This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Michael Podhorzer: We’re going to kick off, and folks will join. Hopefully you all know our guest today. He’s been on here before, but more importantly, I hope you’ve been following his writing, as I have, from when I first encountered him writing for the old FiveThirtyEight, when it was Nate Silver and independent, and was really bringing a not sort of data-nerd-alone exclusive view of the world. And this is someone who actually could map it to what was happening in the world and how it actually affected people, as opposed to, how do we tweak the model so we can improve our forecast by a couple points or whatever.
So we don’t have as eventful a day after primary as we’ve had for the last couple months. But I thought we’d start, Perry, just getting your sense there. This is an area you’ve covered a lot, which is, what’s going on inside the Democratic Party, and what should we take away from the series of primaries now for 2026?
Perry Bacon: Thanks for the nice introduction first. And, people who don’t know I’ve been doing this so long, I also worked at Time magazine, The Washington Post, and MSNBC before I worked at FiveThirtyEight, too. So I’ve been doing this a long time.
But anyway, the primaries have been interesting in that, as I tell people all the time, the average Democrat in Congress, their politics are probably still closer to Joe Biden’s than Bernie Sanders. I think that’s still true. I worry sometimes we take the sort of a DSA candidate or two winning in a few races—the average Democratic member of Congress is not from the DSA and would not want to be associated with the DSA, and I think that’s still true even in the House.
And also, the primaries themselves, I still can’t tell if these have been referendums on Gaza, on Israel, on socialism, on progressivism, or just, like, looking at the Colorado specifically, are just, we want somebody who’s different and not boring like Michael Bennet. I feel like a lot of these races are explained by somebody generic who’s unmemorable. I’ve been covering Michael Bennet my entire life. What has Michael Bennet done in Congress? Michael Bennet, guys, ran for president. Who remembers that in 2020? Because he was so unmemorable there too.
So I think a lot of cases, you have maybe an outsider, a young person, a person from an unusual job, a person who’s charismatic, running in a primary against a forgettable Democrat who’s either been a state legislator or been in Congress. And the new person may be more progressive, or more anti-Israel, or more pro-Palestinian, or more pro-peace, but they also just are not boring.
If people feel like the party has failed and has not fought Trump hard enough, and they’re open to anybody different, I think is what’s driving a lot of these results. You may not agree with all of that, but that’s part of what I think is going on.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I can see that, and that through line and that explanation makes sense to me. I think that an additional element in the primaries, which is very different to the general election—and I also think, just as an aside, that Democratic primary voters and Republican primary voters are very different to each other.
And so that is one of the asymmetries between the parties, where Democratic primary voters on average are more kind of diehard party stalwarts, perhaps more conservative in the original definition of that word, meaning, like, more let’s-not-shake-things-up-too-much conservative, conserve. Whereas Republican primary voters, I think, tend to be more like white nationalist, super MAGA, and so that has—
Podhorzer: Actually, that actually now is the conservative perspective for the Republican Party.
Shenker-Osorio: Sorry to confuse you with word choice.
Podhorzer: That is actually, like, the mainstream.
Shenker-Osorio: That’s true. OK, but in an attempt to be explanatory. So I think, going back to the point that you made, Perry—and also thank you for joining us, I was saying before we went live that it is fun to turn the tables and have the question asker be the question answerer, so always a good time.
I think that another through line, and this may be motivated cognition on my part, is the difference between sort of the economic message that I think more mainstream Democrats are trying to give, which I basically just liken to being on an episode of The Price Is Right, where they’re trying to prove that they know how much things cost, and they’re basically just, Lettuce. Test me. Try me. 635, 702, gallon of milk. What is it? Which, like a lot of focus group participants, they can tell you how much milk is at 12 different stores in their town. It’s actually astonishing the degree to which people know the prices of things down to the cent. So there’s that model, which is like, I am going to demonstrate empathy by telling you how much things cost.
