away from consensus. So in that environment, it’s not really obvious who the next proper nominee should be.
I think a lot of people are attracted to Newsom because, first of all, he’s been more aggressive than I think just about any candidate in putting his name out there early and being very aggressive toward Trump in a way that certainly makes a lot on the left feel better.
Bacon: And his state could be gerrymandered in a way that I don’t think a lot of other states could. Michigan can’t do that electorally, but I also don’t think there are a lot of seats there, either.
Masket: Yeah. And also, I think if you look at the Newsom’s initiative to essentially do the gerrymandering in response to the Texas gerrymandering, that was a very concrete thing that I don’t know that any other single Democratic leader could point to over the last… Everyone was upset about one particular thing Trump did, and he did essentially a thing to erase that. And it’s hard to point to Schumer or anyone else having done such a concrete and very public thing that’s so tied with them.
Bacon: So people don’t have a pinned-down response. And I assume that what happened in New York City, Virginia, and New Jersey confused that a little bit, too—because New York City is not representative of America. But it does seem like people—like Schumer and Hakeem, and the party more broadly—are talking about affordability as if they learned something from Mamdani.
I’m not saying they didn’t think about affordability before, but it does seem like the New York race changed the discourse in the party, even if most people would concede that New York City is not Wisconsin.
Masket: Yeah, I think a fair number of Democratic candidates have tried to learn from Mamdani. Not necessarily that they want to adopt his policies, but, like, they saw that he was a very effective campaigner, for one thing. They and also found, I think, very effective ways to talk about affordability, to make it very relevant to people’s lives. Democrats can certainly read the polls; that’s—that’s at the top list of people’s concerns.
Most Democrats, whatever they’re talking about, will try to tie it to affordability. And theoretically that, voters will resonate somewhat with that. But one thing that really struck me about the—the 2025 elections—is that Democrats did pretty well across the board, right? With a lot of different elections. Yes. A lot of different styles of candidate. Even at a time when the party itself is very unpopular.
A lot of Democratic voters really hate the Democratic Party leadership in a way that we’ve not really seen before, and I think you’re going to see, like, a lot of midterm challenges in the primaries next year. But regardless, most voters are thinking about the election as they have in recent years: Is are you supporting or opposing what Donald Trump is doing? And they see the Democrats as they’re the pushback, regardless of whether they like the party. It’s the only one out there.
So you can still, at least in these elections lately, you can still win something with nothing. That doesn’t necessarily tell you what to do about the next presidential election. And I have no idea what they should be doing, but at least in terms of congressional stuff going on right now, yeah, as long as there are… [opponents] of the other party from an unpopular, aggressive president, that seems to be helping them.
Bacon: People say presidential polls really don’t matter. I’m a little skeptical of that, only because in 2013 the polls did show Hillary Clinton doing pretty well, and she did end up winning the primary. I think in 2017 the polls showed Biden ahead, but the race still felt pretty open.
So do you consider this—do you consider the Democratic primary right now to be wide open?
Masket: It is very open. Yeah. To a degree we probably haven’t seen since ’08, maybe even longer. Yeah. I mean Biden wasn’t a slam dunk, but he was the best-known candidate going into 2020. People had generally warm associations with him as Obama’s vice president. But there is really not an heir apparent in the party right now.
And to the extent Newsom has support, it’s because he’s had his name out there more than anyone else. But over the coming year, with all these congressional contests going on and some gubernatorial contests going on, there’s going to be a lot more names out there. And at this [point], I would be very hard-pressed to say who the obvious choice is for Democrats right now. I think it’s very open.
Bacon: And just to finish, I think you’re doing a book of the Republican Party or you just finished one?
Masket: I’m just finishing up a book; it’s the Republican sequels to my last Democratic book. Looking at Republicans between 2020 and 2024.
Bacon: Did they not learn anything or they didn’t care what they learned?
Masket: It’s not a learning from loss situation. It’s we refuse to learn or it’s we’re going to deny that the loss occurred. It’s hard to learn a lesson from a—from a loss you don’t acknowledge. What they did was more of a doubling down situation. Just regarding 2020 as a fluke for a number of reasons and instead going more in on the Trump direction. My book is called The Elephants in the Room, plural. On the Elephants.
I spent a lot of time focusing on local Republican leaders, local county party chairs across the country, who, interestingly enough to me, a lot of them were very uncomfortable with the idea of nominating Trump for a third time in 2024.
They generally liked his first term. They liked what came out of it. But they saw this as: This election could be close. He has a lot of baggage that other candidates don’t have. We have a number of very qualified people, and Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and others. Maybe we should be thinking about someone else.
And the fact is their Republican voters, primary voters, wouldn’t hear of it. They were just all in on Trump from very early on. And there was no amount of organization or persuasion that their party leaders could do to steer them in a different direction. So a lot of it is about the essentially leaders, the party can’t decide, so to speak.
Bacon: Yeah, because the average county party at that level thought they needed a different candidate, purely based on the chances of winning with somebody new. Seth, this was great. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Masket: Thanks so much, Perry. It’s great talking to you.
