Transcript: Do Americans Hate “The System” or Trump?

This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 4 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, and this is Right Now on The New Republic. We’re here right after the election, not even 24 hours. I have two great guests. A first for this podcast, Hahrie Han is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. She won the MacArthur Grant, more commonly known as the Genius Grant. We have had many intelligent people here on this podcast, but I think she is the first officially designated genius.And I would note that Elizabeth Wilkins, our other guest, from the Roosevelt Institute, she’s the president of that think tank in Washington. From my talking to her and her work, she is also a genius, too, just MacArthur has not gotten to her yet. So Elizabeth, Hahrie, welcome. Thanks for joining me.Hahrie Han: Thanks for having us.Elizabeth Wilkins: Yeah, thanks for having us.Bacon: So the results were so surprising, and to me, so good. I probably came into this, when I talked to you about coming on, thinking, “Oh, Democrats will have a narrow majority in the Senate. They’ll have a narrow majority maybe in the House.” I didn’t get up thinking Texas. We’re talking about Mississippi today. So just give me your reactions. Elizabeth, start with you. Your reactions to what happened last night.Wilkins: Yeah. It’s pretty incredible. Let’s just start with wow. Can we just for a minute, wow.And then a couple of things I am really struck by. One, this was the most expensive election in history, between 11 and 12 billion dollars spent to prevent this result, and yet it happened anyway. So that is a real people over money power story right there.Bacon: Let me pause a little bit, Elizabeth. More than 2024? I don’t think I realized it. The most—Wilkins: Most expensive period.Bacon: Period. OK. That’s helpful to know.Wilkins: Yes. So a real over money power story there. That’s one.Two, as you say, Democrats won in places that they haven’t won in decades. In Kansas’ case, not in 94 years, I think is the stat. Which says to me not just that this is a rejection, but that there was something going on where people who have not believed in possibility of change came out for this election. And that we found some messages that were really exciting even across the South and the Southwest, and that those messages really had to do not just with affordability, which is clearly true, like the living, but also something deeper, like the sense that we feel economically precarious. They feel like they don’t have agency or control, and that they are connecting that to who’s causing it, which is the folks who are trying to buy their elections, the folks who are creating marketplaces that feel extractive. And they want change. And I think all of those things are super, super exciting.Han: Yeah, I would echo a lot of what Elizabeth said. To me, what this is the biggest sign of is that this is a wave of dissatisfaction. I think people are fed up with the status quo, and they came out in droves to express that dissatisfaction. And so in some ways, I think the mandate, if there’s any, is really that people want their everyday lives to improve. People don’t like the way that this kind of moment of tremendous turmoil that we’re in is just not reaching people in a lot of ways. So that’s one point.I think the second point that I really took away, or that the election results really reinforced for me, is that the electorate is not fixed in the ways that I think we commonly hear about. And so this gets to Elizabeth’s point about, Democrats were winning in places that we wouldn’t have thought were even in play. And why do we not think that they’re in play? It’s because so often the way that we talk about politics, we reduce people to geographies, to demographic categories, to these kind of groupings that sort of remove their humanity from the abstractions that we create. And I think what we’re seeing is that we’re in this really dynamic moment, and people are making choices about how they want to respond in ways that aren’t necessarily predictable based on some of those categories that we’ve long been using.Bacon: Let me follow up, Hahrie. I think you said rejection of the status quo, something like that. So is that—we’ve seen every election in the US since 2012, pretty much every election has been rejection of the incumbent party. In Britain, in Italy, almost every country is seeing the incumbent party losing. Is that this, or is this—because I walk into the election thinking it would be another anti-incumbent, the party in power always loses the midterms. But Democrats won a lot of seats. So is this a rejection of the incumbent or about MAGA? Because those are different things. The party in power always losing is one thing. The party in power’s ideology being rejected is another. I know it’s hard to disentangle, but talk about that dynamic.Han: So there’s a way in which this is historically a disjuncture and historically continuous, OK? It’s a disjuncture in the sense that we haven’t seen a wave this big since Watergate, basically, right? In terms of the big swing from one party to another. And so that’s a big deal, right? That was 50 years ago.But on the other hand, what is very continuous is that we have been, throughout the twenty-first century, in this era of unstable majorities, right? The pattern that we see in American politics is that every time one party kind of gains a majority or unified control of the federal government, then in the next election, we see a bounce back. Now, this is a much bigger bounce back than we have seen in the past, but that pattern of instability, I think, is what is continuous.But it’s not continuous throughout American history, right? So if you look at the twentieth century, instead what we had was periods where you had stable party control, right? The New Deal era, the Reagan era, different things like that, where there might have been little blips here and there, but you had one party that captured a stable majority of the American population, and then they governed with that stable majority for some period of time.I think what we see right now in the twenty-first century, and this is to me the part that is continuous, is that neither party has captured a stable majority of the American population, right? So what that means is that every time one party gets control of government, they do a bunch of things that make people mad, because the electorate is not fixed in the ways that we talked about, then people react in the next election. And so I think that’s the pattern that we’re seeing, which is why I would read this much more as a wave of dissatisfaction than a blue wave or something like that, because I think that the electorate is still up for grabs, because they don’t necessarily feel like either party is necessarily speaking to their interests.Bacon: Elizabeth, let’s talk about this, too. I agree it’s not a pro-Democrats wave. I think I agree with that. Is it an anti-incumbent wave or an anti-Trump, anti-MAGA wave? Talk about that question.Wilkins: I have to say, if it’s an anti anything, to me, I think it’s an anti-system wave, right?Bacon: You cut out. Anti-system. OK. Thank you.Wilkins: Sorry. My sense is Trump is a symptom of a system gone horribly wrong. He is the proximate cause, and it is the thing that people are immediately mad about. But people have been mad for decades about their eroding economic position, about their eroding economic power, and this just feels like consolidation, right? To Hahrie’s point, this swinging back and forth has been happening for a while because it’s increasing frustration with the way things are.And I just want to put—one thing, Hahrie, that you said that I think is so important. FDR and Reagan were both presidents who ushered in a new political order. They governed long enough to change the institutions of government, to change the prevailing economic theory, to change the relationship between public power and private power. And when we think about what would it take to truly change the system that people feel like is rigged, we have to figure out a way to govern power that is long after we’re in a different kind of political system.Bacon: Let me ask quickly about the geographies. What do you make of what happened in—the South is a big region. I live in Kentucky. Kentucky’s now like Texas, which is now like Florida. But I think you did see a general trend of Democrats did better in the South than they have in a long time. Winning Texas, Keisha Lance Bottoms winning in Georgia, Mississippi being close, Florida being close.Let’s talk about what did you make of the results in the South, which I think is the most Republican region in the country, generally assumed in some ways maybe the most anti-union, anti-Black, what I would say. What did you make of the results in the South specifically?Wilkins: I think this is super exciting. I think watching what happened in the South, and also a couple of other demographic things, Black voters, Latino voters, and young voters. The expansion of the map and the calling in of some of the people who have been most disaffected means to me that I think that there is a moment that we really need to not miss. To not let those voters down, right? We have a bunch of people who came out in a really different way because they are so angry about what’s happening.And if you look at what people were running on, if you look at a Talarico, or if you look at an Angie Nixon, even though she lost, but she came so close and her margin was not very different. If you look at Hinojosa, they are running a true kind of economic populist message that is appealing across racial lines, right? It is like the original understanding of identity politics, which was not so much representational politics. It was, “I have a particular view about how bad class politics are because I’m at the absolute bottom,” and what we really need is a true anti-system orientation towards upsetting the current status quo.And so to me, if we are exciting voters in Georgia, in Mississippi, in Florida, in South Carolina, it is because there is a multiracial coalition for real epic systemic change, if we can harness it.Bacon: Hahrie, on the South? Anything with the South distinct to you?Han: First of all, I’ll just say, I grew up in Texas, so Texas is my home state. And I will say that I won a 30-year bet last night, which is relevant to the answer to your question. I had bet a friend that Texas would go blue in our day, in our lifetimes, right?Bacon: In our lifetimes. I was curious about that. That’s interesting.Han: Yeah, win back kind of statewide office. And my friend thought no, it wasn’t going to happen, right? And the reason why I made that bet 30 years ago, when people would’ve said, “Oh, Texas is a solidly red state. What are you talking about?” is that if you actually look at the demographics in a lot of states like Texas, or other southern states, there is a lot of heterogeneity that’s masked by some of the kind of Republican reign that we’ve seen in these states.And so in Texas, the major urban population centers have long leaned blue, right? And then you had these big Hispanic populations in like the Rio Grande Valley and other places like that, that really have been swinging back and forth over many elections. And we just saw in this election you had a particular set of candidates and a particular kind of set of economic and political conditions that pushed that over the edge.But I don’t think it was out of reach necessarily in previous moments. Which again, I think just reinforces this point that in thinking about political strategy and moving forward, a lot of what we have to be thinking about is, how can we reconnect the parties to meet people where they are? And to be grounded in the complexity of people’s human needs that don’t necessarily fall neatly on these left continua that we sometimes use to define them.Bacon: Elizabeth mentioned policy, and I want to come back to that now. Obviously we’re talking about policy a lot in this conversation, but be specific about it.I think you could probably say Talarico, Sherrod Brown, this sort of economic populism, that is one theme you saw, in a lot of even quote unquote moderates were running on the billionaires have too much money and that kind of thing. I think you saw that. You had the El-Sayed, Troy Jackson version, which is more Bernie, Medicare for All-ish. You had Ossoff doing something which was a little bit different, which was also the billionaires have too much money, there’s too much corruption, but also a little bit of this sort of, Donald Trump is racist and we need to get the racist. That was a little more pointed on the partisan end of it. And then you had Roy Cooper, who said stuff costs a lot, but he ran a campaign Bill Clinton could’ve run. And that’s not a criticism. Bill Clinton won two elections, and good for him.So I think there was a range of stuff that was going on, and I want to emphasize it only to say, start with you, Hahrie. What are the policy implications of this election? I agree that people don’t like high gas prices, so let’s concede that and not spend much time on that. But beyond that, are there any policy implications that you see from the races?Han: So all we have right now is the exit polling data, which is always fuzzy in the ways that we all know. But if we look at the exit polling data, the top issue that voters named was the economy. The second issue, which was a pretty close second actually, was democracy. Which, to me, as a political scientist, I’m like, “What do people mean when they’re answering that question?”And my gut, and I don’t necessarily have a data point I can give you on this, my gut is that what people are fed up with is a sense of corruption. And so it goes hand in hand with this idea that we have this concentrated economic power, right? That is making choices that raise gas prices, that bring data centers into people’s communities, all these kind of things that we see this reaction against. And that people feel like there’s a different set of rules for one class versus the other. And so I think both of those things are what people are reacting to.And so what’s the kind of policy agenda coming out of it is to try to restore what I always understood as the original promise of democracy, which is that you overcome inequality of resources with equality of voice, right? And so I think when people are saying, “I’m mad about the economy and I’m mad about democracy,” it means that I have no voice and the inequality is just out of control, right? And so you have to equalize those things to restore the kind of world that people want to live in.Bacon: Elizabeth, I also want to hear what you think about the policy implications. That’s where you live.Wilkins: Yeah, so just starting, I couldn’t agree more. There’s a connection between the affordability cost of living econ stuff and the democracy stuff. The corruption is where that comes together. This idea that, I don’t know, man, I think that our political leaders and our corporate leaders might be in bed together to pull the drawbridge up behind them, and whatever they’re doing, it’s not going to benefit me, right?Whether somebody in a political science way says this is democracy or whatever, I think they’re connecting, the American promise isn’t working for me, and it’s working for those people over there, and they are using their advantages to maintain that power.So to me, that means policy going forward has to be laser focused on those two things. So quality of life economic conditions, economic security for people, and the ways in which concentrated power both directly—so how do you deal with your health insurance company? How do you deal with your bank, et cetera, and are they extracting gains from you? And also, when is it that concentrated power means that somebody can buy the political outcome that they want, which is beneficial to them and not to me?I think the peril of this moment is to understand it as a traditional democracy rejection of this administration, and to spend the next two years doing kind of very administration-oriented oversight.The promise or the opportunity is to say, All right. We will show you what a different kind of governing would look like. We will show you that we are willing to take on the powerful interests that are affecting your daily life. We will go after the ways in which uniquely certain corporate leaders and certain political leaders are in bed together to make sure the pharma companies get their profits. What are the ways that corruption actually directly affects your daily lives?So to me, that policy means thinking about the sites of power that people want to see their political leaders fighting, and then figuring out how to lay the groundwork for something I think is really complicated, which is, changing the economy is not something you deliver in one year or two years, right? You both have to have some policies that recognize that people have to pay their bills next month, at the same time that you are building will for those long-term structural changes.Bacon: Hahrie, you write about and you cover movements a lot, so I want to ask about the next—when I think about 2026 and 2025, I think the winners to me, the people who drove this, are not the Roy Coopers and the Jon Ossoffs, they get all the credit. But the people in Minnesota, or the people who were protesting ICE in Chicago, or in Los Angeles, or the people who were in the Indivisible rally saying, “We will stand up to this,” when Hakeem and Chuck Schumer were not sounding as sharp as I would like them to sound, or as they sound right now.So talk about that. When you look at this, what role do movements have in the result last night?Han: Yeah. Actually, maybe I’ll just link it back to an earlier part of our conversation, when we were talking about this idea that we’re in this era of unstable majorities, right? Where partisan control keeps flip-flopping back and forth.And so a logical question that would come out of that is, if neither party has captured a stable majority of the American public for a generation, why has one party not seen the opportunity and then done the work to capture a stable majority? It flies against all of our theory, because it’s completely irrational for both parties to keep doing this thing that keeps causing them to lose every other election, essentially, in a way.And there’s a political scientist at Stanford named Mo Fiorina, and the argument that he makes is that the reason why it’s happening is because there’s been this growing gap between the people who are basically the producers of American politics, and then the vast majority of the public that are invited to be constituents of it, right? And so the people who are the producers are obviously the policymakers and the party leaders, but also people like us who are part of the chattering class, as you might say, journalists, big donors. People who feel like they have some say in shaping the choices that are available to ordinary people, right?And Fiorina estimates that’s about 15 percent of the public. But the other 85 percent of people, they feel all they can do is go to the grocery store and choose Chex or Cheerios, and then go to the polling booth and choose this candidate or that candidate, and maybe they don’t really like either, and so we keep seeing these kind of flip-floppy elections.And so to bring that back to, what role did all the movements that we’re seeing play, I think what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to close that gap between producers and consumers, right? They’re trying to say the only way in which you can hold that producer class accountable is not just at the polling booth. You can do it through your actions throughout the year, right? And we can build power if we act together, which is exactly what social movements and organizers do, so that we can reclaim our ability to have some say in shaping the choices that we’re given.And there’s been a lot of talk in this cycle about the DSA wing of the Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. And I actually do think that—Bacon: We will come back to that for sure. But go ahead, yes.Han: Here’s what I’ll say, because I’ll say it right now. I actually think that a better kind of distinction is the parts of the party that are ensconced in this sort of system of consultants and so on, that have run campaigns and elections for a lot of years, and the new candidates that are coming up that can win only by being really grounded in movement. And a lot of those movements are part of the DSA, but not all of them are, and so we see candidates like Talarico, who was able to build his own kind of momentum, drawing on some of these other kind of moments of mass collective action that we’ve been seeing.Bacon: Elizabeth is not only in the movement now, but her family’s been in movements for a long time, so I want to hear what you think. And people should look up her biography and her parents and grandparents. Anyway, go ahead, Elizabeth, talk about the movements and the role in this election particularly.Wilkins: Yeah. I’m going to do that terrible thing where I’m going to answer the question I want to answer and not the one you asked me. But I will just say one of the things that I am thinking about in terms of what we would need to build coming out of this election is, this is exactly right. There’s a gap between the political and policy elite, and the people that ecosystem is supposed to serve.And so one half of the equation of fixing that is to actually use movement to get candidates and leaders who feel actually accountable. There’s another piece of it, which is, what do we do with this existing ecosystem of policymakers and leaders and governing institutions, and what kind of reorg of that ecosystem and those institutions do we have to do to make them responsive again, right?Just like I think of a policy campaign, the right kind of policy campaign being like an inside-outside campaign, where you have movement pushing for a certain set of policies, and you hopefully have some allies on the inside who are trying to figure out, “How do I help make this happen as the forces are for the status quo.”I think we need something like that for the future of our institutions more broadly, right? We need movement-oriented candidates. We need movements that can hold people accountable. And we also need a group of folks who are dedicated to doing policy and institutional work a different way, who know what time it is and say, “We need to rebuild our institutions not to be what they were 20 years ago.” Say, what would institutions responsive for this moment look like? What would making policy that would shift look like?So one thing that I’m excited, if we understand in part this election to be a movement election, how can we use that to prod the insider ecosystem to rise to the moment as well?Bacon: We touched on demographic groups a little bit, but I want to come at that a little bit more, because in 2024 you had this election and the big message was, I think every Black man who voted for Donald Trump was personally interviewed by the news media. So we had a big focus on—and I’m joking, because most Black men voted for Kamala, and I think it’s 80 something.But anyway, there was a real movement. There were Black men particularly, Latino men, more likely to vote Republican than before. Young voters, you saw this drift to the right among them. And I haven’t read all the polls yet. It looks like you had a drift back.So I’d be curious, Hahrie, and Elizabeth afterward too, is there any demographic story? I know we don’t necessarily want to break down people in blocks, but since we’ve already done that, let’s at least—and I think you also saw the sort of white working class, I don’t love that phrase, white people without college degrees to be more precise, who have been very Republican, were a little less Republican in these races too. So talk about any of those groups and any demographic story you came away with from this election.Han: Honestly, I think because the swing was so decisive across all groups, the wave, however we define that wave, swamped all these other trends that we saw.Bacon: The tsunami or whatever.Han: Yeah. And what does that tell us? I think what it tells us is we’re in this moment of tremendous economic, political, technological, climatological uncertainty of every kind. And I think people are hungry for ways to navigate and make meaning of all that uncertainty that they’re facing, right? The precarity that they’re experiencing in their individual lives, and the uncertainty about how to make choices.And so just from the movement perspective, what I’ll say is, if you look at colleagues of mine who’ve studied movements on the right and movements on the left, on all these different kind of things, the movements that are growing across the ideological spectrum are the ones that are providing a home where people can find belonging and then make meaning of this tremendous uncertainty that we have.Now, does that mean that necessarily then they map exactly onto the political partisan agenda of these different movements? Certainly that’s what the movement is trying to draw them into, but I think we have to understand that process of meaning-making as being related to, but distinct from, that process of partisan mapping. And that’s a little bit what we’re seeing, is that there is—Bacon: Give me an example of a group that’s doing meaning-making, belonging. Does that mean DSA? Does that mean evangelical churches? Just give me a couple examples of people in mind.Han: I’ve done the most work on evangelical megachurches, right? And so here’s a couple data points I’ll give you. We collected, my team and I, every sermon delivered in the 1,500 largest megachurches in America from 2020 to 2026, right? It’s 7.5 billion words, right? It’s a ton of words, so it’s a ton of data.And what percentage of these churches do you think mention the word Trump, right? This is from 2020 to 2026, and the answer that most people give is usually a lot higher. It’s about 15 percent or less, with the sole exception of when there was the assassination attempt on him, where half the churches mentioned him. But that was mostly in the context of, we should pray for him.What that means is that outside of that assassination attempt, 85 percent of these churches never mentioned him, right? When he was running for president, when he was being elected, and then when he was serving. And instead, what they’re doing is they’re tilling the soil for collective life, right? They’re doing the meaning-making. They’re pulling people into communities of belonging. And then that sort of mapping onto political identity is happening elsewhere.Another data point that I’ll give you on the evangelicals is that about 20 percent of evangelicals believe that to be a good Christian means being a good Republican. But most people believe that 70 percent of evangelicals believe that to be a good Christian means being a good Republican. Which means there’s a 50 percentage point gap between perceptions and reality, right? So that’s just making the point about the difference between the kind of place where meaning-making happens, and then the sorting and mapping onto political identity.Bacon: Elizabeth, I asked about demographics. You already taught me a lot of it in a bit, but you can talk about that meaning-making or about demographic groups, either way. I’m curious what you think.Wilkins: Let me see if I can do a little of both. So I’m thinking a lot about Roosevelt’s former fellow Dan HoSang, who’s at Yale, who thinks a lot about this question of, where’s their meaning-making.And he thought a lot about the demographics of the 2024 election, and what all of those stories, why were there so many people of color who voted for Trump, et cetera, et cetera, and this question of belonging. Studied Turning Point. And he has said multiple times, “I send my students to go to these events, and some of my minority students, some of my queer students say that they feel more welcomed in these Turning Point spaces than they do in any of the left liberal spaces which are purportedly agreeing with their politics,” which is really saying something, right?There’s spaces that obviously at some point have a political orientation, but they start with a welcoming place that speaks to people’s need to connect in a moment of uncertainty, as we were talking about.And there is something about both the organizing spaces of belonging and the crosswalk with what has become of our racial politics and culture wars, that we have not figured out how to do both of those things at the same time. We have not figured out how to create welcoming communities that are authentic, and that there is no, we don’t vote you off the island if you say the wrong thing. We welcome you in, and we have hard conversations, and some of those hard conversations are about identity, and that is not about losing our values, right? We stand very comfortably in our values, at the same time tolerate spaces where we have disagreement and difference, and we fight them out.And I’ll just go back to the Mamdani election, right? One of the things that was incredible about his election, he got, I don’t know, like 10 percent of the Trump voters in New York switched over and voted for him. And what he did in his politics was he was econ forward. He spoke to people’s insecurities. He then created a space of meaning and joy. So not just railing against a terrible system, but being a place where people wanted to be. He didn’t drop any of his values, not a single one, about immigrants, about foreign policy. He did not run away from core values, but he was front-footed about the things that brought people together. He did the scavenger hunt, right? He created a place where people wanted to be.So this is a little bit less about the actual demographics of this election, but I do think all of this points us a little bit towards where we need to go, which is, how do we create spaces of joy and connection? How do we figure out what the right relationship is between those spaces and our political spaces, such that we aren’t making vote you off the island lines in all of our spaces, right? We’ve got to be able to create coalitions that admit difference while still being authentic and standing in our values. And figuring out the right connection between those meaning-making spaces, political campaigns, and our policy, I think is part of what we need to do to figure out what our governing coalition going forward looks like.Bacon: So two more questions. The first, Elizabeth teed up. Elizabeth made a distinction between identity politics, which she defined in the way it was written, not in the way it’s become bastardized, and representational politics. I think it’s a very helpful distinction, between identity politics defined by its creators, and representational politics.But I do want to ask you, what should we make of—I’m happy there’s a Black woman governor. I’m not afraid to say that, and I assume Elizabeth is too and Hahrie is too. So talk about those representational things a little bit last night, which is that we have the first Black woman governor in the history of the United States. Unfortunately, it took so long. We had the first Muslim American senator last night as well, in a very hard-fought campaign, which unfortunately Islamophobia from all Republicans and unfortunately occasionally a few Democrats too.And so talk about those things. Are those important things without being too focused on representation? There were moments in 2008 where we got overly focused on, Barack Obama winning did not eliminate racism. But are those things important still? Talk about those, Elizabeth.Wilkins: Yeah, look, obviously I’m not going to take away from anybody the idea that it makes a huge amount of difference that someone who looks like me could sit in the governor’s seat. I talk about this all the time. I have a seven and a nine-year-old, and we live in Washington, DC, and they don’t understand that mayors aren’t Black women. That’s real, right? They are little. They are imagining who they could be in the world, and they appreciate that they could be anything because there is representation in a lot of places.I don’t want to cheapen the value of that, and I am over the moon, not only for the firsts, but we have a Native American governor now. We have a Native American senator. There are just so many. It is genuinely exciting.The thing that I think we shouldn’t get confused about is going back to the thing that Hahrie said about the gap between elite spaces and where people are. It turns out that Black folks and Brown folks and queer folks and everybody else can be just as susceptible to being a part of that distance from people that they are supposed to represent as anybody else. So when we confuse simple representation in the identity sense with continual results for communities in an era where there are deep divides between the political elite and the insider game and where people are, we get into trouble, right?It is true actually, that for a long time, Black representation in the halls of Congress, and Black representation in the South, has meant really important gains for Black communities. But the more we have leaders of color who don’t feel accountable to their base, the less that’s going to be true.So what I am looking for is, yes, I am so glad for my daughter that she now knows that she can be that. That is incredible, and I wouldn’t take away anything from that. It just doesn’t then solve this representational problem of the elite versus the rest, and how we reconnect that democratic accountability regardless of the color or nature of our representatives.Bacon: Hahrie.Han: I would totally agree with every word that she said about that. And as a political scientist, of course I’m tempted to talk about the data, but it’s yes, the data on descriptive representation is that it’s real, that for Elizabeth’s children and my children and other people, seeing people who look like them does absolutely make a difference, and that’s wonderful that we’re seeing that expand.At the same time, it’s not enough. And I think that sometimes when we talk about representation, I worry that we have such a thin version of how it’s understood. Either I want someone who looks like me to be in there, or I am represented only when you do what I want. And neither of those is actually how democratic representation works, right? Democratic representation should be a situation in which people can exercise voice and express their interests and act with others to try to realize their interests in policy, even if they don’t always win, right? And being able to equalize that playing field depends a lot on the kind of accountability that Elizabeth is talking about.Bacon: The last question. I’m going to talk about what this means for the future. We’re going to have, I’ll be very blunt, we’re going to have a Democratic primary very soon. And I assume people will start announcing, maybe six weeks from now. I think Raphael Warnock almost said he was running last week.So here we are. But my initial reactions were, people who say that only I can win are really leaning into winning, including my governor, Andy Beshear, who I respect. If a lot of Democrats can win, you’re going to have to have a little bit more of a platform than I can win. And he’s going to have one, but I think the only I can win is going to be a hard argument if Democrats don’t win in Mississippi. And it might be easier for AOC to say, “I can win Michigan,” since Abdul El-Sayed just did. So those would be my initial reactions.But I’d be curious, I assume yours will be less personality based, but I’d be curious what you all sense of what this means, if anything, for this primary we’re going to see. And maybe also our friend JD Vance also came out with some thoughts about the primary. He pretty much criticized Donald Trump in this very long post on Facebook and said the Iran war, and we didn’t do enough with the economy. Which, I don’t remember a lot of VPs trashing the president, but he knows where he has to go in the future, and he may be making a smart political calculation.So I’ll start with Elizabeth on what this means for these upcoming primaries.Wilkins: Yeah. We haven’t talked as much about this, but there really were some major policy proposals that people ran on that got people excited, and specific fights that won, that people were willing to pick.One thing that I think is incredible, there were 44 measures to ban data centers, to have data center moratoria across the country. 43 of them won.Bacon: What is the one bad state? Now I’m just curious. What’s the area that likes data centers?Wilkins: Some tiny little tech haven somewhere. I think it’s North Dakota, but you’ve got to fact check me there.So we have to have people who are credible in willingness to put the public back in the driver’s seat around how technology is going to affect people’s lives, and how the wild concentration of wealth that is following this technology is going to be controlled and distributed. I think that’s table stakes from what we are seeing around the country.I saw a whole bunch of people campaigning on healthcare costs. People are pissed off. But I will say, not only are they like, “Please restore my ACA premiums.” I just think if we think what is going to cut it is promising to go back to what was status quo ante, that is not the level of what people are asking for.We saw people campaigning on breaking up big medicine, on saying, “No, your health insurance company can’t own the pharmacy benefit manager, and the pharmacy, and your doctor.” “No, you can’t have private equity own your home.” We saw a whole bunch of people voting for those kinds of agendas.There’s two ballot initiatives that won, one in Michigan and one in Montana, that were about campaign finance reform. The Michigan one was no utility money in politics. It wasn’t just a rejection. People voted for an agenda that was around unrigging the economy, unrigging our democracy, creating a sense of not just economic security, but agency and control over people’s lives.So I think that means to anybody who is interested in getting the seat in 2028, they have to be not just responsive to, but bold and visionary about what it would mean to respond to those demands.I would love for everybody to vote on policy. But I also think people are looking for authenticity. The candidate quality kind of did matter in this election, and people were looking for folks who could credibly carry those messages, who could look you in the eye and say, “Yes, I get where you’re coming from, and I’m going to do something about it.”And then I would say, I’ve been spending some time looking at which midterm this is analogous to. So, professional hazard, we think a lot about FDR and the New Deal. An interesting one to look at is the 1930 midterms. Hoover is president. People are obviously very upset about their economic circumstances. FDR is reelected governor in 1930, and he spends 1930 to 1932 doing the pre-New Deal in New York.He creates a system of public power. He works with Frances Perkins to do what would become the ideas for Social Security. He does basically a public jobs program. A lot of the seeds of the New Deal you can see in the two years that he was governor.There’s a lot of people who run states right now who probably are wanting to throw their hat in the ring. I would say we have two years now, again, not just to say we don’t like Trump, but to say this is what alternative governance would actually look like. Attitudinal standpoint, I am willing to stand up to the forces in your life that you feel too small to stand up to. And here’s what an affirmative agenda would look like, so that you wouldn’t feel like things are out of control and taking over your children’s education, so that you wouldn’t feel like your healthcare company owns you and you can’t get a person on the line, et cetera.There is a lot in what was actually run on in this election that I think points the way to folks who want to win in the next two years.Bacon: I like that. And if Josh Shapiro or J.B. Pritzker or Wes Moore’s staff is listening to this, I think Elizabeth is saying you might want to spend January, February, and March doing stuff more, and flying to New Hampshire to do events less.Wilkins: Do your jobs, guys.Bacon: Running for president’s part of their job, when they’re doing it, but I think doing your job and using that power is a very important thing.All right. So 2028 is what I asked about, and I like the answer she gave is more about policy and less about personalities. Personality is interesting too.Han: So here’s where I’ll take it in a slightly different direction. Candidates do matter. I think this election showed us that candidate quality obviously does matter. But actually on the 2028 question, I’m less interested in the candidate right now than I am in the kinds of things Elizabeth’s been talking about, but also one more piece of it, which is what you were just saying about governors who can choose to stay in their home states and actually do the work, as FDR did, or kind of fly to New Hampshire.To me, that represents a difference between this discussion that we’ve been having about the system as it currently works and the system as it could work, right? And the system as it currently works is kind of grounded in this politics of spectacle, right? Where it’s, everything is fly to New Hampshire and do a big event and make sure it looks good on TV and get the right people on stage.And it turns politics into a spectacle that then people get to choose to consume or not in a variety of different ways. And I think this comes out most vividly in the way that people campaign. And The New Republic ran a great article last week or a couple of weeks ago about the fundraising machine that feeds the consultant industry that underlies this, right? For every dollar raised, 70 cents goes back into feeding that same machine. It’s crazy when you think about that.And so for me, what I’d be really interested in is thinking about, the candidates are not going to be our savior, right? Instead what we need to do is rebuild an infrastructure that moves us away from this politics of spectacle, right? And instead knits us into a kind of politics of practice that goes on year-round even when elections aren’t happening.Because the other thing that I worry about when we talk about the policy is just that, one of the trends that we’ve seen is that the data on the state of the economy and people’s experience of it aren’t necessarily moving in line, right? That just because Biden delivered some big policy changes, people didn’t experience it that way. And so what that means is that you need that policy work to be really knit with an infrastructure of meaning making and all this other stuff that’s happening on the ground.So I’m most interested in candidates who are doing that right now, who are investing in that early on, because this is the moment when you should be doing that, so that you can then reap the benefits of it in the six months leading up to 2028.Wilkins: I just want to add on to this. I think about this a lot, that if what people are demanding is systems change, right, that doesn’t happen in two years, right? And the political feedback for that doesn’t exist. What does it mean to tackle big systemic problems, but also deliver in the near term such that you are actually building trust again with people? And how do we actually plan for that in a governing moment?And some of that is exactly what you’re saying. It is, how do you knit back together the policy process and the sense that people have some agency and that there is some accountability in the political system. And then I think there’s also really some policy work to do to say, what are the down payments that we can make to people that are shorter term, but that are directionally right for the kind of reform that we want to see?So rather than what we saw in the last administration, which I was a proud member of, which was basically, I don’t see what your problem is. We’re doing all of the right things for you. You should be happy about it. That didn’t work out so well, right?Again, going back to FDR, two things. One, persistent experimentation and action. I love this example. The Civilian Conservation Corps versus the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. Civilian Conservation Corps, FDR said, “We will have people in jobs in four—I don’t care what happens. We will make mistakes. There will be scandals. We will take risks, but people will be clearing the forests and making us national parks within four months.” And then the WPA took two, three years to put together, because it was more complex work that they were being put together on.You actually have to have a portfolio of policy that you’re delivering for people, some of which is short-term and maybe not structural, but is in the direction. Let’s actually ban non-compete clauses again this time. Let’s go after things like overdraft fees. None of these are going to reshape the economy, but they are meaningful for people’s pocketbooks, and they show that we are willing to fight, right? They are fall-forward kind of short-term policies that help build the will for those long-term structural changes.And then the other thing, I think, is FDR. Turns out we did not actually get out of our economic depression until we went to war, right? But he won elections anyway, and part of that was his fireside chats, right? Part of that was constant communication with the American people.If you are not going to win in one year or two years or three years, rather than communications that say, “But I did all these good things for you,” communications that actually say, “This is hard. I’m fighting. Here’s why it didn’t work. Here’s what we’re going to do next time.” There actually has to be a more honest conversation between leaders and their people. And some expectation setting. We can’t promise the moon and then deliver it tomorrow, and that’s not actually how trust is rebuilt. Trust is rebuilt by repeated interactions where you do what you say you’re going to do over and over, and you start small until you have enough trust to go big.So thinking about a theory of campaigning and then a theory of governance that actually takes that interaction between leaders and the governed into account, I think is really important.Bacon: This has been a great conversation, because we’ve gotten beyond the who won North Carolina by how much. We’ve talked about politics in a more fundamental way than the way I wanted to.I want you all to close by just giving you an opportunity, since I got to lead the conversation, anything you want to say or anything you want to plug that the organization is doing, or anybody else’s work that you want to say, “Please read this piece.” Hahrie, I did not pay her, but she did note a New Republic piece by my friends Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica that I do recommend people read, about the problem of the consulting class. Thank you for that.But anything else, I’ll start with Hahrie, so anything else you want to talk about or plug, I’ll give you an opportunity to do that.Han: Yeah, no, I agree. Just to reiterate, it’s a great piece that’ll set your hair on fire in a good way.And the only thing, actually it just builds a little off of what Elizabeth was just saying, is yes, it’s a yes, and. I agree with everything that she’s saying, and I just want to knit together these different pieces of our conversation, which is that we need policies that are going to enact real changes in people’s lives sooner rather than later. We also need places where people can go and make meaning of those changes.So it’s not like things change and I’m like, “Oh, I know exactly where to attribute causal links to.” It’s people make meaning relationally with each other. And I think where I spend a lot of my time is thinking about, where are those places in America where we’re bringing people together at scale, where people are really making meaning. It’s similar to what Danny HoSang has said on the right, but just looking across the whole spectrum of different places.And I think that one of the most important things we can do right now is just investing in the kind of local entities where people gather with each other to figure out how they want to understand this turbulent, crazy world that we live in. And that’s going to start happening tomorrow. And it’s not a communications game. To me, you have to ground whatever communications are coming from leaders in the lived experience of people who are interacting with each other and coming to understand how they make sense of all the changes that we’re seeing.Bacon: We will have to have another discussion about movement making spaces, because in this conversation we have mentioned that a few times, both of you. We’ve mentioned evangelical churches and Turning Point, and for our audience, those places are not places they’re going to go. They might go to one of them, but definitely not the second. And so I want to come back to, what does it look like for people who might have more liberal points of view? But another time.Han: Yes, but I think that’s an important point. I have a lot of thoughts on that one.Bacon: Yes, I’m sure you do. I know Elizabeth’s got to run her think tank, so let’s finish up here with her thoughts, any final thoughts she has.Wilkins: One thing I just want to say, Perry, is I just so appreciate this conversation, and hopefully you’re going to be OK with this characterization. I feel like you have an insider outsider strategy right here on this screen almost.Han: As it should be.Wilkins: Right? Exactly. It’s, what kind of new set of relationships should political leaders have to the people they represent and the systems around them? So the institutions that political leaders exist in, the ecosystem, the policymakers, the consultants, that’s one side of it. And then the other side is, what is the civic infrastructure and the thickness of civic life that we need for a healthy democracy?You’ve got to do both of those, and actually you need to connect them back together. And conversations like this that put in conversation folks who are thinking about how do we need to change and evolve the insider ecosystem, and folks who are thinking about how do we need to change and evolve the outside ecosystem, both those conversations are super important, and they have to happen together if we are actually going to create a sustainable and equitable democracy going forward. So just kudos to you. I think that this is such a cool pairing for thinking about holistically what kind of political system we want going forward.And then the second last thought I have is just, I am so excited about the magnitude of what happened last night, and also totally terrified that we will misunderstand the moment. People are like, “Oh, is this a rejection or is it a mandate?” I don’t think this is a mandate. It’s an opportunity. People have given us the opportunity to show them that we are worth trusting and investing in again, right? And really shame on folks if they do not understand the opportunity and act accordingly.And just making this point about, we have had swings back and forth from incumbents for so long because the disaffection has run so deep. But true systemic change and political orders come from sustained governing power for a long time. So we have to have a theory of how you turn a moment like this into actual sustained momentum long enough to solidify a political order that truly does restructure some of the economic and democratic systems that we’ve been talking about today.Bacon: All right, good. Elizabeth, Hahrie, great conversation. Thanks for joining me. Thanks everybody who tunes in. See you later.Han: Thanks for having us.Bacon: Bye-bye.