Transcript: These Democrats Have a Real Chance of Being President

Mark Schmitt is the director of the Political Reform Program at New America. But I know they both have some interesting projects going on. So Seth, talk about—you’ve got a book and a Substack—tell everybody about what you’re doing first.Seth Masket: Yeah, a couple of things going on. I just started a new Substack newsletter that’s called the SMOTUS Report—that’s S-M-O-T-U-S, Seth Masket of the United States. We just had a big launch earlier this week. I’m looking for supporters, so I’m hoping people will be interested. But basically, the focus there is a lot about U.S. politics, parties, campaigns, and a lot of other things, all with an eye toward the health of American democracy, which is obviously under a lot of strain right now. And on that topic, I have a book coming out next month called The Elephants in the Room. The book is a look at how Republicans ended up nominating Donald Trump for a third consecutive time in 2024, how a lot of people in the party’s leadership were actually quite uncomfortable with that decision but had no way to move voters in a different direction.Bacon: And Mark, talk about the political reform—is it still called that? I’m forgetting now what you guys call it.Mark Schmitt: Yeah. I think we have layers, so now there’s a section called Democratic Futures—that’s what I was referring to—and I still want to keep—I like a nice, straightforward name like Political Reform, even though it always makes people say, “How is that going?” Yeah, we’re still doing our thing. I think we’re putting out a lot of material right now about why proportional representation is a timely response, particularly with the Supreme Court ruling in Callais that really guts the Voting Rights Act. And there’s suddenly a—we’ve been harping on this for years, but there’s suddenly a recognition of: okay, maybe that is the answer. You’re seeing it from journalists, from conservatives as well. So we’re trying to take advantage of that moment.Bacon: Just because even my nerd friends don’t always know—explain what proportional representation is, very briefly.Schmitt: Proportional representation would be where you have, let’s say, we allow congressional districts to have multiple members of Congress. So you might create one district in Georgia that has five members, and then voters would rank—a candidate who got maybe 25 percent of the vote would have one of those congressional seats, depending on how it was allocated. And there’s super-nerdy different ways—party lists, things like that. I sometimes just nod along when people talk about the variations. But the essential idea is that you would create a model of representation that’s proportional to the share of support that candidates and parties actually get.Right now, we’re moving in the complete opposite direction—where Tennessee becomes a completely one-party state. Florida’s pushing that direction. Republicans in California—Donald Trump got more votes in California than any other state, and they’re totally unrepresented elsewhere in the state. Same with Democrats in Texas and Florida. So proportional representation would change that, and would also enable newer parties to emerge on the scene. If a Green Party, Libertarian, Working Families Party engaged in that system, they could have enough seats in Congress, enough seats in the state legislature to have some real leverage.Bacon: All right, so we’re going to get to our topic today, which is 2028. We’re starting a little early, and it’s a little lighter than usual. So what I want to do is an exercise that I told these guys about—defining who is running exactly is always complicated, because people are hiding their intentions or maybe running but pretending to run but not really going to run. But we have one metric, which was that the National Action Network—the nonprofit group Al Sharpton runs—had a conference about a month ago, and it sounds like Sharpton invited people who he thought might run for president, and 10 people showed up. And so I think that’s a good proxy for 10 people who are aggressively signaling they are running. We’ll talk about some others later.So I’m going to go through these 10 with Mark and Seth. And Seth, as he noted, has written about primaries—he has a great book about the 2020 Democratic primary. And Mark has actually, unlike the two of us, worked in a primary. He was a senior adviser for Bill Bradley back in 2000. So these guys—Schmitt: Perry, that gives me very limited credibility. A campaign that won zero primaries is almost completely forgotten. Any young person who comes and you engage with, I have to do all the background. It was an interesting experience—I spent time in Iowa and New Hampshire—but James Carville I am not. And I’m happy about that.Bacon: And so what we’re going to do is go through the 10 people who went to the Sharpton event and talk about them, and then talk about a few others. So I’m going to start out—it’ll be alphabetical—go through this list. The first person evidently is my governor, actually—Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky. And so what I want to do with each one of these people is talk about what they’re doing to position themselves, then talk about maybe what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are.So Beshear—as you remember, he ran for vice president in 2024 for about three weeks when Harris was choosing between him and Tim Walz and Shapiro. And so right after the election, what he did was he wrote this op-ed in The New York Times where he basically said, “I’m from Kentucky, I’m in a Trump state, but I won, and I also won while being pro-LGBT and pro-abortion rights and pretty liberal.” And so I thought that was a signal that he was going to kind of run as the most progressive of the moderates, for lack of a better way to say that—the most progressive of the sort of mainstream candidates. Since then, he’s gone in a different direction, which is, I would say, he’s just running in the kind of moderate lane. And we’ll get into lanes in a second. In the sense that pretty much every speech he gives now, he says this thing about how Democrats should not speak in “faculty language” and not use big words. President Obama said something similar this week. I find this eye-roll-inducing. But I do think it’s a way to signal you’re not too leftist, you’re poking at the group. So I think Beshear is planning to try to win the Biden 2020 primary vote, which is Black and white moderates—that’s my sense of what he’s trying to do.And so strengths are: this is a state that Trump won by 30, 33 points in 2024. So Beshear has by far the strongest electability credential—way better than Shapiro, Whitmer. This is a very red state that he won. And the weakness, I think the big weakness, is—I don’t love the phrase “attention economy,” it’s become a cliché—but I do think in a primary where you have to raise money and break through in debates, Beshear might be a little too—he’s a nice guy—might be a little too dull, to put it bluntly, to break out there. So that’s my assessment. Mark, what do you think?Schmitt: Yeah, I think that bit is right. He’s a little bit like sort of Michael Bennet in 2020 in terms of personality—just not super [exciting], in my exposure to him. You’ve obviously had infinitely more exposure.I did think it was fascinating how unabashed he was about trans rights and other issues—not occupying that really socially conservative lane—which I think actually, in terms of the Democratic electorate or even of people willing to vote for Democrats in November, I don’t think that really exists. So I thought that was really smart.Like you, I’m a little tired of the scolding. I said yesterday, in response to Obama’s thing about not using faculty language: I don’t think the problem is that Democrats use big words. I think it’s that they kind of construct these complicated logics in the comms shop that are like, for the cost of the war, we could be providing you healthcare—because they’re like, We have to pivot to what we think people care about, instead of just saying, Hey, this war is really stupid. And I think that was sometimes the problem with Kamala Harris’s language too—it wasn’t faculty language, she’s not talking about Pierre Bourdieu. She just gets tangled in these logical things that get her in knots. So I’m a little annoyed about that.And as far as—he’s telling a story about his electability, but he’s not showing it. He’s the classic kind of candidate who can get elected governor of Kentucky but could jump into a Senate race and lose 60–40. There’s a whole litany of people with that kind of history—much less a presidential race. So somehow he has to actually show that as well as tell it, I think.Masket: First of all, Mark, let me join you on being annoyed by what Obama said—just because Obama is literally a law professor and constructs these very beautiful, ornate speeches and won twice by majority votes. But just on Beshear—he strikes me as, some of what you were talking about Perry, the pure electability candidate. And electability is, as we’ve written about, a very fraught area, and it overlaps with a lot of other things, including assumptions about race and how people vote, and assumptions that you need a white candidate if you’re really going to win. I think those are highly suspect conclusions.But obviously, this is someone whose main appeal is that he can win in a red state—more so than any of the other sort of electability candidates. For people who just really don’t care what the Democrat stands for and just want to make sure the Republican doesn’t get the White House, you can see the appeal for someone like that. I can’t help thinking that at least some of that is due to the fact that Kentucky has odd-year elections—and I just wonder, would he win that race if it was during a presidential election where Donald Trump was running? I’m not sure. I’m not sure he does. But it’s a claim. It’ll get him some attention.I think we’ve often seen some version of this candidate in the past. I can think of—was it Schweikert in Montana?Bacon: —I think it was Bullock. In 2020. You’re right.Masket: Yeah. But we’ll see how that goes for him. I think you’re right—there are limits to how far this can take him.Bacon: Next person is Cory Booker. Seth, I’ll let you lead our conversation about Cory Booker.Masket: Cory Booker is an interesting guy. You’d think he ran well in 2020—that is, he hit a lot of the right marks. If you think in terms of lanes, he’s potentially the candidate who could win a lot of Black support but also reach out to a lot of white voters. That year, Black voters were already really in the tank for Joe Biden on pure electability concerns. Maybe Booker would have a better shot at it this time around. He’s interesting in that he sometimes runs moderately, mainstream, but is able to project a lot of strident passion against some of the things Trump is doing. He had the 25-hour filibuster. I’m sure no one remembers it anymore, but he could bring that up.Also, for what it’s worth, he got married late last year. The last time he ran for president was right around the time he announced his relationship with Rosario Dawson. That’s his signal that he’s running. But he’s interesting in the sense that he’s a combination of really strong principled stances and some feel-good internet pablum. And I don’t know if he’s ever hit quite the right note in there. But he’s obviously well-known, he’s well-liked by a lot in the party, and he’s got a shot at being a real player here.Bacon: Mark?Schmitt: Yeah, I think that’s right. He’s very—I feel like he might have passed his sell-by date a little bit. He’s capable of being very inspiring—I’m just not feeling like he has the thread right now. He jumped on that stupid thing about cutting taxes for everybody, along with Katie Porter and a couple others—that was really just embarrassing. It was no taxes if your household is less than 100,000 or something like that, which really, given what we’re going to need to do in terms of taxes, means we’re just going to grind it out more on the sort of middle rich, unless we’re willing to really go after the billionaires. So anyway, that gets into policy complexity, which is probably not the biggest thing that plays.I feel like Booker has one strength: he’s one of those politicians who goes anywhere and talks to anybody, in the way that Mamdani is. And I think there’s just real value in that right now—not parsing out micro-targeting, but just getting in there and showing up in an unfriendly audience and listening. I feel like he’s got a little of that gift. Might help.Bacon: Next is Pete Buttigieg—so I’ll let you start, Mark.Schmitt: I’m not sure where to go on that. He’s clearly just the most—he brings to mind pictures of—just—strengths: he’s just like Obama in terms of ability to articulate a viewpoint and get people going. And he has real credentials now, which—mayor of South Bend was not. And I think he’s super impressive. Weaknesses—maybe seems a little too slick, maybe will never fully appeal to the left as a sort of former McKinsey guy—maybe there’s just an internal resistance. People will say being gay is a weakness—it’s just not going to be a weakness in a Democratic primary. And again, probably not with that population of people who are willing to vote for Democrats at all. So that doesn’t concern me at all, aside from the justice of it. I don’t know—I’ll be interested to see where he goes.Masket: So he drops out of the 2020 race like the morning after the South Carolina primary, and I think about five minutes later he planned to run in 2028.Schmitt: I think it was five minutes before. I think it was always a 2028 [play].Masket: Maybe. Oh, you’re right.Bacon: That’s a good point. Yes.Masket: But it’s important to remember, when he was running back then, he was a kid, and he did shockingly well in that race, honestly. Obviously he didn’t come that close to toppling Biden, but he was a real presence. He stayed in till roughly the bitter end. He was very good at debates. And I think, as we’ve seen since then, probably his main strength as a candidate is going on Fox News. He is very good at speaking to conservatives and speaking to conservative voters in a way that just makes it sound very common-sense—to articulate a center-left set of policies and beliefs—and he’s completely unflappable about that. I think that’s an important skill. So I don’t underestimate his skills as a campaigner. Also, the fact that he’s actually done some campaigning last year in Iowa—which is not going to be one of the Democrats’ first states, but he wanted to show up there anyway. He’s pretty ambitious about this, and he’ll be a major name.Bacon: The thing that came out in 2020—there was a lot of debate about whether he was a strong candidate with Black voters, and you do have to do well with Black voters to win the primary. But I think we should suspend that. Joe Biden, as one of you guys was saying, was a very strong candidate with Black voters for a variety of reasons. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, who are Black, didn’t do well among Black voters against him either. So I think I would suspend that—I don’t think he has the—I think he’s—Another question I would have is: you have a bunch of candidates saying, “I’m electable.” Pete has done a good job going on Fox News, his approval ratings are pretty good among Republicans. That said, Shapiro and Beshear are able to say, I’ve actually won Republican votes, and Pete really can’t say that yet. It’s all theoretical for him. But I think he’s got a good case, he’s got good charisma—I agree with what you all said.Schmitt: There’s also a different generation of Black leadership even since 2020, right? Back then, everything ran through Jim Clyburn—really old. There are four new Black senators—like Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester—and it’s just a different world of Black politics.Bacon: Next person I’m going to let Seth start. Ruben Gallego was there, and I didn’t really think about him for 2028 until recently, but I think he is exploring the waters. What do you think about Ruben Gallego? In case people don’t know, the senator from Arizona.Masket: Yeah, it’s an interesting candidate. He’s had a range of stances—he was considered pretty far to the left before he ran for Senate. And I think now he is, again, a candidate whose main appeal is that he can win in a swing state.Also potentially stands to, as a Latino candidate, win back some of the Latinos that went Donald Trump’s way in 2024. Think that may be happening without his help, but he does stand to benefit from that. It’s notable that when he ran for Senate in Arizona in 2024, he ran seven points ahead of Kamala Harris.Schmitt: That’s pretty good.Masket: He does seem to have—that’s pretty solid. He has some cachet in that way and some ability to run strongly in those states.Bacon: Mark?Schmitt: Yeah, I think the same. He’s one of a bunch of candidates who seem to be experimenting a bit, moving from point to point. And he’s also been more sympathetic to the administration on immigration enforcement than some of the others—which also, in a funny way, is part of his appeal to Latino voters in a super-complicated way. I think he’s toned down some of that a little bit.Yeah—want to wait and see. Also, in terms of weaknesses, I don’t know what’s—when you lift up the blanket over his relationship with Eric Swalwell, I don’t—or his own—it’s one of those where you want a really good background look.Bacon: One thing I would say is: he, like Booker and Pete, has been on the national stage for a while. It would be hard for them to change their views on much. Gallego can kind of make it up as he goes along on some level—I think he won’t seem like a flip-flopper as much because we don’t really know as much about him.Right now, he seems to be running kind of populist economics—he’s talking about big companies being broken up. He’s also been more conservative on immigration. He says the party’s too woke. So there might be an opening for somebody who’s more on the left on economics and on the right on social issues. I think that’s what the kind of Matt Yglesias crowd would like. So I think that’s an interesting potential play.The next person is Kamala Harris—Mark, I’ll let you start with Kamala Harris.Schmitt: Yeah, I was a little surprised when I saw how well she does in polls, but really shouldn’t be, because that’s just like the classic—I remember when I was a kid, every year Ted Kennedy would be at the very top of the polls, Al Gore for a while, people like that. I like her a lot. I thought she ran about as good a campaign as she could. But I just don’t think the Democratic Party’s going to have confidence in her, even giving—even understanding—how much she was screwed by Joe Biden.Bacon: You think she has a mass electability problem, basically?Schmitt: Yeah. She also has a little bit of a communications problem. She does get—and again, it’s not faculty lounge language, it’s just making things too complicated and too nuanced, and trying to appeal to what people seem to want to hear rather than just saying what she thinks—or even just seeming like she’s saying what she thinks. Pete Buttigieg certainly always seems like he’s saying what he thinks, even if it all comes out of a memo.Bacon: —that’s what I was thinking.Schmitt: Yes. I just don’t really have that confidence. And it’s too bad, because I think she was given a thankless job and she did it as well as she could.Masket: Yeah, it’s interesting—this belief has fallen down a little bit on the Republican side, but for Democrats there’s been this very long-standing belief that you only really get one shot at the brass ring. If you run for president and then lose, the party’s not interested in you anymore. They haven’t gone with a previous loser since Adlai Stevenson in ‘56. So I think that’ll be an important tradition for a lot of Democrats.I think there’s a real mix within the Democratic Party about just why she lost in ‘24. I think there’s a fair number of people in the party who say, Look, that was just going to be a tough year no matter who the candidate was. People were angry about the economy. We got a lot of the blame as the incumbent party. And I think a good many also who feel like she underperformed—it had something to do with the way she campaigned or who she was. And that’s going to work against her, and I think that’ll really hamper her.I’m honestly surprised she’s still considering it. I can certainly understand—you get the taste of it, you want to run—but generally we saw this with Al Gore to some extent, we’ve seen this with other candidates, where they express some interest in trying to run again and get politely nudged out.Bacon: So I’ve been surprised. Okay, so what I expected Harris to do was to pretend to run for president for a long time—that makes your book sales go up, makes you seem more relevant—and that’s what I assume is going on still: she’s going to pretend to run, but in early 2027 she’ll magically decide not to run, when she was never really intending to run the whole time. That’s my assumption.That said, her book was a little bit more critical of Biden than I expected, and she’s been a little bit more pro-Palestinian than I expected. I think some of the moves she’s made are the ones you would take if you’re trying to address your previous problems and actually run again. So I think that is the one place where I’ve been surprised. But ultimately, like I said, like Mark said, these polls are just reflecting name ID—she would have a hard time winning, and it’d be a very tough race for her.I’m going to move to Mark Kelly, which is another person who I would not have guessed after the election. He was on the VP list too, a little bit. And the case he’s got—again, a lot of people are talking about—is he’s won a hard swing state, and Arizona is a place where Harris also lost. So I think that’s the appeal of him, that’s the strength. He’s also done a pretty good job—Trump has attacked him personally a couple of times, and he made the most of that. He’s a veteran. I think that helps. An astronaut—that helps. So I think he’s got some personal credentials as sort of the electable white man who can beat Trump or beat JD Vance.The weaknesses are—I’ll be honest—I’m not totally sure I know what Mark Kelly’s voice sounds like. And when I say that, I mean that I’m not sure that he’s made much of an impression as a senator. He also semi-ran for VP when Harris got the nomination and didn’t make much of an impression either. And so I’m just—he won Arizona, but I’m still not actually sure he’s that impressive a politician. Either one of you—Seth, go ahead.Masket: Yeah, I agree with you. Kelly in some ways is a clear electability candidate in that he’s proven he can win in a swing state and do well there. It also helps him that he’s essentially a martyr of the Trump administration—that he’s been not just insulted, but they’ve actually tried to court-martial him and prosecute him. And Trump essentially accused him of treason. So he’s got that.And I think there is, among some Democrats—I don’t know if you’d want to call it a lane or anything like that—but a good pitch for a candidate who doesn’t have particularly strident stances but also appears fairly combative, a fighter, someone who’s willing to stand up for his party and push back strongly on some of Trump’s excesses. And I think he’s been very good on that front. But yeah, I agree with you—we don’t know much about his voice. I don’t know how much that really matters. Not an especially well-known, well-loved, dynamic candidate that way.Schmitt: Yeah. I’ve heard his voice. It’s deep. It’s——Bacon: I was joking a little bit, but he’s not—Schmitt: —as well—a little bit more—Beshear, I think, has a slightly unimposing voice. Not that we should get into stuff like that. But yeah, I think part of it with Kelly too is—if you take that Elissa Slotkin thing about “fight or fold” being the divide among Democrats, everybody’s going to be on the fight side. But he doesn’t have to prove it. He doesn’t have to overemphasize it, because it’s all right there. So he can just do other things, which I think might be an asset. But who knows?Interesting that there are two states—we just talked about two senators from Arizona, and then there are two senators from Georgia, both relatively new, who also are potential candidates. It’s interesting that both those swing states have produced real national stars already.Bacon: So next person is Ro Khanna. He’s obviously running to be the sort of—running for the Bernie vote, where he’s taken every progressive stand on every issue, from abolish ICE to Schumer should resign to there’s a genocide in Gaza. These are all sincerely held views, I’m sure. But also, he’s running in that progressive lane trying to inherit the Bernie vote.So I think the strength of that is there is clearly a part of the party that wants that kind of candidate. And in some ways, unlike the people we’ve talked about, he has a very distinct part of the electorate he can appeal to—in a way that all the people we’ve talked about are fighting for the same voters on some level. So I think he’s got that.Weaknesses are: he’s a House member, he’s got really low name ID, and it can be hard to break out of that. If AOC runs, it could just be really hard for him to win many progressive votes. I don’t know if she’s running or not. And also, ultimately, my sense is that the progressive bloc of the party—while being closer to where my own views are—is not a majority, and so having those stances might not be the right way to win the nomination. But he’s done a good job getting out there. He’s also willing to do an interview everywhere, and he is everywhere. I think that’s a credit to him as well. So Mark?Schmitt: Yeah. I feel like I don’t really understand Ro Khanna very well, despite observing him for a long time. And I think there’s a question: is the Bernie—Bernie has been a dominant figure for the last several elections in a way that we don’t really appreciate. Was that about his positions, or was it something unique to Bernie? And I don’t think we really know, but I think just adopting his positions doesn’t really do it.But you’ve also touched on—it’s funny, we didn’t—you mentioned it in relation to Kamala Harris and obviously in relation to Khanna. Democrats’ relationship to Israel is going to be a very significant dividing lane, and I’m not sure—that’s moving really fast. And I’d rather be on the more pro-Palestinian side—just in cold political terms, not just personal terms—it’d be better to be on that side. But there are going to be a lot of donors and a lot of electeds who are going to be very resistant. That’s choosing a fight in a really significant—and thinking now about what that fight is going to look like two years from now—I don’t know where that’s going. Yeah.Masket: So another important divide within the Democratic Party right now is: what do we do with tech billionaires, right? This is a population with a lot of money. It’s become increasingly influential and has swung very hard right in recent years. As the congressman representing Silicon Valley, he’s one of the few Democrats who tech folks are actually still pretty comfortable with. He can speak to that crowd, he can get support from that crowd, which I think cuts both ways, right? I think that makes him in some ways look like a stronger general election candidate, as someone who could have access to that money and that support.Bacon: He seems pro-business and pro-innovation in a certain way too.Masket: But at the same time, that might make him a little toxic to a fair amount of folks on the left who really want to push back on AI and want to push back on tech’s role in politics right now.Bacon: Let me follow up on something Mark said. Mark, make your point, and then I’ll ask.Schmitt: No, I think that he can also make a pitch as a guy who understands AI, and if we think AI is going to be this big, world-changing challenge—which maybe it isn’t—he gets it. And I think he can play both sides of that, as he has in his career. He was originally just a Silicon Valley candidate challenging a very old, established member of Congress whose name I don’t remember anymore. But I think the tech side is interesting.Bacon: Mark, you said something about the idea being that Bernie Sanders won those votes, not generic progressive X. So I think that’s an important distinction. That said, we have a lot of evidence—with Zohran Mamdani—we have a lot of evidence that in primaries there’s some number of progressive people. So you’re saying there’s a gap between the people who vote for any progressive and the people who voted for Bernie Sanders. Do you think there’s a big gap or a small gap, or just a gap to consider?Schmitt: I just think they’re different. Yeah. I just think being Bernie Sanders connects with people in a way that was not just the bundle of his positions. And there is that phenomenon of supposed Trump-Sanders voters—I don’t know how much of that there is, but you can get how—both of them have a very—especially original Trump—they have a very non-politician appeal. It’s hard to imagine—you know, the guy’s the chair of the Senate Budget Committee—but he still has a very non-politician appeal. I think sometimes—like Mamdani’s progressivism—sometimes that progressivism has an appeal just because it’s coherent.Bacon: Yeah.Schmitt: It doesn’t have to be your worldview—but it’s a worldview, and it’s coming from somewhere, and it’s not just telling you what you want to hear.Bacon: Next person is Wes Moore. I’ll let you talk, Seth, in part because I know less about Wes Moore than I do some of the others. So hopefully you’ve studied him a little bit. Wes Moore.Masket: I was going to say, I don’t know that much about him either. He’s also, in some ways, the opposite of Mark Kelly in that he’s a very good public speaker. He is very engaging, he gets people very passionate. He’s good at going on a wide range of TV shows and venues and just speaking very inspirationally. I don’t have a sense of how well-loved he is generally among Democrats. He’s from Maryland, which isn’t a particularly competitive state. And he’s still pretty young, as far as I understand. But he’d be an interesting candidate to watch—and I think an enjoyable one to watch as he develops his speaking.Bacon: Mark?Schmitt: Yeah. Again, I live 500 feet from the Maryland border, but that doesn’t really mean anything. He’s not super visible, even in my world. He’s super impressive. He could turn out to be almost like Obama in the way he connects with people. But I don’t really have any idea. There are some sort of complicated questions about his personal background that could be—he was in some ways—Bacon: Questions about his military service, right? Exactly what he did—Schmitt: Military service, when he was there.Bacon: Yeah.Schmitt: Yeah. But I tried to figure that out one evening and I couldn’t really even figure out what the actual charge is.Bacon: One thing I would say is—both Harris, Booker, and Wes Moore are not just Black, but have fairly similar ideologies. They’re not leftist, they’re not hardcore moderates. And only one of them—and maybe zero of them—are going to do well. So that seems to me—I think all their plans are going to be: win some white moderates, win some white progressives, and do really well in the heavily Black states in the South. And that plan has worked for Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So it’s a good plan—but only one of them can have it work.Schmitt: And funny—they all three also have academic parent backgrounds. Wes Moore’s mother worked at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore.Bacon: Funny.Schmitt: —involved in [child welfare and social policy]. [FLAG: Schmitt’s sentence trails off; please verify what he was characterizing] I think Booker is definitely from an upper-middle-class family or a middle-class family. I can’t remember what his parents—Bacon: Kamala’s dad was a professor, yeah.Schmitt: Yeah.Bacon: J.B. Pritzker—I do know a lot about him. But anyway, I’ll let you start, Mark. J.B. Pritzker.Schmitt: Yeah, I just think he’s managed to be super popular as governor of Illinois, which is quite an accomplishment given that state’s history. He seems to just always hit the right note in relation to Trump. I think he could be a very formidable candidate. He’s one of those who seems like he’s just saying what he thinks, with a little bit of a Hey, I got all the money in the world, so I can say what I think attitude—which doesn’t really hurt. I don’t know. Lots of potential.Bacon: One question I want to ask you, Mark—and specifically, Steyer is having this problem in California: from my understanding, progressives do—he’s got the most left-wing positions, progressives are nervous about supporting a billionaire. It sounds like that’s maybe a barrier to Senator Warren or Bernie Sanders endorsing him. And Pritzker is trying to appeal to maybe not the hardest left, but certainly a progressive part of the party. Is being a billionaire inherently going to be disqualifying? I’m just curious what you think.Schmitt: First, I think being an inherited billionaire—like FDR—is probably less—Bacon: Is that what Pritzker is?Schmitt: It’s probably less—it’s the hotels and all that. I guess he was involved in the business, but it’s really not his—and his family story is actually very tragic and very moving. So I feel like that’s different from Steyer, who was in this private equity business for most of his adult life. And Steyer’s also actually doing really well.So—it’s no surprise that Warren doesn’t endorse him, because she’s still got her student in the race. I’m less concerned about that.Bacon: Okay. Seth?Masket: Yeah, I’m really curious how this will play on the suspicion-of-billionaires divide in the Democratic Party right now. Because I think there are a fair number of people, particularly in Illinois, who are just saying, Yeah, he’s a plutocrat, but he’s our plutocrat. And he seems to be playing that—he handles that pretty well. He doesn’t run from it. He just keeps saying, This gives me the freedom to say some things that others can’t. And he’s been, I think, quite good at that.He has been way more outspoken than most prominent Democrats from the beginning of Trump’s second term—specifically calling out ICE activities when they were threatening Chicago and things like that—and he’s the one, at least rhetorically, standing up very strongly in those circumstances. So I think that gives him some legitimate credential. I agree with Mark—I think he could be a formidable candidate.Bacon: What’d you say earlier, Mark? There’s the fight candidate—one of you said basically there’s a kind of person whose liberalism is in the fighting and not necessarily in the positions. I don’t know if Pritzker’s for the wealth tax or for Medicare for All, and I don’t think he’s probably likely to be on the sort of most policy-left. But I do think in the sort of—he’s a fighter. On the social issues, he’s very—he is actually fairly good on transgender rights, ICE, the things that—those sort of left social issues, he’s actually very strong on.Masket: Yeah. It’s just hard for me to believe that Medicare for All is going to be the thing we’re going to be fighting over—Bacon: I was using it as an example—Masket: —for the 2028 president given what we’ll have gone through.Bacon: So the final person who was at the Sharpton event, and somebody we’ve kind of referred to already—Seth, Josh Shapiro.Masket: Man, I wish it had been my line, but I heard someone refer to him as Baruch Obama, which I think is such a great line. He is a very skilled public speaker. A lot of people see him as an Obama-like presence, but also Jewish, and also can win Pennsylvania. He was obviously, I think, a very close second in the vice-presidential sweepstakes in 2024—and who knows what would have happened if he’d been the choice. I think it would have probably been the same result.The fact that he is literally a victim of political violence—that his house was attacked and burned—I think that’s a selling point for him among Democrats. But his stances—he’s got a complex set of stances on Israel. I think he’s been generally much more sympathetic to Israel than a lot of other prominent politicians. I think he sensed the wind changing on that and has followed along. But that will be a tough issue, and it will come up a lot for him—that will be the first issue people want to ask him about, simply for being outspoken on it and for being Jewish. And it’ll just be an extra challenge for him.Schmitt: Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t have any strong views about Shapiro. I found Shapiro’s little digs at Harris to be unseemly. But whatever.Bacon: I think he might be the most willing of the people we’ve named to—I think he might actually attack the left in a more aggressive way than the other people. He seems much more anchored in moderate politics in Pennsylvania—not just on Israel, on other issues too. So if it comes down to him and Buttigieg or something like that, I’d be curious if there was an anybody but Shapiro on the sort of progressive end. I think he might be in that territory. You can get past that—but Biden actually did a good job of being progressive-friendly enough to where people were fine with him, and I don’t know if Shapiro can pull that off. But we’ll see.Schmitt: Not if Israel remains a central issue.Bacon: And if he takes his current stand on it, I would say, yeah.Let’s do two more people, and then I’ll broaden it out. So the person we haven’t mentioned yet, who I think had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t come to New York, is Gavin Newsom, who is very clearly, obviously thinking of running for president. Seth, talk about Gavin Newsom.Masket: Gavin Newsom—I’ve seen this among some people on the left, that he rubs them the wrong way. But also he’s been, I think, a success in California. Importantly, a lot of Democrats have talked pretty harsh stuff about Donald Trump over the last year and a half. Gavin Newsom is one of the few who can actually claim to have achieved something, right? He actually pushed back on redistricting. He engineered a redistricting in California to counter what Trump pushed for in Texas and essentially neutralized that. And I think that shows, okay, he’s someone—even in a party that is not in the majority nationwide—who is capable of doing some real actions and changing national politics to a good degree. And I think he deserves some credit for that.Beyond that, I have no idea what his appeal will be like. He obviously loves being pugnacious, loves doing lots of TV—that’ll probably help him. But he’ll always be confounded by the fact that I think a lot of people just worry a Californian is not going to be electable nationwide. Of course, they tried with Kamala Harris—a whole different set of circumstances there.Bacon: Mark?Schmitt: Yeah. Ronald Reagan would have something to say about that.Masket: Wasn’t a Democrat, but yeah.Schmitt: No, I know. Yeah. I have trouble getting past just a kind of personal aversion to Gavin Newsom. And I’ll cop to that.Bacon: Which means that he’s too slick-looking, he doesn’t seem trustworthy—Schmitt: Yeah. And just something about his manner, or whatever. Obviously, yes, he has been a good governor, and the redistricting was great, and he’s basically continued a line of policies—that started with Jerry Brown—that have really helped California stand out from the country in many ways. But what I’ve noticed is he’s just—this intense experimentation—which I respect. There’s the period where he was tweeting in Donald Trump’s voice, as if that would be funny. And then there was a period where he was going on every right-wing podcast that he could find, or the looksmaxers and stuff like that. I just feel like—which is funny, because that might be part of my aversion—I kind of respect that try-anything approach right now to American politics, because I think that’s probably a good idea. But it totally reinforces the idea that this is a guy who stands for nothing.Bacon: Yes, I think I was going to say something like that too. He’s done pretty well this last year. He started off with the Let me have Steve Bannon on my podcast—that got a huge backlash. He was—and then he became super partisan: Trump is terrible, and even fighting him—the redistricting we talked about. He is reading the room, and I think he seems to adapt in a certain way. That’s a skill, even though we’re saying it may mean he has no core. So—Schmitt: No, just don’t make it so obvious.Bacon: Yes.Schmitt: Don’t make it so obvious what you’re doing.Perry Bacon: Yes. And the other thing about electability is, so my friends in pundit world, we study who did better in Arizona than Kamala, or who did better in Michigan, and what are those scores called? Elliot Morris writes about these scores—and there’s a debate, I can’t remember the term now. But anyway, basically how well you do above the average Democrat. A lot of talk about the—I think it’s the war score, or what some of these guys come up with.Anyhow, that’s how my nerd friends think. My friends in real life think any white guy is more electable than any non-white guy. And I think Gavin Newsom’s still a white guy, and so I think he might do better than Elissa Slotkin on electability, unfortunately, only because he is a man and she isn’t. I think that’s not a good way to see the world, but I do think we might be entering a phase where Democrats have run two women, those two women both lost, and we may have to wait 20 years to have another female nominee—and that would advantage someone like Newsom, who’s a loudmouthed white guy.And so the other person is AOC, and I’ll let Mark start.Schmitt: That’s only the second woman we’ve talked about. It’s AOC. Yeah.Bacon: No, you’re right.Schmitt: We’ve only talked about Harris, and now we’ll talk about AOC a little bit. Yeah. I don’t know. I am just a big fan of—I’m a big fan of AOC, but also of just: just run, don’t wait, just go for it—which is in some ways what Obama did. I would love to—I think it would be fascinating if she did it. She’s an extraordinary communicator. She knows when to hold back from the farthest left—people expect her to be a little further out than she is. She’s just got a grounding in common sense and can talk to people and explain things in ways that make sense to them. I’d love to see her try it.Bacon: Now, let me ask you. You said candidates are different and so on. I would argue pretty much everyone who voted for Sanders in 2020 would vote for AOC, and pretty much no one who didn’t vote for Sanders would vote for—we have a replay, in a certain sense. And I think that’s one where I say the lanes do seem clear, and I have a hard time seeing AOC breaking out of the Bernie vote. But I’m curious what you think about that.Schmitt: Yeah, I think I disagree with that on two sides. There is a certain kind of Bernie vote that was a little more like a Trump vote—a certain kind of white guy, more or less working-class, the kind of Graham Platner types, right?Bacon: Yes. That’s a good point.Schmitt: And that’s very different from AOC’s appeal. And then I think—I think there’ll be a lot of feeling like, if you see AOC over a period of time, you’re going to feel like, Okay, I heard about her, I thought she was a little nuts, but she makes perfect sense. I think she could go well beyond the Bernie constituency.Bacon: Seth?Seth Masket: So AOC—it’s remarkable, she’s still so young, right? She’s, I think, 36 right now. She’s barely eligible to run for president. She has been for almost a decade now a lightning rod for the Democratic Party—she is the sort of avatar of everything Republicans hate about the Democrats. And she’s actually played that role pretty well.I think it’s really useful to have someone like that in the House. Nancy Pelosi played that role for many years. I would generally caution against nominating your lightning rod for president. I think Hillary Clinton ran into some problems for that reason as well. She could probably pull it off—honestly, she is, I think, one of the smartest strategists in the Democratic Party right now. She’s just very gifted with that. I think she could also have a very substantial role in the House leadership going forward if she wanted that career. She knows what she’s doing there and could really be, I think, an impressive legislative leader going forward.So I would hate to lose her in the House for a presidential run. But it would also—like I agree with Mark—there’s a certain sense of let’s just see what happens. It would be an interesting race to follow—just whether she could make that sell to people outside New York.Bacon: So we covered the 12 I was going to cover. So now I’m going to—Schmitt: Hold on—I want to ask you a question about AOC.Bacon: Sure.Schmitt: Do you think she should run against Schumer? And would she be in a stronger position if she does run against Schumer, or if Schumer retires?Bacon: Schumer’s behavior—Schmitt: Oh, I’m getting a little mixed up, because that would be ‘28 also.Bacon: So my perception is that Schumer is acting like someone who’s not going to run for another term. And so at that point, AOC would have a better chance of winning a Senate seat, obviously. I don’t think the Wall Street crowd is going to be eager to have Senator AOC, so it’s not going to be a cakewalk either. And so I anticipate her running for the Senate—that’s what I think. There’s an open seat, a potentially open seat there. You become a senator and you wait and then run for president later. That’s what I expect.But if we’re in an attention economy and we’re in a place where being skilled as a communicator is the most important thing, she’s obviously better than most of who we’ve talked about. And I think—when I asked your question about her appeal—I think she would do worse with maybe the Graham Platner vote. I think she’ll do better with young Latinos and African Americans compared to what Sanders did in 2020 and 2016, obviously.So my round robin—and I’m now, this is the end. We’re going to end here by just saying: I’m going to give a list of a bunch of people, and if you guys are interested in any of them, we can talk through them, or just bring them up. Rahm Emanuel is going everywhere and doing pretty much everything—I don’t know who’s going to vote for him. I’m certainly not going to. Chris Murphy has been early, I think he’s really named himself. Elissa Slotkin has gone to New Hampshire and done some of the hinting about running. Stephen Colbert pretty much announced himself to Barack Obama the other day, and that was funny—and I think there might be room for an outsider person, and he’s going to be unemployed soon. Jon Ossoff is getting a lot of buzz in Georgia. I think Raphael Warnock would also be a pretty good candidate as well. And then Gretchen Whitmer—as a two-term governor of a swing state—she is not acting like she wants to run, but I think it’s relevant that she’s a two-term governor of that state, and the gender thing we talked about earlier might apply to her.Anybody—any of those you guys want to talk about, or anything else you want to mention about this process as we’re getting to the end here?Schmitt: I think Murphy’s interesting to me. When you think about somebody like him, a lot will depend on if the Democrats take the Senate. He’s really good at some of the oversight stuff, he’s on good committees. He’ll be able to elevate his profile enormously, and that’s a variable we haven’t talked about. If the Democrats don’t win the Senate and the only side with subpoena power is the House, then you could see—that’s where Ro Khanna or AOC could really have a huge impact.Bacon: Seth?Masket: Yeah—similar feelings about Rahm Emanuel, just because I still don’t understand how he has won some elections before. Because—we talked about being that candidate who has relatively moderate stances but is seen as a fighter. His whole thing is pure belligerence, right? And some of that is directed against the Trump administration, and that would help him. But it’s also against everyone. I don’t think he’ll win a lot of friends nationally among Democrats there. It would be an entertaining one to watch. And so in that sense, I look forward to it.Bacon: Any dark horse among either the people I named or anybody else that you all think we should name in this conversation?Masket: I think Ossoff is undervalued as a candidate here. Right now he’s been making a pretty good name for himself. He’s done a lot of national media lately, and he’s honed, I think, a very strong message. Arguably that’s just a way to raise money nationally for his Senate reelection bid. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he was thinking seriously about a presidential run in ‘28, maybe in ‘32. Maybe he’s thinking about being a VP candidate. But anyone who’s won two Senate races, I’d say, automatically puts themselves in the presidential material category. And he’s getting the name recognition for it.Schmitt: Yeah, I think that’s the only one I would name of the ones that you named—that’s the one I would point to. And also, it’s not just like—what do candidates think they’re going to do? It’s people coming to them and saying, You should do this, and that could be donors, it could be other leaders. I feel like I’m seeing people say that—not necessarily people with that level of influence—but it certainly happened for Obama, when Harry Reid said, You should do this. It’s not just in his own head. So I think the encouragement that different candidates are going to get will matter a lot.Bacon: So last question. People are describing this as a very wide-open race, so let me ask it this way: have we named the Democratic nominee in this discussion? Do you think one of the—we’ve named and discussed about 20 people. Do you think it’s so wide open that we’ve missed them among the 20, or do you think it’s wide open but within a certain range of people we’ve discussed here?Masket: We have probably named the nominee. But I agree—it’s also wide open in a way that it hasn’t been in a very long time. There is no obvious heir apparent. The last president and vice president went out in kind of an unpopular way, and it’s not clear who they would even be supporting at this point if it came down to that.One thing I think we might want to think about—I don’t like thinking about this—but Graham Platner may well be a senator a year from now. And yeah, he’d be a first-term senator, but he’s this sort of come-from-nowhere populist, and that—Bacon: Isn’t James Talarico the better answer to this question than Graham Platner, if that’s where you’re going?Masket: Possibly.Bacon: Talarico may not win—he’s got a lower chance of winning.Masket: No, he could win too, yeah. But yeah, could go either way. But suddenly Platner could be the big sensation that everyone’s got their eyes on, who can win over some conservative voters. And the Nazi tattoo business might get lost in the noise there. But yeah, he would not be that much less experienced, say, than Barack Obama was when he first ran for president.Schmitt: Barack Obama had—whatever years in the Senate, I’m going to say—Masket: —legislative experience—Schmitt: Yes. Nothing.Bacon: So Mark, did we name the person in this, or not? Is there—Schmitt: I think odds are we have. I don’t think Platner would—I wouldn’t—I would think it’s more likely that people just try to imitate Platner. So Josh Shapiro starts talking like Platner, without the Nazi tattoo. Rather than him being the candidate. But I also think—in two—so much terrible stuff could happen in the next two years that could totally scramble things. And—Bacon: Yeah.Schmitt: —somebody could emerge either out of Congress or out of a courageous stand they take within the military or something like that—who suddenly appears on the stage. I don’t know. It’s not like the last two years of the Bush administration where we just floated downstream into disaster. It’s just going to be much more dramatic.Bacon: And with that, we’ll close this off. Thank you guys for joining me. Tell everybody where they can find your work—Mark and then Seth—where they can find you on social media, on websites and other things like that.Schmitt: I’ve got newamerica.org—go to the Political Reform program. We’re putting out a bunch of stuff recently, some of which I’ve written, some of which my colleagues have written. I’m on Bluesky as mschmitt9, and I do post on Substack occasionally. I’ve got a bunch of drafts sitting there, so maybe they’ll go up soon.Bacon: And then Seth, you’re going to be doing a lot of stuff. Let’s talk about the book stuff.Masket: Yeah, definitely. You can always find me on Substack—again, the name of the newsletter is the SMOTUS Report. You can find that at smotus.substack.com. And yeah, I also have this book coming out next month called The Elephants in the Room. It’s about the Republican nomination of Donald Trump in ‘24, and how the party got to that point. So I’ll be doing a number of events to the extent I can to promote the book, and you can watch for that. There’s also a link to buy it if you want to pre-order it on my Substack site.Bacon: All right. Great conversation. Good to see you guys, and thanks for joining.Schmitt: Nice talking to both of you. Thanks.Masket: Thanks, Perry. See you, Mark.