Transcript: Why the Democrats’ Primaries This Week Are So Critical

The contests in Minnesota and Wisconsin this week are among the last major fights this year between the Democratic Party’s progressives and centrists.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. I’m joined by Ryan Cooper. He’s a senior editor at The American Prospect, another great liberal magazine you should also be reading. Ryan, thanks for joining me.

Ryan Cooper: Glad to be here.

Bacon: So I want to—you’ve been writing a lot about these primaries. We’ve been covering them a lot, too. We’ve got two more coming up this week in Minnesota and Wisconsin. But I want to go back to Michigan a little bit first. So now that we’re almost a week out, talk about what we saw. Did we learn anything about the results themselves in Michigan?

It looks like we had sort of a common breakdown of, Abdul maybe won the sort of younger vote, maybe the more college-educated vote, the counties around the universities. Stevens won Detroit for sure, some of the more rural areas. Anything surprising in the results, just looking at them from the usual progressive-centrist races we’ve seen?

Cooper: No, it’s more or less what we’ve come to expect from these sort of breakdowns, that the class base of the socialist movement in the United States is, like, downwardly mobile, highly educated people. And they tend to struggle with, like, older minority folks, particularly Black people. And so yeah, that was not too surprising.

However, I will note—oh, I forget his name, the fellow that turfed out the incumbent in the Detroit House District. He’s a DSA member and a Black man, not a—

Bacon: Donovan McKinney?

Cooper: That’s right, that’s the one. Yeah. Sorry, I should have taken some notes for this. But yeah, that, I think you see, like, a more return to form for kind of the natural tendency among Black voters to support fairly left-wing, at least economic policy, being basically very economically disadvantaged on average among all the sort of racial groups in the United States. And it’s not at all impossible to imagine Abdul El-Sayed racking up very large margins in Detroit. I would expect that to happen. But it will remain to be seen if he can do that or not.

Bacon: So the left has been very focused on economic issues, more—is it surprising that they’re not winning the sort of non-college vote, even though, even more than six years ago, the left is very focused on affordability? Is it surprising they’re not winning the voters who might be most concerned with affording things?

Cooper: On one level, yes, but on another level, no. You could certainly say, from a sort of, like, vulgar Marxist perspective, that you would think that the people that would be most directly influenced and helped by lefty policy—whether it’s, like, rent control, or expanding childcare subsidies, that sort of thing—that those people would be attracted to those policies.

But in practice, it’s rather more complicated than that, both as a matter of political mobilization and as a matter of how, at least certain fractions of those demographics tend to approach politics. Not so much as the just, “What can I get for myself?” But it’s more that, I believe that this more moderate Democrat is more likely to be elected, and so I shouldn’t support the lefty radical who might benefit me more personally, but is more likely to lose in the general election.

We saw that tendency with Cuomo. Some of his strongest districts across New York City were working-class Black districts. And this is a very long tendency in the Democratic Party, where it’s toxic in some ways, but it’s also unsurprising in others. It’s like, these folks like Cuomo have built up a connection there, and it’s not something that you can expect to happen automatically because the policy that you decanted out of a book from graduate school would theoretically benefit the poverty rate by the so-and-so percent.

Bacon: So we’re five days out. You’ve seen Kamala Harris endorsed him. Buttigieg was up there with him. Haley seems to have been very positive about him. There’s been the leaked Obama phone call.

So are we at a place where the party is pretty much—we talked about the very divisive primary all running up to it, but are we at a point where the party is pretty much unified around him fairly quickly?

Cooper: Oh, around El-Sayed, certainly. Yeah. I think that in addition to being clearly a progressive candidate, he’s also not a DSA member. He says he’s not a socialist. He’s a capitalist who wants to make capitalism better, you know—

What do you mean by that precisely? But he’s also clearly a very charismatic and talented politician. And you saw that—I think that when Obama was reaching out to Zohran Mamdani, he was like, “This guy is good.” And game recognize game. Obama, whatever else you want to say about him, is an exceptionally talented politician. And he knows when someone else is also talented, and I think El-Sayed is in that bucket.

He’s a guy who’s good, and the Democrats, they absolutely want to win that Senate seat. They want it very badly, and now El-Sayed is their only hope. He more or less must win in order for Democrats to have a good chance of taking the Senate. And whatever else you might disagree with him, if you’re Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg—clearly, we could set that aside at least until the general election is over, and then we can start fighting again.

Bacon: Now, I assume there’s no American Prospect view on this, but increasingly these days, I feel like if you read, let’s say, Jacobin, the Jacobin perspective is that the populist candidate is more electable than the centrist, because they’re going to win more working-class votes on economics. And then the Matt Yglesias view is, obviously the centrist candidate is more electable, because they’re going to win more sort of moderate voters in the middle. And my view, at least, is often that I would’ve said in 2020, Senator Warren, who I preferred, had a sixty percent chance of winning, Biden had a seventy percent chance of winning. In other words, I would’ve voted for Senator Warren—I would not have claimed Warren had a better chance of winning than Biden, who was a straight white guy who we elected, but I would’ve said that Warren could win, too.

And so similarly, I would’ve voted for El-Sayed, not because I think he’s more electable than Stevens, but because I think this is a Democratic year, so I think he can win and he’d be better on policy. But I’m curious where you are on these electability questions. Do you have an ideological or strong view about who is most electable in Michigan, or just in general?

Cooper: Yeah, it’s tricky. It’s something I’ve struggled with for my whole career. I can remember the 2016 primary between Bernie Sanders and Clinton, and practically Hillary Clinton’s entire argument was that, I am most likely to win, and then I know how to get things done. And so I was pretty resistant.

My general attitude is that nobody really knows with any degree of certainty who is more likely to win. It’s a moving target all the time. It’s not like you can reduce these things and say, “It always is like this.” And clearly, like, sometimes this type of candidate is in and this type of candidate is out. If you run the wild-haired radical in, like, 1952, like, that’s clearly not going to cut it. It’s not the type of electorate. But you could run somebody—

Bacon: Nor would the Black person win, 1952.

Cooper: Yeah, exactly. It’d be illegal in half the states.

Bacon: Yeah, exactly right.

Cooper: But by the same token, though, people are obsessed with this question, that it was how the election was decided, that the primary was decided in 2016, and I think again in 2020, it was like, who’s most likely to win? And so all the voters are supposed to put on their amateur pundit hat, and I just think it’s so difficult for people to resist talking their book, as you were saying, that they support this candidate and therefore they will think up reasons why you should vote for them because they’re the most electable candidate.

And I suspect that in the end, it may come down more to the candidate’s individual characteristics rather than what sort of ideological bucket that they fit into. Like, Bernie Sanders is bizarrely popular among moderates, and I think it’s just as much to do with his affect and his history. It’s things you can’t replicate, as someone who isn’t 80-whatever years old with the legacy that he has.

And it’s a tricky thing to suss out one way or the other. But I guess where I come down with it, as regards El-Sayed and Francesca Hong, Hong in Wisconsin, is that, you look at who—our biggest blowout election of the last, this century, 2008. And why was that? We had a very talented and charismatic politician with a very interesting story and a very compelling message, and he was very lucky. He happened to run as the Republican Party was directly responsible for blowing the economy up, and an obviously failing war. So what do we have now? I don’t know if the economy’s blowing up, but it’s certainly not doing great, because Trump keeps hitting the make gas prices go up button, and he’s involved in a clearly failing war. That also makes gas prices go up.

And I would say, for individual voters especially, it’s like, you should vote for the person who reflects your values the most, and then really try to help that person win, rather than putting your amateur pundit hat on and trying to guess what your neighbor’s going to........

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