This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 6 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Meredith Conroy: First, great to get the gang back together. I’m a professor of political science at [California State University,] San Bernardino.

Nathaniel Rakich: I am the managing editor at Votebeat, which is a nonprofit news site that covers election administration and voting access. So the last two weeks in particular have been very busy, between the FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump’s comments that he wants to nationalize the election. So if you’re interested in that kind of stuff, head on over to votebeat.org.

Perry Bacon: Good. And so with that, we’re going to do an exercise we used to do at FiveThirtyEight. It’s sort of goofy, but I think it’s helpful. We’re going to call it a “draft” of the 2028 Democratic presidential candidates. So by that, we mean we’re going to pick—we’re going to go around for three rounds and pick.

We’re not picking who our favorite ideologically or substantively might be—even though I hope we’ll get into that a little bit as well—but the idea is to pick who we think, at this point, is most likely to win the nomination. And I understand that it’s three years away and “no one had heard of Barack”—I get all that stuff.

Rakich: But people had heard of Barack Obama, importantly. He gave a very high-profile speech in 2004 that everybody was like, “Oh my goodness.”

Bacon: But anyway, the idea is that often this—we are in the process where people are early. People are going to Iowa. They’re hiring staff. They are thinking about this. And so the field is not set, but we have some sense of that. And planning it out early gives you a sense of what might change and who might drop out.

At this time in 2006, to date myself—we all thought Mark Warner was going to run for president and maybe win, and that Obama would maybe run ... in 2012. And so that’s how things change.

So with that ... we’re going to start the draft. Meredith will go first, and what we’ll do is we’ll each name—we’ll go one to three, and then we’ll discuss the one to three and then go from there. So, Meredith, you’re up.

Conroy: I am up. And when we were at FiveThirtyEight, I always wanted to get the first draft pick and never did. And actually, I don’t thank you. I don’t want it today—

Rakich: Do you want to trade? Because I want it.

Conroy: I think my pick is going to probably allow you to have the one that you wanted to go first anyway, since Nathaniel is second. But I know how to read; I know how to read polls. I know how to read ambition. I know what’s happening in this particular moment, and I know that I should be picking Governor of California Gavin Newsom, but I’m not going to. I’ll let someone else make the arguments for Newsom.

I think that the backlash against the Trump administration’s agenda—especially on immigration and reproductive rights—is going to be pretty significant by the time the primaries come around. And the Democratic Party will need someone who can carry that mantle credibly. And so, for me, my first draft pick: I’m going to go with the New York representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Rakich: Our former colleagues Galen Druke and Nate Silver did a draft as well, and they also both picked—they both had AOC first on their boards. It ended up making an article in the New York Post that was like, “Data Guru Nate Silver Thinks AOC Is the First.” So I wonder if we’ll get the same treatment. Something tells me we won’t, but ...

Meredith Conroy: Well, there’s a California Post now. And actually, I was driving on the freeway the other day and I saw a billboard that said, “Hair to the Throne.” It was Gavin Newsom’s hair.

Rakich: That’s funny.

Conroy: So they, yeah, so they might think it is him. So maybe the California Post, to kick their coverage off, they will cover us, but I picked her for that reason. I also don’t know if she will actually run, because she does have presidential ambitions, and I don’t know if 2028 is the moment for that. I don’t think she needs to run as a “trial balloon.” She doesn’t need name recognition; she doesn’t need a run in the primaries to help people know who she is.

So the biggest knock on my pick would be that she doesn’t run. And then, of course, we have the issue of “strategic discrimination,” which academics refer to as a term that helps us explain why Democratic primary voters don’t take their first pick when they are a woman or a woman of color or a person of color. So it is the idea that you think other people are prejudiced, so you are not going to pick your first-choice candidate.

In 2020, there was this survey done by Data for Progress called the “Magic Wand,” where if you were given a magic wand and you could put your person in the office right now—you would have to go back and look at the timing of all of this; Biden hadn’t officially entered—but anyway, most people—most, not a majority, by most—put Elizabeth Warren in the White House. But then when they asked who you’re going to vote for, she didn’t have the most votes.

So that strategic discrimination in a Democratic primary would absolutely impact Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And also, she is very young and she has become the symbol of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party on Fox News and social media—her and Nancy Pelosi. I think if you did an analysis of whose faces are most commonly used in attack segments of Democrats, it would be theirs. There is gender and race embroiled in all that. So those are the knocks on her.

But I still think that the “left lane” is clear with Sanders not running, and she is the likely person to fill that lane. And I do think there will be a high demand for a progressive candidate—not to say that there aren’t plenty of other progressives. So there you go. There is my argument.

Bacon: So then you give yours and I’ll give mine, and then we’ll discuss all three of them. So give yours quickly.

Conroy: Oh, geez. Sorry.

Bacon: No, that’s OK.

Rakich: Meredith is correct. I appreciate being able to take Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who ... this exercise is really difficult in general because—

Bacon: I want to discuss all three ... I’m going to give Pete Buttigieg. So let’s discuss those three. Now go ahead, Nathaniel.

Rakich: I just think this exercise is very difficult, because this is truly a wide-open race. When I was preparing for this, I went through the list of the top contenders and I came up with a lot more reasons why I thought they all wouldn’t get the nomination, not that they would. And there are some times when, obviously in 2024 with Trump and in 2020 with Biden as well, there is a pretty clear front-runner and something would have to happen to topple them from their perch.

And here it is pretty wide-open. I picked Newsom because I do think that of all of the different people in the field, he is the strongest. He is the governor of the biggest state and the bluest state. He is leading in the polls. I know it is very early and things can absolutely change, but it is still better to be ahead in the polls than to be at two percent in the polls, which is where most other people are.... I don’t think any one person has more than a 20 or 25 percent chance of winning, but if I had to pick one, I would go with Newsom.

Bacon: Let me follow up on a couple of things. First of all, the exercise, Meredith, is to pick the person most likely to win the Democratic nomination. And you, having watched the last two primaries where the left person ... the organizer person did not win.

Rakich: Exactly.

Bacon: There were very sustained comments about their “electability,” which became a word attached to them every day.

Conroy: I study electability!

Bacon: You think a congresswoman from New York, who is a Latino young woman who is on Fox News every day, is the most—I would love to be in a country where AOC was the most likely presidential candidate. I don’t think I live in a current country like that. And you read all the same things I do about racism and sexism, so I want to make sure—

Conroy: If know how to play the game? Yeah—

Bacon: Do you really think that?

Conroy: I do. I think there is going to be a backlash against what is happening, and that right now, she is the progressive to fill it. I had other ideas that I’ll talk about, but I think you need someone—I hate this phrase, “authenticity.” You need someone who is authentic.

There are great arguments for why Pete Buttigieg would be a great pick. I think he would—he is the debater that JD Vance thinks he is. And if JD Vance is the candidate, I actually think Pete Buttigieg would be an excellent nominee.

But Pete Buttigieg can’t credibly pick up the mantle for what the backlash is going to require. And so, of the list of people who are credible and have viability—electability, viability, all these words are very loaded—I do think that it could be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Rakich: Look, we do know that there is a fair amount of anger now among the Democratic base with the Democratic Party establishment. And historically, the Democratic Party has been a lot more pro-establishment than the Republican Party. Obviously, Republicans nominated Trump. They have a long history of the Tea Party and stuff like that.

Obviously, there is a bit of a discourse about whether there is a “Democratic Tea Party” brewing. I personally ... would tap the brake pedal on that—but I can’t deny that there is dissatisfaction as well. I’m just not sure that it is numerically a majority.

I agree that AOC is going to be a strong candidate and going to have her passionate followers, but I’m not sure that Democrats are ready to throw over the chessboard the way that Republicans did by nominating Trump.

And to Perry’s point, Bernie Sanders, for a brief moment in 2020, was the front-runner, and the Democratic Party establishment, they acted. They were very swift to be like, “Nope, we are not allowing this.” And I think they would do the same with AOC.

Conroy: They’re not going to do that for Gavin Newsom. I teach in California. Californians have an interesting take on Gavin Newsom. A lot of the reasons I went with this pick is because the obvious pick, Gavin Newsom, isn’t obvious to me, but it hasn’t been for a while. At FiveThirtyEight, we used to have these conversations years ago about Gavin Newsom, and as the resident—other people worked at and lived in California, were from California at FiveThirtyEight—but I was like, “I just don’t think it’s going to happen.” But he does. He think’s it’s going to happen.

Rakich: I think that he is not inherently the most likable guy, but he has done a good job. He has proven me wrong in terms of how he has developed this national profile, especially by standing up to Republicans on the gerrymandering thing. The base wants a fighter, and he has been a fighter. He has got all these kind of posts on Twitter that are mocking Trump’s style and everything like that. I think that’s more emblematic. I don’t think he’s literally winning votes that way.

But he has gotten to a point where if you look at the very early polling, he and Kamala Harris are basically the two who are in the lead ... it’s like 25 percent, 30 percent of the vote, which is not overwhelming by any standard—but he’s gotten there and there’s probably still some room to grow.

Bacon: Let me go to my pick. I would’ve ranked Buttigieg first. And the reason being, actually, that the “California knock” on California is weird, and he has fancy hair and whatever, and he doesn’t seem Midwestern enough, either. I think that would be a real barrier to him in a longer primary versus Buttigieg. I........

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