Transcript: These Democrats Have a Real Chance of Being President

Schmitt: Yeah, I was a little surprised when I saw how well she does in polls, but really shouldn’t be, because that’s just like the classic—I remember when I was a kid, every year Ted Kennedy would be at the very top of the polls, Al Gore for a while, people like that. I like her a lot. I thought she ran about as good a campaign as she could. But I just don’t think the Democratic Party’s going to have confidence in her, even giving—even understanding—how much she was screwed by Joe Biden.

Bacon: You think she has a mass electability problem, basically?

Schmitt: Yeah. She also has a little bit of a communications problem. She does get—and again, it’s not faculty lounge language, it’s just making things too complicated and too nuanced, and trying to appeal to what people seem to want to hear rather than just saying what she thinks—or even just seeming like she’s saying what she thinks. Pete Buttigieg certainly always seems like he’s saying what he thinks, even if it all comes out of a memo.

Bacon: —that’s what I was thinking.

Schmitt: Yes. I just don’t really have that confidence. And it’s too bad, because I think she was given a thankless job and she did it as well as she could.

Masket: Yeah, it’s interesting—this belief has fallen down a little bit on the Republican side, but for Democrats there’s been this very long-standing belief that you only really get one shot at the brass ring. If you run for president and then lose, the party’s not interested in you anymore. They haven’t gone with a previous loser since Adlai Stevenson in ‘56. So I think that’ll be an important tradition for a lot of Democrats.

I think there’s a real mix within the Democratic Party about just why she lost in ‘24. I think there’s a fair number of people in the party who say, Look, that was just going to be a tough year no matter who the candidate was. People were angry about the economy. We got a lot of the blame as the incumbent party. And I think a good many also who feel like she underperformed—it had something to do with the way she campaigned or who she was. And that’s going to work against her, and I think that’ll really hamper her.

I’m honestly surprised she’s still considering it. I can certainly understand—you get the taste of it, you want to run—but generally we saw this with Al Gore to some extent, we’ve seen this with other candidates, where they express some interest in trying to run again and get politely nudged out.

Bacon: So I’ve been surprised. Okay, so what I expected Harris to do was to pretend to run for president for a long time—that makes your book sales go up, makes you seem more relevant—and that’s what I assume is going on still: she’s going to pretend to run, but in early 2027 she’ll magically decide not to run, when she was never really intending to run the whole time. That’s my assumption.

That said, her book was a little bit more critical of Biden than I expected, and she’s been a little bit more pro-Palestinian than I expected. I think some of the moves she’s made are the ones you would take if you’re trying to address your previous problems and actually run again. So I think that is the one place where I’ve been surprised. But ultimately, like I said, like Mark said, these polls are just reflecting name ID—she would have a hard time winning, and it’d be a very tough race for her.

I’m going to move to Mark Kelly, which is another person who I would not have guessed after the election. He was on the VP list too, a little bit. And the case he’s got—again, a lot of people are talking about—is he’s won a hard swing state, and Arizona is a place where Harris also lost. So I think that’s the appeal of him, that’s the strength.

He’s also done a pretty good job—Trump has attacked him personally a couple of times, and he made the most of that. He’s a veteran. I think that helps. An astronaut—that helps. So I think he’s got some personal credentials as sort of the electable white man who can beat Trump or beat JD Vance.

The weaknesses are—I’ll be honest—I’m not totally sure I know what Mark Kelly’s voice sounds like. And when I say that, I mean that I’m not sure that he’s made much of an impression as a senator. He also semi-ran for VP when Harris got the nomination and didn’t make much of an impression either. And so I’m just—he won Arizona, but I’m still not actually sure he’s that impressive a politician. Either one of you—Seth, go ahead.

Masket: Yeah, I agree with you. Kelly in some ways is a clear electability candidate in that he’s proven he can win in a swing state and do well there. It also helps him that he’s essentially a martyr of the Trump administration—that he’s been not just insulted, but they’ve actually tried to court-martial him and prosecute him. And Trump essentially accused him of treason. So he’s got that.

And I think there is, among some Democrats—I don’t know if you’d want to call it a lane or anything like that—but a good pitch for a candidate who doesn’t have particularly strident stances but also appears fairly combative, a fighter, someone who’s willing to stand up for his party and push back strongly on some of Trump’s excesses. And I think he’s been very good on that front. But yeah, I agree with you—we don’t know much about his voice. I don’t know how much that really matters. Not an especially well-known, well-loved, dynamic candidate that way.

Schmitt: Yeah. I’ve heard his voice. It’s deep. It’s——

Bacon: I was joking a little bit, but he’s not—

Schmitt: —as well—a little bit more—Beshear, I think, has a slightly unimposing voice. Not that we should get into stuff like that. But yeah, I think part of it with Kelly too is—if you take that Elissa Slotkin thing about “fight or fold” being the divide among Democrats, everybody’s going to be on the fight side. But he doesn’t have to prove it. He doesn’t have to overemphasize it, because it’s all right there. So he can just do other things, which I think might be an asset. But who knows?

Interesting that there are two states—we just talked about two senators from Arizona, and then there are two senators from Georgia, both relatively new, who also are potential candidates. It’s interesting that both those swing states have produced real national stars already.

Bacon: So next person is Ro Khanna. He’s obviously running to be the sort of—running for the Bernie vote, where he’s taken every progressive stand on every issue, from abolish ICE to Schumer should resign to there’s a genocide in Gaza. These are all sincerely held views, I’m sure. But also, he’s running in that progressive lane trying to inherit the Bernie vote.

So I think the strength of that is there is clearly a part of the party that wants that kind of candidate. And in some ways, unlike the people we’ve talked about, he has a very distinct part of the electorate he can appeal to—in a way that all the people we’ve talked about are fighting for the same voters on some level. So I think he’s got that.

Weaknesses are: he’s a House member, he’s got really low name ID, and it can be hard to break out of that. If AOC runs, it could just be really hard for him to win many progressive votes. I don’t know if she’s running or not.

And also, ultimately, my sense is that the progressive bloc of the party—while being closer to where my own views are—is not a majority, and so having those stances might not be the right way to win the nomination. But he’s done a good job getting out there. He’s also willing to do an interview everywhere, and he is everywhere. I think that’s a credit to him as well. So Mark?

Schmitt: Yeah. I feel like I don’t really understand Ro Khanna very well, despite observing him for a long time. And I think there’s a question: is the Bernie—Bernie has been a dominant figure for the last several elections in a way that we don’t really appreciate. Was that about his positions, or was it something unique to Bernie? And I don’t think we really know, but I think just adopting his positions doesn’t really do it.

But you’ve also touched on—it’s funny, we didn’t—you mentioned it in relation to Kamala Harris and obviously in relation to Khanna. Democrats’ relationship to Israel is going to be a very significant dividing lane, and I’m not sure—that’s moving really fast. And I’d rather be on the more pro-Palestinian side—just in cold political terms, not just personal terms—it’d be better to be on that side.

But there are going to be a lot of donors and a lot of electeds who are going to be very resistant. That’s choosing a fight in a really significant—and thinking now about what that fight is going to look like two years from now—I don’t know where that’s going. Yeah.

Masket: So another important divide within the Democratic Party right now is: what do we do with tech billionaires, right? This is a population with a lot of money. It’s become increasingly influential and has swung very hard right in recent years.

As the congressman representing Silicon Valley, he’s one of the few Democrats who tech folks are actually still pretty comfortable with. He can speak to that crowd, he can get support from that crowd, which I think cuts both ways, right? I think that makes him in some ways look like a stronger general election candidate, as someone who could have access to that money and that support.

Bacon: He seems pro-business and pro-innovation in a certain way too.

Masket: But at the same time, that might make him a little toxic to a fair amount of folks on the left who really want to push back on AI and want to push back on tech’s role in politics right now.

Bacon: Let me follow up on something Mark said. Mark, make your point, and then I’ll ask.

Schmitt: No, I think that he can also make a pitch as a guy who understands AI, and if we think AI is going to be this big, world-changing challenge—which maybe it isn’t—he gets it. And I think he can play both sides of that, as he has in his career. He was originally just a Silicon Valley candidate challenging a very old, established member of Congress whose name I don’t remember anymore. But I think the tech side is interesting.

Bacon: Mark, you said something about the idea being that Bernie Sanders won those votes, not generic progressive X. So I think that’s an important distinction. That said, we have a lot of evidence—with Zohran Mamdani—we have a lot of evidence that in primaries there’s some number of progressive people.

So you’re saying there’s a gap between the people who vote for any progressive and the people who voted for Bernie Sanders. Do you think there’s a big gap or a small gap, or just a gap to consider?

Schmitt: I just think they’re different. Yeah. I just think being Bernie Sanders connects with people in a way that was not just the bundle of his positions. And there is that phenomenon of supposed Trump-Sanders voters—

I don’t know how much of that there is, but you can get how—both of them have a very—especially original Trump—they have a very non-politician appeal. It’s hard to imagine—you know, the guy’s the chair of the Senate Budget Committee—but he still has a very non-politician appeal. I think sometimes—like Mamdani’s progressivism—sometimes that progressivism has an appeal just because it’s coherent.

Bacon: Yeah.

Schmitt: It doesn’t have to be your worldview—but it’s a worldview, and it’s coming from somewhere, and it’s not just telling you what you want to hear.

Bacon: Next person is Wes Moore. I’ll let you talk, Seth, in part because I know less about Wes Moore than I do some of the others. So hopefully you’ve studied him a little bit. Wes Moore.

Masket: I was going to say, I don’t know that much about him either. He’s also, in some ways, the opposite of Mark Kelly in that he’s a very good public speaker. He is very engaging, he gets people very passionate. He’s good at going on a wide range of TV shows and venues and just speaking very inspirationally.

I don’t have a sense of how well-loved he is generally among Democrats. He’s from Maryland, which isn’t a particularly competitive state. And he’s still pretty young, as far as I understand. But he’d be an interesting candidate to watch—and I think an enjoyable one to watch as he develops his speaking.

Bacon: Mark?

Schmitt: Yeah. Again, I live 500 feet from the Maryland border, but that doesn’t really mean anything. He’s not super visible, even in my world. He’s super impressive. He could turn out to be almost like Obama in the way he connects with people. But I don’t really have any idea. There are some sort of complicated questions about his personal background that could be—he was in some ways—

Bacon: Questions about his military service, right? Exactly what he did—

Schmitt: Military service, when he was there.

Bacon: Yeah.

Schmitt: Yeah. But I tried to figure that out one evening and I couldn’t really even figure out what the actual charge is.

Bacon: One thing I would say is—both Harris, Booker, and Wes Moore are not just Black, but have fairly similar ideologies. They’re not leftist, they’re not hardcore moderates. And only one of them—and maybe zero of them—are going to do well. So that seems to me—I think all their plans are going to be: win some white moderates, win some white progressives, and do really well in the heavily Black states in the South. And that plan has worked for Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So it’s a good plan—but only one of them can have it work.

Schmitt: And funny—they all three also have academic parent backgrounds. Wes Moore’s mother worked at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore.

Bacon: Funny.

Schmitt: —involved in [child welfare and social policy]. [FLAG: Schmitt’s sentence trails off; please verify what he was characterizing] I think Booker is definitely from an upper-middle-class family or a middle-class family. I can’t remember what his parents—

Bacon: Kamala’s dad was a professor, yeah.

Schmitt: Yeah.

Bacon: J.B. Pritzker—I do know a lot about him. But anyway, I’ll let you start, Mark. J.B. Pritzker.

Schmitt: Yeah, I just think he’s managed to be super popular as governor of Illinois, which is quite an accomplishment given that state’s history. He seems to just always hit the right note in relation to Trump. I think he could be a very formidable candidate. He’s one of those who seems like he’s just saying what he thinks, with a little bit of a Hey, I got all the money in the world, so I can say what I think attitude—which doesn’t really hurt. I don’t know. Lots of potential.

Bacon: One question I want to ask you, Mark—and specifically, Steyer is having this problem in California: from my understanding, progressives do—he’s got the most left-wing positions, progressives are nervous about supporting a billionaire. It sounds like that’s maybe a barrier to Senator Warren or Bernie Sanders endorsing him.

And Pritzker is trying to appeal to maybe not the hardest left, but certainly a progressive part of the party. Is being a billionaire inherently going to be disqualifying? I’m just curious what you think.

Schmitt: First, I think being an inherited billionaire—like FDR—is probably less—

Bacon: Is that what Pritzker is?

Schmitt: It’s probably less—it’s the hotels and all that. I guess he was involved in the business, but it’s really not his—and his family story is actually very tragic and very moving. So I feel like that’s different from Steyer, who was in this private equity business for most of his adult life. And Steyer’s also actually doing really well.

So—it’s no surprise that Warren doesn’t endorse him, because she’s still got her student in the race. I’m less concerned about that.

Bacon: Okay. Seth?

Masket: Yeah, I’m really curious how this will play on the suspicion-of-billionaires divide in the Democratic Party right now. Because I think there are a fair number of people, particularly in Illinois, who are just saying, Yeah, he’s a plutocrat, but he’s our plutocrat. And he seems to be playing that—he handles that pretty well. He doesn’t run from it. He just keeps saying, This gives me the freedom to say some things that others can’t. And he’s been, I think, quite good at that.

He has been way more outspoken than most prominent Democrats from the beginning of Trump’s second term—specifically calling out ICE activities when they were threatening Chicago and things like that—and he’s the one, at least rhetorically, standing up very strongly in those circumstances. So I think that gives him some legitimate credential. I agree with Mark—I think he could be a formidable candidate.

Bacon: What’d you say earlier, Mark? There’s the fight candidate—one of you said basically there’s a kind of person whose liberalism is in the fighting and not necessarily in the positions. I don’t know if Pritzker’s for the wealth tax or for Medicare for All, and I don’t think he’s probably likely to be on the sort of most policy-left. But I do think in the sort of—he’s a fighter. On the social issues, he’s very—he is actually fairly good on transgender rights, ICE, the things that—those sort of left social issues, he’s actually very strong on.

Masket: Yeah. It’s just hard for me to believe that Medicare for All is going to be the thing we’re going to be fighting over—

Bacon: I was using it as an example—

Masket: —for the 2028 president given what we’ll have gone through.

Bacon: So the final person who was at the Sharpton event, and somebody we’ve kind of referred to already—Seth, Josh Shapiro.

Masket: Man, I wish it had been my line, but I heard someone refer to him as Baruch Obama, which I think is such a great line. He is a very skilled public speaker. A lot of people see him as an Obama-like presence, but also Jewish, and also can win Pennsylvania. He was obviously, I think, a very close second in the vice-presidential sweepstakes in 2024—and who knows what would have happened if he’d been the choice. I think it would have probably been the same result.

The fact that he is literally a victim of political violence—that his house was attacked and burned—I think that’s a selling point for him among Democrats. But his stances—he’s got a complex set of stances on Israel. I think he’s been generally much more sympathetic to Israel than a lot of other prominent politicians.

I think he sensed the wind changing on that and has followed along. But that will be a tough issue, and it will come up a lot for him—that will be the first issue people want to ask him about, simply for being outspoken on it and for being Jewish. And it’ll just be an extra challenge for him.

Schmitt: Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t have any strong views about Shapiro. I found Shapiro’s little digs at Harris to be unseemly. But whatever.

Bacon: I think he might be the most willing of the people we’ve named to—I think he might actually attack the left in a more aggressive way than the other people. He seems much more anchored in moderate politics in Pennsylvania—not just on Israel, on other issues too. So if it comes down to him and Buttigieg or something like that, I’d be curious if there was an anybody but Shapiro on the sort of progressive end. I think he might be in that territory. You can get past that—but Biden actually did a good job of being progressive-friendly enough to where people were fine with him, and I don’t know if Shapiro can pull that off. But we’ll see.

Schmitt: Not if Israel remains a central issue.

Bacon: And if he takes his current stand on it, I would say, yeah.

Let’s do two more people, and then I’ll broaden it out. So the person we haven’t mentioned yet, who I think had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t come to New York, is Gavin Newsom, who is very clearly, obviously thinking of running for president. Seth, talk about Gavin Newsom.

Masket: Gavin Newsom—I’ve seen this among some people on the left, that he rubs them the wrong way. But also he’s been, I think, a success in California. Importantly, a lot of Democrats have talked pretty harsh stuff about Donald Trump over the last year and a half. Gavin Newsom is one of the few who can actually claim to have achieved something, right?

He actually pushed back on redistricting. He engineered a redistricting in California to counter what Trump pushed for in Texas and essentially neutralized that. And I think that shows, okay, he’s someone—even in a party that is not in the majority nationwide—who is capable of doing some real actions and changing national politics to a good degree. And I think he deserves some credit for that.

Beyond that, I have no idea what his appeal will be like. He obviously loves being pugnacious, loves doing lots of TV—that’ll probably help him. But he’ll always be confounded by the fact that I think a lot of people just worry a Californian is not going to be electable nationwide. Of course, they tried with Kamala Harris—a whole different set of circumstances there.

Bacon: Mark?

Schmitt: Yeah. Ronald Reagan would have something to say about that.

Masket: Wasn’t a Democrat, but yeah.

Schmitt: No, I know. Yeah. I have trouble getting past just a kind of personal aversion to Gavin Newsom. And I’ll cop to that.

Bacon: Which means that he’s too slick-looking, he doesn’t seem trustworthy—

Schmitt: Yeah. And just something about his manner, or whatever. Obviously, yes, he has been a good governor, and the redistricting was great, and he’s basically continued a line of policies—that started with Jerry Brown—that have really helped California stand out from the country in many ways.

But what I’ve noticed is he’s just—this intense experimentation—which I respect. There’s the period where he was tweeting in Donald Trump’s voice, as if that would be funny. And then there was a period where he was going on every right-wing podcast that he could find, or the looksmaxers and stuff like that.

I just feel like—which is funny, because that might be part of my aversion—I kind of respect that try-anything approach right now to American politics, because I think that’s probably a good idea. But it totally reinforces the idea that this is a guy who stands for nothing.

Bacon: Yes, I think I was going to say something like that too. He’s done pretty well this last year. He started off with the Let me have Steve Bannon on my podcast—that got a huge backlash. He was—and then he became super partisan: Trump is terrible, and even fighting him—the redistricting we talked about. He is reading the room, and I think he seems to adapt in a certain way. That’s a skill, even though we’re saying it may mean he has no core. So—

Schmitt: No, just don’t make it so obvious.

Bacon: Yes.

Schmitt: Don’t make it so obvious what you’re doing.

Perry Bacon: Yes. And the other thing about electability is, so my friends in pundit world, we study who did better in Arizona than Kamala, or who did better in Michigan, and what are those scores called? Elliot Morris writes about these scores—and there’s a debate, I can’t remember the term now. But anyway, basically how well you do above the average Democrat. A lot of talk about the—I think it’s the war score, or what some of these guys come up with.

Anyhow, that’s how my nerd friends think. My friends in real life think any white guy is more electable than any non-white guy. And I think Gavin Newsom’s still a white guy, and so I think he might do better than Elissa Slotkin on electability, unfortunately, only because he is a man and she isn’t. I think that’s not a good way to see the world, but I do think we might be entering a phase where Democrats have run two women, those two women both lost, and we may have to wait 20 years to have another female nominee—and that would advantage someone like Newsom, who’s a loudmouthed white guy.

And so the other person is AOC, and I’ll let Mark start.

Schmitt: That’s only the second woman we’ve talked about. It’s AOC. Yeah.

Bacon: No, you’re right.

Schmitt: We’ve only talked about Harris, and now we’ll talk about AOC a little bit. Yeah. I don’t know. I am just a big fan of—I’m a big fan of AOC, but also of just: just run, don’t wait, just go for it—which is in some ways what Obama did. I would love to—I think it would be fascinating if she did it. She’s an extraordinary communicator. She knows when to hold back from the farthest left—people expect her to be a little further out than she is. She’s just got a grounding in common sense and can talk to people and explain things in ways that make sense to them. I’d love to see her try it.

Bacon: Now, let me ask you. You said candidates are different and so on. I would argue pretty much everyone who voted for Sanders in 2020 would vote for AOC, and pretty much no one who didn’t vote for Sanders would vote for—we have a replay, in a certain sense. And I think that’s one where I say the lanes do seem clear, and I have a hard time seeing AOC breaking out of the Bernie vote. But I’m curious what you think about that.

Schmitt: Yeah, I think I disagree with that on two sides. There is a certain kind of Bernie vote that was a little more like a Trump vote—a certain kind of white guy, more or less working-class, the kind of Graham Platner types, right?

Bacon: Yes. That’s a good point.

Schmitt: And that’s very different from AOC’s appeal. And then I think—I think there’ll be a lot of feeling like, if you see AOC over a period of time, you’re going to feel like, Okay, I heard about her, I thought she was a little nuts, but she makes perfect sense. I think she could go well beyond the Bernie constituency.

Bacon: Seth?

Seth Masket: So AOC—it’s remarkable, she’s still so young, right? She’s, I think, 36 right now. She’s barely eligible to run for president. She has been for almost a decade now a lightning rod for the Democratic Party—she is the sort of avatar of everything Republicans hate about the Democrats. And she’s actually played that role pretty well.

I think it’s really useful to have someone like that in the House. Nancy Pelosi played that role for many years. I would generally caution against nominating your lightning rod for president. I think Hillary Clinton ran into some problems for that reason as well.

She could probably pull it off—honestly, she is, I think, one of the smartest strategists in the Democratic Party right now. She’s just very gifted with that. I think she could also have a very substantial role in the House leadership going forward if she wanted that career. She knows what she’s doing there and could really be, I think, an impressive legislative leader going forward.

So I would hate to lose her in the House for a presidential run. But it would also—like I agree with Mark—there’s a certain sense of let’s just see what happens. It would be an interesting race to follow—just whether she could make that sell to people outside New York.

Bacon: So we covered the 12 I was going to cover. So now I’m going to—

Schmitt: Hold on—I want to ask you a question about AOC.

Bacon: Sure.

Schmitt: Do you think she should run against Schumer? And would she be in a stronger position if she does run against Schumer, or if Schumer retires?

Bacon: Schumer’s behavior—

Schmitt: Oh, I’m getting a little mixed up, because that would be ‘28 also.

Bacon: So my perception is that Schumer is acting like someone who’s not going to run for another term. And so at that point, AOC would have a better chance of winning a Senate seat, obviously. I don’t think the Wall Street crowd is going to be eager to have Senator AOC, so it’s not going to be a cakewalk either. And so I anticipate her running for the Senate—that’s what I think. There’s an open seat, a potentially open seat there. You become a senator and you wait and then run for president later. That’s what I expect.

But if we’re in an attention economy and we’re in a place where being skilled as a communicator is the most important thing, she’s obviously better than most of who we’ve talked about. And I think—when I asked your question about her appeal—I think she would do worse with maybe the Graham Platner vote. I think she’ll do better with young Latinos and African Americans compared to what Sanders did in 2020 and 2016, obviously.

So my round robin—and I’m now, this is the end. We’re going to end here by just saying: I’m going to give a list of a bunch of people, and if you guys are interested in any of them, we can talk through them, or just bring them up. Rahm Emanuel is going everywhere and doing pretty much everything—I don’t know who’s going to vote for him. I’m certainly not going to.

Chris Murphy has been early, I think he’s really named himself. Elissa Slotkin has gone to New Hampshire and done some of the hinting about running. Stephen Colbert pretty much announced himself to Barack Obama the other day, and that was funny—and I think there might be room for an outsider person, and he’s going to be unemployed soon.

Jon Ossoff is getting a lot of buzz in Georgia. I think Raphael Warnock would also be a pretty good candidate as well. And then Gretchen Whitmer—as a two-term governor of a swing state—she is not acting like she wants to run, but I think it’s relevant that she’s a two-term governor of that state, and the gender thing we talked about earlier might apply to her.

Anybody—any of those you guys want to talk about, or anything else you want to mention about this process as we’re getting to the end here?

Schmitt: I think Murphy’s interesting to me. When you think about somebody like him, a lot will depend on if the Democrats take the Senate. He’s really good at some of the oversight stuff, he’s on good committees. He’ll be able to elevate his profile enormously, and that’s a variable we haven’t talked about. If the Democrats don’t win the Senate and the only side with subpoena power is the House, then you could see—that’s where Ro Khanna or AOC could really have a huge impact.

Bacon: Seth?

Masket: Yeah—similar feelings about Rahm Emanuel, just because I still don’t understand how he has won some elections before. Because—we talked about being that candidate who has relatively moderate stances but is seen as a fighter. His whole thing is pure belligerence, right? And some of that is directed against the Trump administration, and that would help him. But it’s also against everyone.

I don’t think he’ll win a lot of friends nationally among Democrats there. It would be an entertaining one to watch. And so in that sense, I look forward to it.

Bacon: Any dark horse among either the people I named or anybody else that you all think we should name in this conversation?

Masket: I think Ossoff is undervalued as a candidate here. Right now he’s been making a pretty good name for himself. He’s done a lot of national media lately, and he’s honed, I think, a very strong message. Arguably that’s just a way to raise money nationally for his Senate reelection bid.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if he was thinking seriously about a presidential run in ‘28, maybe in ‘32. Maybe he’s thinking about being a VP candidate. But anyone who’s won two Senate races, I’d say, automatically puts themselves in the presidential material category. And he’s getting the name recognition for it.

Schmitt: Yeah, I think that’s the only one I would name of the ones that you named—that’s the one I would point to. And also, it’s not just like—what do candidates think they’re going to do? It’s people coming to them and saying, You should do this, and that could be donors, it could be other leaders. I feel like I’m seeing people say that—not necessarily people with that level of influence—but it certainly happened for Obama, when Harry Reid said, You should do this. It’s not just in his own head. So I think the encouragement that different candidates are going to get will matter a lot.

Bacon: So last question. People are describing this as a very wide-open race, so let me ask it this way: have we named the Democratic nominee in this discussion? Do you think one of the—we’ve named and discussed about 20 people. Do you think it’s so wide open that we’ve missed them among the 20, or do you think it’s wide open but within a certain range of people we’ve discussed here?

Masket: We have probably named the nominee. But I agree—it’s also wide open in a way that it hasn’t been in a very long time. There is no obvious heir apparent. The last president and vice president went out in kind of an unpopular way, and it’s not clear who they would even be supporting at this point if it came down to that.

One thing I think we might want to think about—I don’t like thinking about this—but Graham Platner may well be a senator a year from now. And yeah, he’d be a first-term senator, but he’s this sort of come-from-nowhere populist, and that—

Bacon: Isn’t James Talarico the better answer to this question than Graham Platner, if that’s where you’re going?

Masket: Possibly.

Bacon: Talarico may not win—he’s got a lower chance of winning.

Masket: No, he could win too, yeah. But yeah, could go either way. But suddenly Platner could be the big sensation that everyone’s got their eyes on, who can win over some conservative voters. And the Nazi tattoo business might get lost in the noise there. But yeah, he would not be that much less experienced, say, than Barack Obama was when he first ran for president.

Schmitt: Barack Obama had—whatever years in the Senate, I’m going to say—

Masket: —legislative experience—

Schmitt: Yes. Nothing.

Bacon: So Mark, did we name the person in this, or not? Is there—

Schmitt: I think odds are we have. I don’t think Platner would—I wouldn’t—I would think it’s more likely that people just try to imitate Platner. So Josh Shapiro starts talking like Platner, without the Nazi tattoo. Rather than him being the candidate. But I also think—in two—so much terrible stuff could happen in the next two years that could totally scramble things. And—

Bacon: Yeah.

Schmitt: —somebody could emerge either out of Congress or out of a courageous stand they take within the military or something like that—who suddenly appears on the stage. I don’t know. It’s not like the last two years of the Bush administration where we just floated downstream into disaster. It’s just going to be much more dramatic.

Bacon: And with that, we’ll close this off. Thank you guys for joining me. Tell everybody where they can find your work—Mark and then Seth—where they can find you on social media, on websites and other things like that.

Schmitt: I’ve got newamerica.org—go to the Political Reform program. We’re putting out a bunch of stuff recently, some of which I’ve written, some of which my colleagues have written. I’m on Bluesky as mschmitt9, and I do post on Substack occasionally. I’ve got a bunch of drafts sitting there, so maybe they’ll go up soon.

Bacon: And then Seth, you’re going to be doing a lot of stuff. Let’s talk about the book stuff.

Masket: Yeah, definitely. You can always find me on Substack—again, the name of the newsletter is the SMOTUS Report. You can find that at smotus.substack.com. And yeah, I also have this book coming out next month called The Elephants in the Room. It’s about the Republican nomination of Donald Trump in ‘24, and how the party got to that point. So I’ll be doing a number of events to the extent I can to promote the book, and you can watch for that. There’s also a link to buy it if you want to pre-order it on my Substack site.

Bacon: All right. Great conversation. Good to see you guys, and thanks for joining.

Schmitt: Nice talking to both of you. Thanks.

Masket: Thanks, Perry. See you, Mark.