Transcript: What’s Really Driving the Progressive Surge

Political scientists Julia Azari and Seth Masket say a more organized progressive faction is one of the reasons leftist candidates are increasingly winning Dem primaries .

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 14 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic, and I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Our guests today are two of my favorite political scientists. Julia Azari is a professor at Marquette University. Seth Masket is at the University of Denver. They’re both experts on political parties and how political parties work. And so I want to talk to them about what’s happening in the Democratic Party right now. So Julia and Seth, welcome.

Seth Masket: Thank you.

Bacon: So what I want to talk about is—Seth lives in Colorado, so he experienced the unseating of an incumbent House member just recently here, and some primaries that were unexpected, in that both the incumbent senators did fairly poorly, and Diana DeGette obviously lost. And we had the New York races where the three Zohran-endorsed candidates won.

And you’ve had some other races around the country where the more left-wing, progressive, socialist—pick your term here—candidates are winning. We’re all looking at Michigan, where that Senate race is closer than I would have guessed a couple years ago, let’s say.

So let’s jump into the factors here. I’m going to ask you about four or five different things that might be going on, and ask you if they’re a big factor, a medium factor, or not a factor at all, or not really that important to what the story is.

So I’ll start with ideology. Is the average Democratic voter becoming more progressive, more left-wing? Particularly on issues of Israel, Palestine, and on maybe issues of billionaires and wealth in politics—which are the two issues where I perceive some change in terms of ideology among Democratic voters. But I’m just curious, when you look at these primary results, do you think it’s about the ideology of Democratic voters moving left? And I’ll start with Seth.

Masket: It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Generally, I don’t want to overstate the ideological nature of the American electorate, which is usually not huge, but there is something motivating this. And I have this impression that it’s not necessarily that a lot more people are becoming socialist, but rather that fewer people are afraid of socialism.

A lot of the current political system was designed by people who grew up during the Cold War and associate socialism with the Soviet Union and with the fear of war and military expansion and repression. And the Cold War’s been over for almost forty years. And so this newer generation coming into politics, they don’t have those associations. They don’t have those fears. They’re more open to the idea that this could solve some pretty overt economic problems we’re having right now, and they just find the whole concept less toxic.

Julia Azari: Yeah. So I think all that’s generally right. I think there’s two things I would maybe add there about ideology. I forgot what our scale is for—

Bacon: So the scale is: is it a big factor, a medium factor, or not really a factor at all? So it’s a three-point scale. And we’ll press Seth on an answer afterward, but I didn’t get his. But anyway, what were you saying, Julia?

Azari: I think put it to high, medium.

Bacon: Yeah, OK. It’s a three-point scale. High, medium, low.

Azari: Yeah. I’ll give it like a two and a half. Sorry, this is what happens with political scientists. But OK, so two things.

One is the socialist label. So I think that’s right, that the label’s not as toxic among people who were born after the Cold War ended. But also, what’s interesting to me is that what the label indicated in past political conversations was, this person wants a huge government takeover—and you know what it actually is, right? The government and the people own the means of production.

That’s not actually the agenda, as I understand it. For the Democratic socialists, the actual agenda sounds much more like some combination of the New Deal Democratic Party in the ‘40s and your average Labor Party in Europe. It’s not really radical reimagining of the structure of the economy. It’s just more social supports, basically. So I think that’s part of the story.

The other piece—I think when you lay it out the way you’ve laid it out, the socialism, the economic agenda, the millionaires and billionaires, the Gaza issue—it’s a new way of thinking about how to assemble a Democratic coalition. So it’s not overestimating the overall ideology of the American electorate, and that everybody understands every issue and understands how they bundle together, but that there may be pockets of the population for whom these issues are very important.

And I think that’s how to understand the Gaza issue. Most people in the US are not paying attention to foreign policy and don’t prioritize those issues. But for a small subset of people, they’re really looking for a politician to address concerns that they’ve had for a long time and haven’t seen in the electorate.

And so this is entrepreneurship of mobilizing a new coalition in a new way, and bringing them into conversation with people who are joining the electorate through age—what do you call it—cohort replacement. I think that’s the story. So I think if we understand it as different pieces, as opposed to one overarching ideology, that gives us more purchase.

Bacon: So to pin you down, is it a big factor, a medium factor, or a small factor, the ideology part? Either one of you can answer.

Masket: Sorry. I had high medium.

Bacon: You said high medium. OK. What did you say, Julia?

Azari: I think I also said two and a half, but I’m uncomfortable with the word ideology.

Bacon: OK. All right. High medium, I like that. OK.

Second factor would be what I’m going to call frustration with the Democratic Party, the Democratic establishment—a term I don’t always love. But anyway, a general sense that the Democratic Party screwed up by running Biden in 2024 when he was too old, and then did not fight enough against Trump early last year, had to be pushed to resist and didn’t do enough. The votes for various Trump Cabinet members that various senators voted for. That kind of frustration with the DC leadership, Congress overall. Is that a high factor? Talk about that, and then do the scale again—Julia, this time.

Azari: OK. So I guess, like you, I’m really skeptical of the establishment term, and I have a really unsatisfying non-answer, because I think it’s omnipresent, and I think it’s usually framed backwards. Whoever is doing well is now the anti-establishment candidate. I’m thinking back to 2008 and Barack Obama.

I do think that frustration is probably real among people who are highly engaged, and potentially the people that are voting in these primaries—especially the frustration with the procedure in 2024. And Seth and I have done some actual survey work on this, and I asked open-ended questions, and people definitely brought that up, and also the age factor and the gerontocracy.

Bacon: Brought up what, exactly?

Azari: Specifically, they brought up the procedure, or lack of one, in 2024.

Bacon: The lack of procedure to do what?

Azari: To nominate Kamala Harris.

Bacon: OK. So the picking of Harris without a vote of any kind. Without a formal—OK.

Azari: Yeah. And I think this also goes back to work in political psychology about losing. I think there’s a sense that the Democratic establishment is synonymous with losing, and people will do all sorts of things in their mind to avoid that feeling.

So in one way, it’s really important, but in another way, I don’t know that it distinguishes it from other types of developments that we’ve seen in the past. Does that make sense? So it’s either a one or a three, not a two. You’re never inviting me on again.

Bacon: Seth, go ahead.

Masket: Yeah. I’m going to give this a high importance. And in some ways this is bigger than ideology, as far as I could tell, because it’s more of the symbolism of insider versus outsider.

We saw a lot of this in the recent Colorado Democratic primaries. These perceptions were very big in the first congressional district, where Diana DeGette, a long-term incumbent, loses to Malat Keros, a twenty-nine-year-old challenger. A lot of Keros’s pitch was that, I have a lot of respect for DeGette’s career. She was a leader on abortion issues, but what has she done for us lately? What is she doing to stand up to the administration now? Why isn’t she in the street? Why isn’t she just more visible?

And that’s like a general anger we’ve seen toward folks like Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer, where it’s not necessarily disagreeing with their policy stances. It’s not disagreeing with the work that they’re actually doing. It’s just, we’re saying they need to be doing it more. They need to be doing it louder, more aggressively.

So we saw some of that. But I’d also add........

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