This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 5 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon, joined by two regular guests at this point, two of my favorite political scientists. Adam Bonica is at Stanford, Jake Grumbach is University of California, Berkeley, and this is our second podcast where we’re going to break down the election results and talk through them some. So Adam, Jake, thanks for joining me.
Jake Grumbach: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: So let me start with, when I talked to you all about doing this, I wasn’t thinking about discussing Mississippi. And really didn’t think about South Carolina either, to be candid about it. So I definitely had in my head 52 Senate seats, 230. That was what all the data experts were saying. And I think NBC had over 250 estimated.
So let’s talk about that first in terms of your general impressions. I’ll start with Adam and then go to Jake. Your general impressions of what we saw on Tuesday.
Adam Bonica: I had expected 250 seats. And that was way above. And even that, the size of the wave—no one predicted it would be this large. No one predicted Mississippi would be in play.
And one thing I thought was probably pretty clear is that it was unlikely that we would see a situation where we would just have a few races that were really close. It was probably going to be in the Senate either a big win or a pretty devastating defeat. It was much more bimodal than we’ve seen in the past.
But the other thing is this majority is going to rival the size of the majority Democrats came into office with after 2008. The year in which they were able to get a lot done. And it is surprising. I think we’re all still processing it.
Grumbach: Yeah, I agree with Adam. I’m sorry, I’m a little choppy right now. I’m having some computer difficulty, so I’m a little choppy right now, but I hope you can hear me.
I was surprised at this wave election. The one thing I’ve learned from Adam over the years is that in the modern polarized era, parties rise and fall together in wave elections. And this was a blue wave election, that across the country you saw massive blue shifts, and the wave was big enough that it carried even parts of the Deep South. It looks increasingly like it’s going to include Mississippi. Of course, Texas was a massive sweep by the Democrats.
But for me, I think one of the most underemphasized pieces of this has been Black organizing in the South. I served as an expert witness for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, pre-Callais, in a Voting Rights Act case in Mississippi. And as a Northerner, I’m a Californian through and through, my impression of Mississippi being there was that it was unlikely to shift blue anytime soon, despite the efforts of Black people in Mississippi and the occasional caucusing coalition with white liberals as well.
So I think this was a real national wave election, and that’s the main takeaway, is that the Democratic Party fielded pretty good candidates across the board, across the country, that were compelling in their areas, and that the Republican Party under Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular.
Bacon: So I want to do a little bit about geography now. You talked about the South a little bit, but is that the big geography story? Or is there anything else about geography we should think about?
Bonica: I think the geography story has been one long in the making. So when all is said and done, I think the story of this election, one of the stories in terms of demographic shifts, is going to be, A, a turnout story, where we’re going to see that Democrats finally matched or exceeded Republican turnout rates. And two, that the youth vote was incredibly important.
And this has been a trend, right? When young people turn out and show up for Democrats, they tend to win in wave elections. That’s been the pattern since 2008, really.
And if you looked at Mississippi, if you looked at Texas, you saw these generational curves that were overwhelming. And a lot of the backsliding, I think we saw, the Democratic backsliding that Jake has written about, the gerrymandering, the pushing democratic institutions away from electoral democracy to preserve these majorities, had a lot to do with the fact that there was this generational pressure building in Texas, even in Mississippi. Mississippi has a big curve, too. The younger people in Mississippi were pretty Democratic.
And we saw it happen first in Georgia, but Texas and Mississippi, they’re not as unpredictable as one would think. I think it happened sooner than I would have expected. But the geography story, again, I think is really more a geography story about how young and old people in a lot of these states have very different sort of partisanship and preferences.
Bacon: Jake, I asked while you were away about if there’s a geography story of the election. I think the one story we’re talking about is the South. But is there any other geography story? And also, if you want to talk about the South more. Because I think that’s the takeaway, was Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas. Talk about that story. What do you think is driving that?
Grumbach: First, apologies for my technical difficulties. This seems to happen every other Perry Bacon show session I go on. Won’t happen again, I’m investing in better hardware.
So I do think Adam’s right about a geography story, but overall I’ve really learned from Adam that national waves carry the day, and this was true of much higher turnout among Black voters and young voters than previous midterm elections outside of potentially 2018.
Adam talks a lot about differential turnout. So swing voters do matter here. A number of people did switch from voting Trump 2024 to in 2026 voting the Democratic slate in their areas. But really across the country it’s that Republicans were more likely to stay home, people who lean Trump or wouldn’t ever vote for a Democrat but are now a little bit disappointed or embarrassed by the MAGA sort of performance.
And increased turnout and passion from Black voters as a response to the Voting Rights Act ending, Latino voters as a result of the economy, the cost of living and ICE, and young voters who see a Democratic Party nationally that provides a potential path forward rather than “Just vote for us, we’re not Trump,” type of thing.
So I think it’s really across the board, but regions do matter, and bigger swings in the redder places, that is places that were deeper red or swung farther towards Trump in 2024. Southwest Texas is a classic. Latinos in West Texas split maybe 50 percent Trump 2024 or so. They absolutely repudiated that coalition in this election, which resulted in a massive swing.
But again, I would say the story is national, and in a wave this big, the biggest wave since Watergate in terms of the popular vote for a single party in a midterm election against a president like this, it really carried the entire country.
Bacon: So I’m old enough to remember stories about there being a political realignment in America after 2024, in which voters of color were going to vote Republican in the future. So I think it’s worth doing a little mockery, but let me be serious for a second here to say, I think one account of that, the account I had of that, was anti-inflation, anti-incumbency.
Biden lost a lot of voters, including voters of color and including young voters, and some of those people are going to come back in 2026. That’s obvious and that was going to happen. So I thought the realignment stories were overdone a little bit.
But that said, the numbers looked a little bit deeper than just a real shift backwards toward the Democratic side. So Adam, was there never a realignment? Did Trump realign again by being so crazy? So talk about the minority story of 2024 and 2026.
Bonica: Yes. So Jake and I, I think we talked about this with you probably a year and a half ago, looking at how turnout was the primary dynamic that mattered in the 2024 election. Places where turnout was depressed tended to be in more urban, more multiracial areas.
And places that saw increases in turnout—Trump, one thing to his credit, is he really does have a turnout advantage. These sort of poll misses seem to consistently follow this trend, that he is able to mobilize a certain part of the electorate that may be less inclined to vote.
So if you take, the turnout dynamics are important, but then there’s another type of voter, which is an anti-system, often anti-incumbency voter, who may be activated because they’re upset about something, but also just they don’t like the status quo, and they don’t like the party in power often, and their vote is against the system.
And we see this consistently as well. The types of voters that are swing voters, and they exist, there are plenty of them out there, they’re not the type of voters who are being persuaded by, “Here I have policy X versus policy Y.” They tend to be people who say, I want my life to be better. I think the system is broken. I think the system is corrupt. And they’re more of a disruptive force, not a sort of orderly, you can be won over by being more appealing than the other side. You win them over by right now not being the party in power.
Bacon: When you say turnout, let me probe a little bit. It is obviously the case that more people voted in 2024 than 2026. That’ll be almost the case, I’m sure, in every state. So when you say turnout, drill down. What I think you mean is, in Chicago, more people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than voted for Kamala in 2024. So therefore, this idea that individual Chicagoans did not become Republicans who are Black.
And so roughly, the Republican Black people in Chicago turned out, some of the Democrats didn’t, and it creates a swing that is really turnout-based. But I think in like South Texas, there was actual swing, right?
Bonica: Yeah. And this is partly why South Texas stands out so much, why it is the outlier region. I think there are a lot more voters of the type I just described, and they probably had that stacked on top of a turnout differential that looked different.
Think you have 100 Democratic and 100 Republican voters in a district. On average, Democrats historically have been turning out like 60 of them in midterms versus 70 for Republicans. That gap between the probability of a registered Democrat turning out versus a Republican was about as large as it has been in a decade in 2024.
And in 2018, the last time we have full data for, it was about equal. Democrats were equally likely to get to the polls as their Republican counterparts. When you close that gap, Democrats win in big wave elections. And when that gap widens, Democrats perform really poorly in Republican wave elections.
Grumbach: All right, yeah, to jump in here. So Perry, you started talking about the supposed realignments of 2024. You said you think they are a bit exaggerated. They were a lot exaggerated.
So the big things were like, Latinos are now a conservative group that will consistently vote Republican, or lean at least purple to Republican. The second was young men, especially the red-pilled young men, Joe Rogan listener type of kid.
Bacon: Joe Rogan listeners just—
Grumbach: Exactly. That’s just now MAGA. Then you see this cultural dominance in punditry and media. You saw New York Magazine has sent the cruel kids table, and it’s like this election that Trump wins by a couple percentage points becomes this mandate that culturally MAGA is dominant, led by Latinos and young men shifting, right? And that really disrupted this idea of the Democratic Party as this more multiracial coalition that we know historically since really the New Deal and the civil rights era.
But what happened very quickly in 2025 is those constituencies swung back dramatically. As Adam mentioned, there’s differential turnout, so the more conservative Latinos and young people.
This was a classic thing, was that Latinos swung to Trump 2024 somewhat, right? They still were majority Kamala Harris, but the biggest Republican presidential victory for Latinos since George W. Bush 2004, who was much more engaged in Latino outreach than Trump was. And this was like, OK, we’re in post-racial politics. Latinos are rejecting racial politics.
But it actually turned out in surveys that it was the more racially conservative Latinos who were shifting most towards Trump 2024, the types of people that answer survey questions that, for example, Black-white inequality is due to a lack of Black effort rather than discrimination. If you agreed with that statement, you were much more likely to swing towards Trump as a Latino in 2024, or a young man.
What happened after that, though, was a rapid shift backwards. So those realignments—Adam and I talk about in some recent work in The New Republic on Democratic Party consultants and fundraising consultants, that there’s this real impulse within the Democratic Party network, due to a lot of consulting money incentives, to in every election be like, “There’s this new crisis that demands top-down strategy for the Democratic Party, and that needs to go through us and pay us a lot of fees and listen to us about the strategy.” And that strategy tends to be what maximizes fundraising, maximizes the fundraising text and pleases large donors.
But regardless, the point here is that actually it turns out politics and party building are long-term efforts of building constituencies, and that things happen, like inflation, like COVID, like nominating more or less popular nominees at different levels, that shift constituencies. And that small Trump victory was not a mandate over these demographic groups or over the country.
We see a swing back, and not only because Trump’s economic performance has been poor. It is true, it has been worse than in the late Biden era, and people are not happy with prices and things, and the war in Iran has generated higher energy costs that has spilled over in tariffs in the economy. That’s a large part of it.
But also, just unlike what the realignment pundit types were saying, the cool kids table type of thing was saying, “No, Latinos, young men, everybody hates immigrants,” right? And are just motivated by these kitchen table issues.
The repudiation of ICE in Minnesota and throughout the Latino electorate in the country is so big, and that’s true among young men as well. Seeing ICE in action. And for Black voters, seeing the Voting Rights Act go down in flames. Those things are beyond the sort of affordability, cost of living type of questions. Voters do care about that as well.
And the Democratic Party, through Chris Van Hollen sort of championing a more humane, less authoritarian immigration policy, and the Kilmar Abrego sort of episode, Minneapolis protesters and things like that, those were real beachheads that shifted public opinion, and Trump never recovered from those dynamics.
So the realignment was not really there. At the same time, this swing is not going to last either. What the Democratic Party needs to do nationally is continue to build organizing, Black voter mobilization in the South, the labor movement, young people. And how young people who don’t have in-person civil society and are stuck in social media, how do you continue to mobilize these constituencies, build organization and an agenda? That’s a long, slow process that’s not this constant realignment, top-down strategery thing that the sort of consultant class pushes after every election.
We’re already seeing that right after this election. We’re already seeing, these are the lessons of how Democrats need to govern, from polling and things like that. Build the party, dedicate your life to that.
Bacon: Let me give a sort of—we talk about insincere moderate arguments. Let me compare El-Sayed to this X person and ignore all the factors that were involved there. But let me give a more sincere presentation of that, which might be, OK, the party brand matters. I think we can say in this era, the party brand matters.
So in 2024, the party brand maybe still has some inklings of Black Lives Matter and protest, and there’s a Black woman who’s on the top of the ticket. 2026, there’s a few Democrats who said some negative things about trans people and said they’re conservative on that. The party has stopped talking about race, and that’s bad, but they’ve dropped racial inequality, period. And so the brand is more, quote unquote, moderate.
And I think the moderate people might say, when the brand is differentiated among 97 candidates, most of whom are white, then that’s a safe brand. So the key thing there in 2028 is, if they were honest, they’d say, not make the brand too diverse by putting AOC or Kamala Harris there. And so the key thing is to make the brand generic, and where is the young Roy Cooper?
That’d be a more polite version of their argument that would actually be more rigorous. Talk about why the lesson here potentially is that the Democrats still should, even if moderation doesn’t produce everything, having the Roy Cooper brand be the national brand might be useful. Adam, start with you.
Bonica: Yeah, we’ve written a lot about this sort of positioning on the left-right spectrum being a pretty big distraction from the types of things the party should be doing to build a movement. Those often come from a type of realignment that we’re dancing around.
But a realignment doesn’t come from the parties just playing on the same turf. It comes from a party upending that sort of what’s liberal, conservative. It’s about, we’re for better government, we’re for anti-corruption, we’re truly not like the other guys. We’re truly ruling for the public. Those are the types of movements real progressive realignments emerge.
A second part of it is, empirically, it just does not bear out in the data. For all the concern about Justice Democrats, their shift in this election, their improvement over Harris’ vote shares in their already really Democratic districts, so they don’t have a lot of leeway, is just as big as the Blue Dogs, right? There’s no difference. The wave affects everyone. The idea that it was because the party became more moderate—
Bacon: Just to clarify what Adam was saying, just to break down. So Justice Democrats did about eight points better than Harris, as did Blue Dogs in their districts, about eight points. So the moderate bonus didn’t exist functionally. That’s what you’re saying, right?
Bonica: It’s so small that it does not swing any races. Nationally, the political center is a no man’s land at this point. Everyone who goes to inhabit it becomes some sort of political pariah, from Sinema to Fetterman to Jared Golden. It’s not a welcoming place because it’s not where the future of politics is. People don’t want a status quo that they protected.
And I think the other thing that Jake was saying that’s really important here is, there’s this emphasis in our political culture right now of this very short-termism, of maximizing vote shares or profits in the very next election is all we care about.
But that’s not how you get out of moments like this. You do it through what Jake said. You mobilize. The idea that you need an all-white party—what you need to be doing is building an inclusive party that actually has those roots to all different communities and all different types of people, that then can be built up.
You don’t play defense in a moment like this and expect to come out on top. You need to actually, as Jake said, it’s about building the party. That’s a slower process. But if you were a business and you only cared about the next term’s short-term profits, you’re just liquidating whatever value the company has.
What you want to do is build out the company. You have to build out the project over a long period of time, and that just seems to be missing from a lot of our elite level top-down politics.
Bacon: Jake, you have anything there?
Grumbach: Yeah. So I totally agree with Adam here.
Two things that make this sort of moderate progressive comparison challenging now and total BS across the board. You don’t want to listen to anybody who’s like, “This type of candidate performed like this, and this shows how the party must perform.”
And one reason for that is because we’re in national partisan warfare. So what El-Sayed does, it doesn’t just stay in Michigan, right? It’s the entire Republican Party, nationally on conservative media, targeted this one race. That makes him potentially serve as a lead blocker for a broader, and takes away resources from elsewhere. There are so many spillovers.
Bonica and I are stats nerds. That’s our actual day job. We come on the Perry Bacon Show as an extra treat in our job. But what we do is we’re quants, and we separate correlation from causation. And what we see now is we can’t do that anymore. Parties rise and fall together.
So while it’s clear that, for example, El-Sayed suffered an Islamophobia penalty, that’s actually pretty clear. It was relentless Islamophobia. I was young in the post-9/11 era. It seems more explicit even.
Bacon: George Bush was not going around calling average American Muslims terrorists. He actually went out of his way to say the opposite, in fact.
Grumbach: It was jaw-dropping.
And one interesting thing about this is, this already harms this moderate progressive comparison when people are saying El-Sayed ran a couple points behind other candidates, let’s say. It depends how you slice this. That’s not even potentially true under all metrics, right? But let’s imagine that’s true for a second.
People are saying, “Oh, that’s because he’s too far left.” But the Republican attacks on him were entirely about identity. Zero policy. They didn’t attack him for Medicare for All.
Bacon: They were not talking about Medicare, bro. They were talking about Muslims.
Grumbach: They’re talking about, this guy’s a scary Muslim. And because of that, we can’t draw broader conclusions. We don’t know what it would look like if he was a white Christian dude. We just don’t know. We don’t know if he switched his policy positions, what would happen on Israel-Gaza, Medicare for All, or anything else.
The point is, this is a national party that succeeded incredibly well with El-Sayed as a kind of lead blocker in this way. And just resist any of this sort of strategery stuff.
What I saw was actually that, like Bonica said, candidates were well-calibrated to their areas. And then Perry, you mentioned some candidates tacking more centrist on transgender issues recently. That was a key debate in the Democratic Party strategy messaging debates, is that it is true that trans participation in NCAA sports polls pretty poorly. It’s also low salience.
Andy Beshear in Kentucky and others have threaded this needle as kind of conservative Democrats who don’t compromise on trans rights. Others, like Talarico, famously did hedge on trans rights. That is an incredibly uncertain question, right?
But I think it’s issue by issue, these are the debates parties have. But I would just say there’s no clear answer to that either. And it’s also tough to say to trans rights activists, too, it’s not a clear answer that attacking right on trans issues didn’t help either. It’s totally uncertain, and you should not believe any incredibly robust hot takes.
And again, this is why voters, activists, small donors, people who are watching this show right now, don’t get too into being pundit brain strategists yourself. Say what you believe in as a voter, as an American, what type of world you want to build and what types of policies you want and what kind of candidates you like.
That is the most healthy way to manage a party base. And unfortunately punditry and consultants really want you to be a strategist saying, “I don’t dislike this person, but the median voter probably does,” and that’s just a poor way to run a party.
Bacon: Adam wrote a lot last year particularly about the virtues of talking about corruption as a sort of unifying issue. And if I was going to say something, I think this is not in the punditry as much, but I think Talarico talked about that, Ossoff talked about that.
A lot of Democrats talked about money in politics, the scourge of billionaires, but not necessarily in a sort of a Bernie Sanders Medicare for All way. In a way that is more about, our political system is broken. And I think that was a widespread trend. So talk about, were you surprised by how many candidates ended up doing something you were talking about, Adam?
Bonica: No, I wasn’t surprised. Moving beyond the consultant pressures, the situation the United States finds itself in feels unusual or extreme, but it’s very common for democracies around the world to have dealt with very similar scenarios and situations.
And a consistent theme that you see over and over again, most recently in Serbia, but before that in Hungary, we saw it in Bulgaria, we saw it in Bangladesh. It’s just a consistent—
Grumbach: Brazil.
Bonica: Brazil also had an element of that as well. Is that anti-corruption politics becomes a type of unifying movement against authoritarians.
Trump is, by basically any expert on this area’s assessment, the most openly corrupt, extremely corrupt leader that I think we’ve seen in contemporary politics. Putin even at least tries to hide what he steals. Trump just does it out in the open. It’s profound to watch this.
I’m a bit surprised we didn’t see more of it from politicians, because it’s just such an easy opening. And then going back to this question, we spent so much time talking about trans rights. Look at the exit polls. How many people said that was crucial to their vote? It was not a large percentage.
Go look at what people said was crucial or extremely important to their vote. It was corruption. That was the number one determinant people told the people in the exit polls, that determined their vote. It was more important than affordability. And when you actually ask voters about corruption and affordability, they see them as the same issue in most cases.
So it is the defining issue of this election. Voters have been screaming this at the top of their lungs. In every survey where corruption is a question, voters are very clear that this is their biggest concern, government corruption. It’s amazing how little play it gets.
And part of it is, if you look at voters’ views on both of the parties in terms of who’s corrupt, they see both parties as corrupt. The Democrats are not anywhere close to as corrupt as Republicans. We don’t need to play that game. But voters don’t go and look at someone and go like, “He’s less corrupt than the other guy, so he’s my guy,” right?
They want someone who’s clean. They want someone who’s authentic and someone who’s going to clean up the system and change from the status quo that they see as broken to one that actually starts serving the public. And that’s fundamental to anti-corruption politics.
Another word for it is a reform party. We have a long history of this in the United States as well. The Watergate babies came in and changed a lot in terms of how corrupt the Democratic Party was in certain ways at that time. They reformed their own party, their party rules, in an effort to clean up what was going on after Watergate.
But going back to Teddy Roosevelt, this was his secret sauce in politics, was he was an anti-corruption candidate. And he’s a long lineage of very successful politicians, and it’s the type of thing that creates these political realignments that we are very overdue for, but also are in desperate need of to dig ourselves out of this hole.
Bacon: And Jake, corruption I think is one that obviously was relevant. I think gas prices were obviously relevant. ICE I think was relevant. Any other issues that you think drove, or any messages or issues that are worth saying this worked, or this didn’t matter at all, or what have you?
Grumbach: Yeah, I mentioned the Voting Rights Act, especially for Black voters, and especially in the South where Black Voting Rights Act districts were wiped away. The real casualty of the end of the Voting Rights Act—and I remember discussing with Hakeem Jefferson from Stanford and you, Perry, on the show. There’s some issues with Latino opportunity districts and things, but the real hit is southern Black districts.
We saw Justin Pearson’s district in Tennessee, the Memphis district long held by Democrats, was cracked and he loses by one point. Some figures in Alabama eke out a victory in a redistricted district. But Pearson’s is a classic case of the casualties of the new era of gerrymandering, where racial gerrymandering is essentially allowed in addition to this partisan gerrymandering we know very well from the 2010s.
But on corruption, Adam was like Babe Ruth calling his shot. He has these pieces from a couple years ago. Democrats need to be the anti-corruption party. Tie it to the cost of living. It’s big money in politics. Corruption is why policy doesn’t help you economically, right?
And that’s a clear thing voters cared about. He called his shot like Babe Ruth and then hit that homer, because in exit polls it was 90 percent said corruption was a top issue of why they voted. This went beyond the economy stuff.
Bacon: Economy stuff.
Grumbach: Exactly, economy type of stuff. Hugely important in defeating authoritarians around the world, as Adam said, as well as student protest movements, also very important for that, and the Democratic Party should really think about this.
But in thinking about what the Democratic Party can do now with control of Congress and not the White House, this is actually a really important thing. I’ve heard some people already say, “Now it’s time for the Democrats to deliver economically and the cost of living and deliver material goods to people that make people like Democrats.”
I wish that were possible, but when you don’t have the White House, you can’t pass statutes. This isn’t like Mamdani’s ability with a somewhat favorable city council that’s aligned under a leader who can then deliver better transportation and make your life, fix potholes.
What the Democrats can do in Congress is investigate and hold the Republican Party in the White House accountable. They can block nominations, especially for the judiciary, that’s very important, all the way up to the Supreme Court with Senate control. And they can investigate and try to start the process of accountability through Congress that we’ve seen going back to, for example, Watergate.
This is crucial, and you hear from the Democratic leadership some back and forth here. Both Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate have signaled already in little ways that we’re looking forward, not backwards. This is about moving forward with consensus kitchen table issues. Hakeem Jeffries even said, “Americans want to get ahead, not get even.”
And I think people speak in these platitudes on TV, so you shouldn’t draw too much from this. But to frame accountability for high crimes and misdemeanors, rampant corruption—DOGE broke Article 1 of the Constitution, right? Ignoring judicial orders on immigration orders, that’s Article 3 of the Constitution. They have broken the rule of law.
Not just political inequality and the fight for voting rights and the first sort of dimension of democracy that’s been a struggle throughout American history, for political equality and one person, one vote for everyone. But the rule of law, right?
That is so broken that there will need to be deterrents so that future political leaders do not break the Constitution in the same way. That’s going to require accountability. And it’s going to be tough, because American political institutions are so decentralized in checks and balances and state and local government that it’s hard to centralize accountability, right?
One lucky thing for the Democratic Party this cycle is that the Republicans held every part of the federal government, so there’s nobody they tried to blame. JD Vance was trying to blame Democrats for prices and stuff. It doesn’t compute even to people not paying attention. That does not work.
Now, with the Democrats holding both chambers of Congress, there’s going to be this attempt of the Trump administration to say, We didn’t mess up. The Democratic Party’s blocking us for this. It does get then distorted.
The media typically brings up, “Oh, they’re disagreeing,” blah, blah, blah. It’s a tougher sell, so people have got to keep their eyes on the prize, think about accountability, and with a trifecta potentially, knock on wood, in 2029, that’s when you can pass a real agenda to improve people’s lives materially through congressional statutes that are signed by the president.
Bacon: Two final questions. There’s a discourse about the leadership and about Jeffries and Schumer. I guess the conventional wisdom I’ve read among progressives is basically, Hakeem Jeffries is not up to this and not strong enough, but he would be the first Black speaker, so they’re going to vote for him, let it go. And versus Indivisible is already demanding that Schumer not become the Senate Majority Leader.
So Adam, I’m just curious what your thoughts are. Do you think these two are up to the job, and if not, should they be replaced?
Bonica: Corruption is the movement that I think the Democratic Party needs to grasp. I see none of that coming from Jeffries. In fact, I see outright hostility towards it. I’ve seen this in a lot of channels. And Schumer is in a similar situation.
So I watched the DCCC leadership press conference with Jeffries and other soon to be House leaders, most likely. And they were talking about affordability, linking everything affordability. Which is an important problem. But then you look at it, just setting themselves up to fail in a way on this issue, where—
Bacon: They can’t make anything affordable in the next two years because they don’t have the power.
Bonica: It’s also just a global problem. Governments have some levers, but they don’t have the main lever, which is the Fed, which has now aligned with the White House. But globally, we saw post-COVID inflation and rising prices. Governments around the world with all types of policy levers were unable to control it. In fact, Biden did better than basically anywhere else. And he’s still punished for it. This is a really hard thing to deal with.
But getting back to leadership, there are a whole bunch of collective action problems within the party. The party’s coming in with an approval rating that is 10 to 20 points lower than their approval rating was in 2010 when they lost in a landslide. People do not see the Democratic Party as a popular party. They are the alternative, and that is what this election was about, but they need to be more than that.
Now, dealing with affordability is going to be very difficult through policy, as we described. But the thing they do have complete control over is adopting anti-corruption policies. They don’t need to pass legislation to do it. They just need to say, “As rules for our Democratic Party.”
If you recall, after 2006, when they ran on that culture of corruption platform, they came in and did a bunch of rules that changed how lobbyists could engage with politicians. All these things they talk about wanting to do, banning congressional stocks, getting money out of politics, removing mega donors, or even, stop exploiting seniors to fundraise and draining their retirement accounts through exploitative fundraising, the revolving door.
All of that can be resolved within the Democratic Party with a leader that says, “These are the new rules. If you do not follow the rules, I will use the powers as speaker to say that you no longer get the committee you want. You no longer have free privilege to bring bills to the floor. You lose a whole bunch, you get the worst office.”
All of these tools that majority leaders have been able to use and speakers have famously used to reform Congress, that’s what a leader needs to be doing right now. And you know what? You don’t need to worry about the Supreme Court. You don’t need to worry about Republicans.
In fact, you want to create that contrast. Let the Republicans be corrupt for two years so you can show that, Look, we cleaned up. We took it into our own hands and said, All these things we don’t like about politics, we actually rooted out in our own party, and we held our own accountable.
And then as part of that, you pass legislation that’s anti-corruption legislation. And think of the political communication dynamics. Democrats show up, they have now adopted voluntarily these reforms that voters have been clamoring for, and then they show up and say, Here’s a bill to make Republicans do it too.
And they pass it through the House, and they pass it through the Senate, and it shows up at the White House, and Trump vetoes it. And then you do it again, and you do it again.
It would be catastrophic for Republicans to watch that happen. This is the one bipartisan issue that Trump has. The only thing that he has reached across the aisle to do is to pardon and excuse political corruption within the Democratic Party. This is his biggest weakness.
Their focus on affordability, which I don’t think that they have the levers to do. A leader in this moment, whether that’s Jeffries, and I’m skeptical that it is, but I hope it could be, understands that this is a golden opportunity.
You could be basically the best speaker in the history of the country and reform how we think about politics, without worrying about any of those institutional barriers that we’ve faced on so many other issues.
Bacon: Jake, I’m so certain that agenda he said will not happen. So I wanted to probe about why. I would not say Chuck Schumer likes corruption. I would not use that sentence directly.
So why are Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, in my view, opposed to doing anything about political corruption? Maybe they’re for it secretly, but discuss the barriers, why that’s unlikely to happen. I don’t want to say not going to happen, unlikely to happen.
Grumbach: Excellent question. So the answer is incentives, and thinking like a game theorist here.
Schumer especially has served the longest of these two congressional leaders, and when you rise the ranks in an institution, you get used to the norms that rose you to the top of that institution. And especially in the Senate, the norms are like this debate comedy, even the filibuster is a legitimate tool to use. My friends on the other side. That’s throughout the party.
And the same goes for, as Adam’s saying, fundraising. The types of fundraising models that get you to rise within the party mean you don’t want to get rid of this fundraising sort of machine, which is why you ended up at this particular place in the party, and how people rise and fall within the party.
But now we’re in a new era where, as a party, we have to prioritize the party winning over authoritarianism as a collective whole rather than individual status within the party. And that is a very challenging thing for American political parties, given the institutions of district-based elections and long-term incumbency, where you rise in committees and things throughout that chamber. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about politics. Sadly, we’re in an authoritarian moment that calls for breaking that glass and thinking differently.
So the three challenges of American authoritarianism right now, the Democratic Congress and its leadership have been behind on, and the Democratic base have been ahead on. Remarkably, this is from Minnesota ICE resisters to people at No Kings protests to Black voters in the South. The base of the Democratic Party is much more open and focused on this, and has been changing and thinking collectively as a party in a different way.
And I’ll say the challenges are threefold. First is Trumpism, and that’s the one we most hear, the end of the rule of law. But also the longer term McConnellism challenge, which has been to use US institutions to empower numeric minorities against majorities.
So that’s the revolutions of gerrymandering, using eroding norms to not seat Supreme Court nominees of the other party, using everything up through the letter of the law that’s possible but eroding every norm to have your side gain structural advantage in political institutions.
And the third is Muskism, the idea of incredibly wealthy mega billionaires. This guy’s richer than any human in human history, whose power rivals the power of all of us in the entire country and is essentially above the law, came in with DOGE, destroyed the Constitution, didn’t go through the normal nominations process, and is now out spending half a billion dollars on this election cycle, right?
Those three challenges are new, McConnellism a little bit more long term. Those require breaking the glass in the fire extinguisher, trying new things as a party, and you cannot go along with the usual, You’ll rise in this party if you fundraise well and leadership in this way.
So the Democratic Party base, when you poll registered Democrats, they are not supportive of these leaders. And it’s because they see these leaders not breaking the glass to make sacrifices to their potential individual positions in these institutions, to take risks on behalf of the broader party and the country as a whole.
And that’s things that in every fundraising text, ordinary voters are being asked to sacrifice money, time, all in, vote blue no matter who, don’t worry if it’s not your nominee you particularly like. Trump is in office, and you better step up. And the base is asking all parts of the party, including the leadership, to do the same. So I think that remains an open question.
Bacon: That was a good framing, in part because Trumpism, McConnellism, and Muskism—I wrote a profile of Chuck Schumer when he joined the leadership in the Senate Democrats. That was in 2005.
So many of those three things, actually, he’s been in office in leadership way before McConnell was in office, and McConnellism is different in certain senses. I think that gets the sense of why his thinking is so outdated. He was in Congress much longer than 2005. He was in leadership in 2005, which tells you how maybe outdated his vision of the world is.
So the last question will be a little bit more personality driven, about the future. We’re going to have this Democratic primary soon. So I look at the election results and think, if I’m Andy Beshear, who’s my governor, who has done a good job, I think.
If I’m Josh Shapiro, I was going to go out and say, Look, I can win in a purple state, in a red state, and look at me, and look how great I am, and we have to nominate someone who can win those hard places. A Black man is going to be elected senator in Mississippi. I think it’s fairly obvious that a white governor can win.
So I guess there’s two questions. One is, is the electability campaign going to be more challenging? And then second, as a progressive myself, yeah, AOC is not Abdul El-Sayed, but is it easier to see her running today than it was two weeks ago?
So start with Adam, in terms of 2028. Does Jon Ossoff have to run, or should everybody else read his corruption talking points, and should Raphael Warnock just steal those and stop talking about being a nice pastor and talk about that? Or just any kind of lessons about 2028 that you want to talk about here, as my last question.
Bonica: Yeah, if there was one sort of message I could communicate to people who are going to be voting in and engaging in the Democratic primary, which as always will be chaotic and there will be a lot of unknown variables about it. But it goes back to a piece that you wrote recently about electability. That it just dominates so much of what happens in how we talk about politicians.
But it’s not real. This election is the latest in many that has shown that you win because your party and your movement is popular. AOC is no less likely to win than Beshear, I would say, if she was in the general election. The reason is who she’ll be running against.
But there’s also a much bigger issue, the prize here, which is if we’re trying to build a broader party, we’re trying to build a younger party, think about the long term here. The type of candidate that can really mobilize younger voters, who can really mobilize and say, “This is a party for a lot of people.”
And a great thing about the Democratic Party is, it can have a voice like Beshear and AOC, both who I’d say are anti-corruption candidates. And they’re the good guys. And being a good guy is not a progressive or centrist thing. That’s separate. And I think people should look at candidates and vote for the candidates that they think will be the best and strongest president and candidate. That’s what’s in the party’s best interest.
Bacon: Jake?
Grumbach: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And one thing I’m very supportive of is thinking about primary election institutions and how those rules distort and create these pathologies in the nomination process for president.
So what we need to move towards is one national primary day, right? Potentially with ranked choice voting. This is the most obvious use case of ranked choice voting, where you can rank AOC one, Beshear, whatever, right? People know these candidates in that way at the presidential level.
This isn’t ranked choice voting for dog catcher in an exurb that you don’t know who’s running. This is ranked choice voting at the presidential level. And it’s really pathological that you get this Iowa, South Carolina jockeying, New Hampshire caucus, and then momentum hits, donations hit, and as Adam said, the debate becomes entirely not who do you like and whose policies do you like, but rather what do you think will win the general election.
That fails to capture the energy of the movement and the base and build a movement. A primary election is to actually learn something about what people want, right? It’s not to be strategic about some later date. It’s about saying, “Where is the energy?”
I think Mamdani in New York is the best example of this, where it’s unexpected. Wow, he’s generating a ton of volunteers and energy. We’ll learn from that, and the Democratic Party did. Now everybody’s talking like Mamdani. That’s how it works.
You should use the presidential primary season to learn. Oh, maybe AOC doesn’t generate the youth energy we expected on college campuses. Maybe she does. Maybe somebody else comes out as a dark horse candidate. That’s what you want to see. Our institutions are set up to totally distort that.
And what people should think about, no matter when you’re voting in the 2028 primary season, no matter what state you are, resist the urge to be a strategist pundit. Support who you support. Be proud of that.
And hopefully this sort of pundit economy second order strategery of soccer moms will decline, and people can talk about what world they want to build and how they want to govern. And that would create a much healthier politics and a much clearer path to defeating authoritarianism.
Bacon: That’s a great place to end on. Jake, Adam, thanks for joining me. Love all your work. I’ll encourage people to check it out. You guys are on Bluesky. I think Jake is on Twitter. And they’ve co-written some excellent pieces. There’s one in Boston Review laying out how to fight authoritarianism that I thought would give a really good look at why what Schumer and Jeffries are doing is not effective, if you’re trying to win this broader fight. And they have a more recent piece about the consulting class that was published here at TNR. So I encourage you to check out both of them, and great to see you guys. Bye-bye.
Grumbach: Thanks so much, Perry.
