Transcript: Why Insurgent Candidates Are Thriving in the Midwest

Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong are showing that innovative campaign tactics help candidates outside of progressive strongholds too.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: We’re going to talk about these big primaries that are happening—I guess tomorrow in Michigan, and then next week in Wisconsin, where Nathan is. So these are primaries. I’m here in Louisville, but people are talking about them. It’s become like this year’s version of the New York primary, where everybody who’s left of center is thinking about these races, talking about them, knows the candidates’ names, knows who they would vote for, even though we do not get to vote. Nathan does, but the rest of us do not get to vote in these races.

So I’ll start with a question I like to ask, which is—we’ll start with Michigan—we don’t know who’s going to win, and we haven’t had any results yet. I brought you all on intentionally knowing that, because I want to ask, in some ways, what are we going to learn? We don’t know who the winner is, and I hate when people say, This race obviously showed X, when they wouldn’t have said that if they knew what the results were.

So I want to ask you all, knowing what you know today, which is not the results, what have we learned about the Democratic Party from this race in Michigan? There’s a lot of things that have happened. You went from three candidates to two, a lot of spending, so on. So I’ll start with Nathan.

Nathan Kalmoe: Yeah. Thanks, Perry. I think maybe the main takeaway for me is that Democratic voters seem to be unsatisfied with the conventional Democratic candidates that the party prefers. Obviously, it’s up to the voters to decide, but clearly the party establishment has preferences. The supporting groups have preferences. Some of that could look ideological, I realize. People talk about left and right, and we’ll get into this later.

I think the main takeaway is less about ideology and more about dissatisfaction with the level of fight, with what Democrats have been providing. Obviously, a range of fight. And the other piece for me is just the dissatisfaction with what Democrats have been able to deliver. And I think that’s reflected in the advantages that we see for El-Sayed in Michigan and for Hong in Wisconsin.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: I guess that’s me.

Shenker-Osorio: I want to say the responsible thing on both these counts, which is that I know Abdul, I have for a very long time. I don’t do paid work for him, I never have, but I have given him advice from time to time. We’re going to talk about Wisconsin, where I’m from, next. The same goes for Frannie Hong. So that feels like the responsible disclaimer to make. I’m just a human being, and so I know that objectivity is a fiction, so that feels fair.

So I think as far as what we’ve learned—just to take it in a different vein than Nathan did—I agree entirely with what he said, and in fact, I think that could be underscored with how much more traction Abdul has this time around than, say, when he ran for governor unsuccessfully against one Gretchen Whitmer, who, spoiler alert, is the governor. So that’s how that went.

And obviously different race, different time, but still so much more traction than he had in the previous round. We’re seeing that in multiple ways. And so, just at the outset, big picture: insurgent candidates, is the term a lot of people have been using for them, are doing better than they have before—which just is a point of fact to hold up what Nathan said.

I think, to give a different answer, what’s interesting—and I saw an author named Eric Garcia remark this, and I thought it was really smart—the Democratic establishment, Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, et cetera, could have gotten behind McMorrow. She was sitting right there for them, and she was very much positioned, I would argue, as a Goldilocks candidate, right? Not too hot, not too cold, somewhere in between, and had progressive bona fides to run on, came to prominence through, I think, a really well-done speech clapping back against a lot of anti-LGBT hatred, as we probably recall. And they didn’t.

They went with the true, kind of, most establishment of the establishment. And like I said, just looking for a different thing to say, because I agree with Nathan: what we learn is that even when there is an option that the party arguably could have been more comfortable with, they still go to, I don’t know, the least common denominator.

Bacon: Let me follow up one thing Nathan said. You said it’s not about ideology, it’s about fight, not fight. It seems to me—I agree with that on some level, but I’m struggling to name the fighting moderates, and I think there’s a reason why that might be the case. So I agree with you in concept that maybe the voters are not voting on ideology. But the people who voted for Kristi Noem all are moderates, and I think that does tell us something. So talk about the point I just made.

Kalmoe: Yeah. So it’s not only fight, I want to be clear. A lot of the conversation around that, where people are using ideological terms, I would say is really about groups. It’s fundamentally about groups—by race, by class, by sex and gender, sexuality, religion. And people have fairly clear views about prominent social groups, and they make choices in politics based on that.

Likewise, they’re not very ideological, most voters, in the sense of ideas of principle differences, or like really elaborated policy preferences. There are some of those people, but they’re few. People are really oriented more around how they feel about groups.

You could say that there’s maybe an ideological principle of, like, egalitarianism generally—like, all groups should be treated equally. But even there, when you get into the practice, even among liberals, you’ll see that there are certain groups that don’t count, or they’re left out of that formulation. And likewise, even though we talk about candidates and parties in terms of ideology, really parties are coalitions of groups, of interest groups, of social groups. And the goal of the party is to form a majority, in most cases, of—

Bacon: Let me stop you a second. So you would agree that the people who give money to AIPAC and the people who go to DSA meetings probably do have some ideology. You’re just saying that’s probably not the average voter.

Kalmoe: Yeah. And the people who go to DSA meetings, that’s a really tiny percentage of people. The folks who like DSA candidates are a much larger fraction of the public. And part of this is recognizing that voters are really heterogeneous. They’re really heterogeneous in the ways that they make decisions, and the kinds of views that they bring to bear. So all of this is with a grain of salt, but even among primary voters, people are less ideological than you think.

An example of this is, in 2016, Chris Achen and Larry Bartels did an analysis that they published in The New York Times about Bernie Sanders and Clinton supporters, and found that on average, on many economic issues where you’d expect that Bernie supporters would be to the left of Clinton on the ideological spectrum, they actually weren’t. They were pretty similar, or in some cases, Clinton voters even a little bit to the left. So even in, like, the sort of quintessential ideological battles that we imagine, the voters, even in the primaries, are not always resembling that.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I just—so we do focus groups all the time. All the time. We’ve done 320, maybe 330 since the outset of 2021. That means a whole lot of voters.

Shenker-Osorio: They tend to be configurations either of what we call disaffected Democrats—people, if they were to turn out, they would turn out for Democrats, but they are very plague-on-both-your-houses—and then your traditional swing voters. I like to joke that swing voters have all had to quit their jobs, because they’re required to be 24/7 in various focus groups because there are so few of them.

And what I would say is that we don’t do this every time, but we used to, all the time, do two things. We would ask voters, “If you had to liken the Democratic Party to an animal, what animal would it be?” Perry, forgive me if we’ve talked about this—I remember nothing anymore. And generally speaking, with sort of regularity, you could almost turn it into a drinking game. They would say a slug, a sloth, a turtle, or a tortoise. And with Republicans, they would say an apex predator—so that would be a lion, a shark, a tiger.

And in more recent groups, we finally got some variety, because we had some folks saying a deer in headlights, which—I don’t know, you tell me, is that better or worse? I guess a deer, in theory, could run, but, you know, it is considered—

Bacon: Is not running well.

Shenker-Osorio: My summary statement for a very long time is that voters’ beef with Democrats is that they’re weak, not woke. And that’s not because you can’t talk them into being mad about whatever it is you want them to be mad about, but you have to actually plant that for them. And if you do, you can take them on that merry journey. I’m, again, not arguing you can’t.

But left to their own devices, what upsets you about Democrats? It’s that they don’t do anything. It’s that they don’t stand up. It’s that they don’t fight back. And that is, generally speaking, what most people feel. And as I’m sure we’re about to get into more deeply, and Nathan has already intimated, most voters are very low information.

Bacon: OK, that was helpful. I’m going to shift to something a little bit different. So in Michigan, there was a poll by a firm—I don’t know if it’s called Epic, or EPIC-MRA. This is a poll that does a lot of polling for the Detroit newspapers there. And there was a poll that showed, in a general election, hypothetically, Mike Rogers, a Republican, forty-six, Abdul, forty-three percent—so a three-point advantage—versus Haley Stevens would be at forty-four if she were the candidate, and Mike Rogers at forty-two.

In other words, they show Abdul maybe down by three, potentially, and Haley Stevens up by two. This went viral on Twitter as an idea of, Oh dear, the Democrats are about to give away a Senate seat by not picking the most electable candidate. Talk about why that should not be the conclusion here. Anat, I’ll start with you.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. So first of all, I’m not looking at the poll. I’m guessing it was probably an N size of 1,000, because that’s what, usually at best, a state poll is going to be. The margin of error is, I don’t know, two points, 2.5, three. So first of all, let’s just take that all with a grain of salt.

Bacon: In other words, if the poll showed Stevens ahead by 15 and Abdul down by 12, that would be different than a poll with this small number of... Yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: First. Second, I tried to find this, and so hopefully one of you remembers better than I do. I couldn’t find it before this interview. My recollection is that Abdul came up from behind, that whatever he was polling—how many months are we from November?—at the start of the primary, and where he is now, is a radically different trajectory. Or is a radically different spot. Am I wrong?

Bacon: You mean among Democrats, right?

Shenker-Osorio: Among Democrats.

Bacon: Yes. He’s surged tremendously. Yes.

Shenker-Osorio: Just wanted to, you know, not spew lies on here. There are many other channels that can do that.

Bacon: Are you saying politics is not static, you might imply? That he might be able to gain support as politicians do when they are good at politics.

Shenker-Osorio: And good at politics. So I want to underscore that. Like, any human being could start in one place and end in another. This particular human being happens to have demonstrated actually achieving that recently—as opposed to the person who’s going to deliver a... Like, he has a—granted, it’s a small track record,........

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