Our guest this week was the truly great columnist Perry Bacon of The New Republic (and formerly of the Washington Post, until truly great columns stopped being part of Jeff Bezos’s business model).
As a native and resident of Louisville, Kentucky, Perry has a sharp perspective on how geography shapes, and distorts, our media and political landscape. Most national political reporters cluster in D.C., New York, and to some extent Los Angeles — places where a DSA candidate is very electable and a MAGA one never would be. That dynamic, Perry explained, is one reason democratic socialism often gets more attention and panicked headlines than the real threats to democracy from MAGA. As Anat put it, the media is more interested in covering what Democrats say than what Republicans do.
Our conversation broadened to expose other pathologies that drive today’s crises. That same concentration of press, party gatekeepers, and big donors in a few zip codes decides which voices are legitimate and which candidates are “electable.” And geography plus gerrymandering goes a long way toward explaining structural differences between how the two parties operate and who their voters elect.
Highlights included:
“Electability” is a smokescreen, but we can’t ignore Democratic voters’ worries about it. When party insiders argue a candidate can’t win, I said it usually means they disagree with the candidate ideologically but don’t want to say so out loud because those positions are actually popular with the base. It’s also a form of status-hoarding by those geographically concentrated media and political elites. Perry agreed that all of this is the case, but his advice to progressive insurgent candidates is to confront the argument head-on and make the affirmative, non-ideological case for their own electability. He said that if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for president, for instance, she should think about how to convince influential, numbers-minded pundits like Nate Cohn or Ezra Klein that she can win.
Blue-state “infighting” is the fight red states don’t have to have anymore. Now that the Republican Party has gone fully MAGA, the kinds of substantive policy debates that a pluralistic democracy would normally resolve are happening almost entirely within the Democratic Party. People who would otherwise be moderate Republicans are running as Democrats, and there are big factional disputes between what Perry shorthanded as “corporate” and “non-corporate” Democrats. The GOP has disqualified itself in blue states — but has consolidated so much control in red states that it can project its power nationwide.
How it got this way: Republican primaries are different. I explained that in much of the rural South, white evangelical churches function as an organized turnout machine that supplies about 60% of Republican primary voters (and still roughly half in suburban southern districts), even though evangelicals are only about 18% of the US population. That gives them outsized control over who can win in gerrymandered red seats. Democrats have no equivalent institution (other than unions, which don’t have the same geographically concentrated power), and the DSA isn’t telling millions of people how to vote every Sunday.
Red-state trifectas can get more done and face less scrutiny. While blue-state trifectas are stuck hashing out genuine disagreements, the white Christian nationalist monopoly on Republican primaries creates a unified GOP prepared to rubber-stamp laws that ruin millions of lives in red states and provide the blueprints for what Trump will do nationwide. And national media incentives let them operate under the radar, as Perry pointed out; just a handful of local journalists are covering the policy threats to freedom in twenty-plus red states, while a small army of D.C. reporters is tasked with following Susan Collins around to see if she’ll cast the same pro-Trump votes she usually does.
Democrats don’t follow the “11th Commandment.” Given all of this, Ronald Reagan’s “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican” rule is easier than ever for Republicans to follow. Still, Perry argued that left-leaning media figures on shows like Morning Joe or Pod Save America aren’t doing Democrats the favors they might think they are when they grill progressive candidates with the equivalent of, “Here’s a bunch of crazy things other Democrats believe. Do you believe these things, too?”
The problem with “The Price is Right” messaging on affordability. Anat noted that most Democrats are great at reciting how much groceries cost down to the cent, but less great at telling a compelling origin story, complete with heroes and villains, about why things are unaffordable, whose fault that is, and how to fix it. Mamdani and other left-populist candidates do a much better job of that, and the results speak for themselves. I added that much like on “The Price is Right,” where the goal is to guess closest to the real price without going over, most Democrats are much more afraid of being too ambitious than of underselling what they want to accomplish.
How the media, and Republican operatives, manufacture concern about “wokeness.” Perry called out the tendency of mainstream outlets to let regressive operatives like Chris Rufo act as their assignment editors. He argued that Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s resignation was almost entirely driven by the New York Times (which employs more than a few Harvard graduates) deciding to make it a headline story. Anat emphasized that in focus group after focus group, she never sees Democratic voters volunteer concern about trans issues or DEI. They can be led there, but their real concerns are that Democrats aren’t fighting for them or doing anything to make their lives better.
The right way and wrong way to handle a “will you punch left” question. I think Zohran Mamdani gave a master class in how to handle questions like this in a recent New York Times Magazine interview. Perry and Anat discussed how Andy Beshear also did it well recently — focusing on the ways Democrats agree with each other and how dramatically they differ from Republicans — but has also made unforced errors like calling socialism a “failed experiment.” Perry observed that Beshear hasn’t felt the need to punch left as governor of Kentucky — but that as a likely 2028 candidate vying for the “moderate” faction’s support, he’ll be spending a lot more time in rooms with center-left donors who are more upset by Zohran than by Trump.
Perry’s parting read on the media landscape. He’s glad the Washington Post lost its arbitration fight over Karen Attiah’s firing and will at least owe her something, but notes that the outlet still does some great journalism, like this piece on cuts to Black studies programs that shows the real threat to academic freedom. He says the mainstream media has failed to meet this moment, but that there’s a point of diminishing returns to pointing this out. His advice to progressives is to spend less time on Bluesky dunking on paragraph four of a bad New York Times story, and more time actively promoting the outlets that get it right, like The New Republic, the Guardian, or The American Prospect.
