Transcript: Why Insurgent Candidates Are Thriving in the Midwest
Similar in 2018, you have Tammy Baldwin, the other senator from Wisconsin, winning her Senate race by 11 percent, while Tony Evers, when he was first running as a challenger against Scott Walker, was only elected by 1 percent. And you could argue that Baldwin was more progressive, relatively, than Evers. And similarly, in 2024, Baldwin won her Senate race by 1 percent, and Kamala Harris lost the state to Trump by 1 percent. I think that provides a little bit of context.
Especially recently, we’re talking about very small differences. I think incumbency is a bigger factor, and there’s no incumbent in this case. And something that we haven’t really talked about yet, but I think we will—midterms are very much about turnout, and having people enthusiastic about supporting the vision of the candidate and the party.
And to the extent that different people respond differently to the candidates and the parties and the conditions, a lot of the potential effects would be offsetting. Some things that might turn off a handful of voters can be things that other voters are more enthusiastic about. It makes them want to turn out more.
Shenker-Osorio: What I would add is that, on Barnes-Evers specifically, Barnes three weeks out from the election was minus nine. And in a three-week sprint, which I would argue was a decidedly different campaign than what had preceded it, managed to make up eight points to lose by one—which is still losing, and as we know in politics, there’s only winning and losing.
But the campaign that he was running previously, when he got to minus nine, was a campaign that was very much, perhaps ironically, controlled by a very old-school, stalwart, you’ve-got-to-be-centrist campaign model that was foisted upon him from the DSCC, the people holding the purse strings—excuse me—Chuck Schumer.
And in particular, Barnes was met with really horrifying, really ugly—I call it Willie Horton on steroids—tough-on-crime attacks that were bought and paid for by Wisconsin’s very own homegrown billionaires. There was a state level of the badness to prop up Ron Johnson.
And instead of recognizing that there’s no such thing as race neutral in American politics—because the right, at the very least, is never ever going to shut up about race, and so even if you don’t care from a moral perspective, which, by the way, is my view, you just care from a strategic perspective, that just doesn’t exist, because those racialized attacks are occurring in voters’ faces for the campaign.
And so if you clap back with an ad with your candidate making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—which perhaps is the most offensive thing that could happen in Wisconsin, when obviously the man could have been making beer brats, at the very least. If you’re going to pander, let’s pander, Wisconsin. Nathan and I are both from Wisconsin, and therefore deeply offended by the peanut butter and je—well, I’m not going to speak for Nathan.
Bacon: Speak for him. Sure.
Shenker-Osorio: But you just can’t clap back against evil with vacuousness.
Bacon: So now I’m eager to know what happened in the last three weeks. I’m waiting on the edge of my seat, even though I covered this, I think.
Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. Again, not objective, because—
Bacon: You were working with him.
Shenker-Osorio: Not objective. But from my view, he began to actually clap back and to actually say, Look, they have the same one trick in the book that all authoritarians do—not that he said authoritarian, that’s my wording—They want you to point your finger at me. They want to divide us. They want to have us at odds. They want to scare you about me, because they know that I’m the one that’s actually going to try to make life better for you and do something about these billionaires that are financing these attacks.
There is, I would argue, a formula to how you clap back, and he began to be more honest and forthright, some would say aggressive—which was advice he had been given not to do, because you’re going to look, and I’m sorry to say it, but like—
Bacon: He’s a Black candidate, so you can’t seem aggressive. Sorry, I’ll just say it and help you make it.
Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, thanks, Perry, for being my Black man anger translator. So, was that the reason? I don’t know. But that happened, that occurred.
And then, I think more broadly, to Nathan’s final point about midterms being different elections—this is where he didn’t want to torture you, even though he is a professor, with Stats 101. But you have to remember—for those who, it was long enough ago—if you’re only polling, you’re only surveying registered voters, by definition you are over-indexing to the people who are reliable, habitual voters.
And in midterms—Mike Podhorzer has pointed this out many times—if you were to look at a graph of participation in every midterm and look at every year, it’s in this narrow band. It’s this year, and then you have 2018. And 2018 is a leap larger than any previous leap, except for when we granted women the vote.
Meaning we actually altered who could participate. We have not seen a jump between two different midterms that large previously, except in that instance, which I think is pretty explicable. And so what is the point of that story? The point of that story is that the name of the game really is, are we bringing new voters—meaning people who’ve just aged into the electorate—and new voters meaning people who have been like, A plague on both your houses. I don’t care about any of this. Please turn it off. I am not interested—into the electorate.
And so the question really is, who are the candidates that can do that, in a year in which the name of the game is throw the bastards out? And by the bastards, MAGA. And that is really what is drawing in a lot of these either new or non-habitual voters, or non-habitual midterm. It’s really a desire to beat Republicans.
And so even with my unobjective view about Hong and about El-Sayed—what’s going to happen in this election, fingers crossed, is that Republicans will lose. Notice that I’d say Republicans will lose, not Democrats will win. And we have a two-party system, so that’s the same thing. But I really do mean Republicans will lose.
Bacon: I want to come back to that before we finish, but let me move to—we’ve talked about Michigan mostly, but in general, Wisconsin is happening next week. We don’t know the results. We do know Hong is leading, and that one is more surprising. I knew Abdul had run before, and I knew he was a strong candidate, even if he had a base, even if he didn’t think he was going to win.
Hong—I didn’t know much about her. She’s a state rep. She’s an actual socialist, which I thought would be a bug, not a feature, in Wisconsin. So talk about that campaign. Nathan, you’re there. What has happened there? What does that race tell you—about also this weird thing where Tony Evers, like, grabs someone off the street to run again, for whatever reason? What, in some ways, has this race told you about the Democratic Party?
Kalmoe: Crowley isn’t quite off the street, but—
Bacon: But he was out of the campaign, and, anyway, I get the point. Yes.
Kalmoe: He dropped out, and establishment person dropped out, and then Crowley was in, and Evers had endorsed the guy who was out but now is in. It’s been a little bit chaotic these last couple of weeks. And now Barnes is out too.
I think big picture, Hong has been really hammering home the ways that government can help people. And I think that’s been meeting people’s needs, not in a sort of affordability in a really micro sense, but in a more profound way. And it’s not really about policy proposals, necessarily. Policies are basically the heuristic, the sort of, like, the gesture towards, I have a plan to help the people that I say that I’m going to help, and to live up to the values that I’m putting forward.
Bacon: If you don’t mind, just to zero in—because she’s probably not running on free buses and a rent freeze, because it’s not New York. So what is she—she’s doing a sort of practical campaign, like Zohran, but with different issues. Can you name some of the issues?
Kalmoe: Yeah, education, healthcare. Anat, you can go ahead.
Bacon: No, go ahead, Anat. Yes.
Shenker-Osorio: Big on $20 minimum wage, temporary moratorium on data centers, and then there’s a third one, because she knows that three is cognitive good.
Bacon: So go ahead, Nathan. All right, that’s helpful. Go ahead, Nathan, about what’s going on there.
Kalmoe: Yeah. Another sort of big picture factor is that, unlike Michigan, there was really a large number of Democrats who were running, and multiple candidates who really fit the more or less more establishment. And Hong really stood out as somebody who was pushing back against that and really emphasizing this change narrative and the fight narrative. And so I think part of the story is the lack of coordination.
I think there were certainly preferred candidates, but they couldn’t unite behind one candidate early enough to really give her a run for her money. And I think part of that is there were low expectations for her ability to generate real enthusiasm among Democrats.
And I think actually the biggest argument against her right now is really—other Democrats have basically conceded that the kinds of ideas that she’s putting forward are what Democratic voters here in Wisconsin want, the values and the vision. And really, their main argument is an electability argument. They say—
Bacon: She really doesn’t shy from calling herself a socialist, mostly, right?
Kalmoe: Yep. And it’s been remarkable that they basically have given up on the substantive argument. And I hear this from people who cross the ideological spectrum, if we want to use that, after I just poo-pooed that. But people with a wide range of ideas about politics are approaching this with, I think, trepidation, because so many of us have learned—from maybe not in elementary school, but from maybe college classes, from the scholars that we hear in the news and the news media—the pundit messages are all embracing this idea of the median voter. And this myth that everybody’s going to vote, everybody has strong preferences about policy and about ideology, and you can only win if you win over the median voter. And forgetting about turnout entirely.
And basically, that entire model is false. This has been around since the mid-20th century. A guy named Anthony Downs, scholar, put this forward in An Economic Theory of Democracy, and it’s not all his fault, but people took the idea and ran with it, and I think fundamentally misunderstand politics as a result.
So lots of Democrats have absorbed this conventional wisdom that I think is dangerously wrong about how elections are won and lost, and how people think about politics when they’re making these choices.
And so I think Hong’s support would actually be quite a bit higher if not for people who are saying, You know what? I really want to support her, but I’m worried about the—can she actually win? And we can’t guarantee that she’s going to win. It looks like she’s going to be the nominee. But the electability arguments are based on lots of misunderstandings, and really, I don’t see a way that she’s less electable than the other candidates who are running.
Bacon: I want to ask Anat about Wisconsin, but let me ask one thing before that, Anat. I read a piece by Astead Herndon—worked at The New York Times for a while, he’s now at Vox—and the piece argued that the story we’re telling about this election is like, the left candidates, or the progressives, or the insurgents, whatever the term we’re going to use, are innovating and doing really well. And he argued the actual story is the other side—establishment, whatever—they have nothing to say. And that’s what the real issue is.
What is Haley Stevens running on would be hard to answer. What were all these people in Wisconsin running on, beyond electability, would be hard to answer. Is that a big part of it, that the one side has things they have to say that they are proud to say, and one side has pablum? Is that actually the story that’s happening?
Shenker-Osorio: I have so many things to say at once. That’s part of it. Part of it is actually—
Bacon: You can’t be something with nothing, and they have nothing, is like—anyway, I’ll let you start it out. Yeah.
Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. There’s the mechanics of the way that they are running, which is really notable in Hong’s case, and I’m happy to talk about that one second. And, for example, the sort of marquee people that famously just swept various New York races—talking about Brad, I’m talking about…
So to put it in sort of simple, crass terms: when you don’t have to spend as much, or even any, of your time doing call time—which is famously what candidates are required to do for a certain number of hours a week, sometimes even a day, calling donors to be like, Hi, I’d like some more of that sweet cash—then you have more time to be out in the world. And the number of person-hours that Hong has spent, the number of person-hours that Mamdani spent, the number of person-hours that those other New York candidates spent, is just more time.
And one mainstay that people reported back to me—and this is anecdotal—in New York, is they would just be like, “I don’t know. He was just everywhere. I would be dropping my kids off and there’d be Brad Lander,” or, I’d be like at a picnic and there’d be Brad Lander. And, I’ve lived in this district for however long and I’ve never seen my elected representative. I’ve literally never seen him, so I don’t know what he’s doing, and he’s been the representative for however long.
And so one of the things that Hong did, which is a really interesting model—there’s a Wisconsin consultant named Josh Clemens who does, like, down-down-down-ballot races. He also worked digital consultant for Dan Osborn, and he calls it the backbone model. And I won’t go into all the details, but basically, Fran was relatively unknown.
You said it yourself, obviously you’re out of state, but she was a state representative from the east side of Madison, and in the rest of Wisconsin she wasn’t a big name. She had almost no money, and somehow she went from this kind of real outlier, just in terms of the pragmatics of how you’re supposed to run a campaign and what you’re supposed to need, to becoming this front-runner. And a big piece of that was that after she was elected as a state rep, unlike everyone else, she didn’t turn off her digital advertising machine.
She kept serving ads at a very low rate, but they weren’t ads. They weren’t traditional political advertising that was like, Stop right now. It’s about to be the whatever quarter, and we need this much money. The most important vote ever is happening. It would be like her at a fish fry, or her hanging out with people, or—AOC is famous for this—doing a sort of get ready with me, or doing a behind-the-scenes, “We just took a vote, this is what actually happens in Congress,” or Mamdani doing a scavenger hunt.
So there’s a big difference between political advertising and content—and making content that people actually want to watch, that doesn’t, on the face of it, look political, but actually is a get to know you, establishes a brand. It establishes a relationship. Because the mistake that these mainstream consultants have been making—forget ideology for a second—
Bacon: Or even policy. OK.
Shenker-Osorio: They have misunderstood, I would argue, the practice of politics, as being: hold all of your money, hold all of your fire until sort of October, because most voters are low information, they’re paying no attention—that’s true—and do endless RCT, randomized control trial testing, and come up with a spreadsheet of, this ad did best, this ad did best, this ad did best, this ad did best. None of those ads together tell a story. This one is about healthcare, this one is about the—this one is about taxes, this one is about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and there is no establishment of a story and a brand.
That does not work, because in reality, the way that people make political decisions, especially low information people, is on the basis of an impressionistic feeling and whether or not they get a sense of belonging, whether or not the people in their milieu are also—the guy, to take the New York example: my bodega owner keeps talking about this Mamdani guy. I don’t know who he is, but it seems like the bodega owner’s really into him.
And so in Hong’s case—not a lot of bodegas, some in Madison, some in Milwaukee, but for the most part—it’s like she shows up to things. She does content, not advertising. She has been doing this the entire time she was in office. She’s running a better campaign.
And so with that, that means that she is going to run a better campaign for the general election, because that is what she has been doing. And does that mean that I’m sure she’s going to win? I’m not sure of anything. I’m not sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, but that is a good indicator. I maybe have wandered away from your question unintentionally. I get very passionate about this.
Bacon: I have even forgotten what my question was, but that’s OK. But I like the answer, and I feel like it was very informative. Oh, I did—the question was along the lines of: is the story of the last year and a half, New York campaign, these campaigns, that the insurgent candidates are running well, which you explained very well? Or that the mainstream candidates are running blandly, which you didn’t get into as much, but they’re not doing the things you talk about?
I think the answer to the question is yes, but I was just trying to—is the story here that politicians are behaving well, or are politicians behaving boringly? And that’s what I’m trying to tease out, what’s driving the results here.
Shenker-Osorio: Part of it is boring. Part of it is, the piece of advice that I give to everyone the world over, that is the most obvious statement that I ever make but somehow cannot be internalized by most people, is that a message that nobody hears, by definition, cannot persuade them.
And so when they are perfectly calibrating these 80-word or 100-word statements that are crafted toward this median voter, or whatever the name of Chuck Schumer’s make-believe family. I don’t know, they’re so boring to me, I can’t remember their names.
Bacon: I can’t remember their names, yes. I’ve read this article a few times. Yes.
Shenker-Osorio: I can’t remember their names, this made-up family he is pitching to—which is perfect, both literally and as a metaphor for everything. Nobody hears what you’re saying, because politics, modern life, is such a cacophony that if you are not actually saying—when you’re Mamdani, you’re questioned about, you’ve said you’re going to tax the rich, you’re going to tax the rich, you’re going to tax the rich, and so you’re asked on The View, people are saying that you’re anti-billionaire, and instead of demurring, he says, “I don’t think billionaires should exist.”
Part of wanting to get heard is that you actually have to say something that makes people go, “What?” and stop scrolling. And you have to recognize that if you’re running a campaign, there’s going to be conflict. You’re going to be attacked by the people who oppose you.
And so rather than get freaked out by that, you have to figure out how to turn that back into a way to keep talking about your issues. You have to remember the rule of three. You have to make it seem like voting for you could make a tangible difference in people’s lives, rather than just simply belabor their problems.
And the problem with the standard Democratic practice, which seems to be that they think they’re on an episode of Price Is Right, and they just keep saying, Can you see how expensive this is? Can you see how expensive this is? Can you see how expensive this is?—I guess because this is the first time they’ve ever been to a grocery store and not had a helper do it for them, they’re suddenly clued in.
People don’t need you to tell them how expensive things are. They actually shop for themselves. They know. So what they need is to feel like voting for you could resolve that problem, if only a little bit. It’s not enough just to name the problem.
And so yeah, it’s about not being boring. It’s about being able to actually present something. And it’s about demonstrating that you’re actually going to fight back, because if you won’t fight back, how will you make any of these things into law?
Bacon: I’m going to close with a tweet—I’m on X, so this is an X comment from a professor. His name is Keith Oragel—I hope I’m pronouncing his name right—but I like what he said, so I’m going to read it to you. “Yes, if it’s a massive blue wave and Dems win everywhere but El-Sayed and Hong lose, then lefties will have to face some real tough realities about electability in swing states. But that has not happened, and I remain optimistic they will win.”
And so the question I want to get at is, are these—like Wisconsin and Michigan, if the two candidates we’re talking about win—are these really high stakes races, in this way he’s implying? Is the AOC presidential campaign, or the Ro Khanna one, kind of dependent upon the results here? So talk about these campaigns and what the implications of them are. I’ll start with you, Nathan.
Kalmoe: Yeah. So, good question. Obviously, people are going to—people always take election results and interpret them, often in ways that reinforce the way they already thought. This is going to sound like a dodge, but I think we’re going to learn a lot about what is possible from a range of elections this year. But no one election is really definitive as to whether things made a difference or not, because you don’t ever get to see the counterfactual, right?
We will never see—assuming, let’s say, Hong gets the nomination in Wisconsin—we’ll never see Barnes or Crowley or Boyd or others in a similar position. And we can speculate, but we don’t really have strong evidence to suggest otherwise.
So really, what Grumbach and Bonica are doing in their analysis, it’s hard to wrap our minds around, because these individual cases are so salient. But really, you have to look at the constellation of all the results to find these what would be small differences, but actually it turns out are really, really quite small.
I think the best evidence that would be more definitive from these elections is if Hong, El-Sayed, and others who are similar do as well as we would expect a standard Democrat to do. I think that’s a really strong proof of concept for progressive candidates, for progressive groups. Again, it sounds like a dodge, but if they lose and it’s close, and it’s basically where we would expect a standard Democrat to perform, I don’t think that is a definitive knock against their candidate or the ideas or the vision that they’re putting forward.
Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, two things. One, Fran Hong is a working-class candidate. Not a cosplay, not a make-believe—she grew up in her parents’ restaurants, not for funsies, but because that is what they needed in order to survive. She didn’t finish college, so that she could go home and help her parents work in that restaurant, which she eventually became a restaurateur herself. She has famously held two jobs, both on the Capitol Square: the restaurant, which is located there, and the state legislature, which is also located there.
So I guess if she loses, we can conclude that actually people don’t want working-class candidates. But that’s not what we’re going to conclude, is it? Because somehow Graham Platner is manna from the heavens when he is a cosplaying fisherman, but she is not. So that’s just my little snark aside.
My non-snark aside, or non-aside, is that this electability conversation is, in and of itself—to the extent that voters, that normie voters are paying attention to anything that it is we are saying, and thank God they are not, because they are too low information to be inside baseball—it is itself detrimental to the cause of getting Democrats elected, period. And that is because, again, people do the thing they think people like them do.
And so if low information people are inhabiting a milieu, like they did largely speaking in 2018, where the vibe and the thing to do and what everyone believes and is doing is, I’m going to go, I’m going to vote even though I never do in midterms, or I never do, period, and I’m going to get rid of these MAGA bastards, then that’s what other people do.
And that is in fact the dominant discourse that we require—whether that is to elect a Fran Hong, or whether that is to elect a Dan Goldman, whomever—is, voters are turning out in record numbers. Your vote is your ice whistle, blow it. Your vote is your gas bill, lower it. Your vote is your healthcare premium, slash it. Your vote is your body, protect it. And that’s what people like me do.
And so shame on the people who are introducing an argument that Democrats could possibly lose. That is a silly thing to do, across the board. It is not something we should be doing for moderate candidates. It’s not something we should be doing for insurgent candidates. We need to be reinforcing the behavior that we actually desire.
Bacon: I want to repeat that just so the audience makes sure they hear it. I would not vote for Haley Stevens, Perry Bacon, but I am not going around saying Haley Stevens cannot win, because I want Haley Stevens to win if she is the nominee. So I’m not saying she’s a weirdo people wouldn’t vote for, because I want people to vote for her if necessary.
So please, if you’re listening, whatever centrist you are, saying you don’t agree with Abdul on policy, don’t vote for him—in the primary, that’s fine. Abdul is a weirdo who can’t win the general election is not helpful. Please stop saying this. Particularly since the Muslim candidate particularly is going to be hurt worse by the sort of vague “unelectable,” what have you, things.
We’ve got to get away from this kind of discourse. I’ve been trying to write a lot about saying, having every primary be about electability is problematic. And I’d much rather—even Israel policy, while being divisive, is still not a divide that is suggesting if you vote for this person, it is not normal to do.
We want people to think voting for the Democratic candidate is normal, no matter which one they are, and I don’t know how we get out of this. I guess I’ll ask you about this: is there a way to get out of the primaries being about electability?
I guess that’s easy for the sort of progressive to say that, but is there a way to—I’m not a centrist, but is there a way to get centrists to run on centrism, as opposed to the progressives are weird? Because the progressives are weird is a toxic argument.
Kalmoe: Yeah. I just wanted to reinforce what Anat was saying, that Democrats, if they want to win, need to stop being so terrified about what Republicans are going to say about them, and really focus on what they say about themselves and make Republicans afraid of what we’re going to say about them. Because they’re running as extremists, insurrectionists, people who support pedophiles. It’s pretty shocking to come up against them and feel like we’re the ones who should be afraid of what they’re going to say about us.
Shenker-Osorio: Is there a way to make them stop? No. And I think the fact that they will not stop is them telling on themselves. Because—
Bacon: They might prefer to lose than to win without being in charge. So they might prefer to lose than to, yeah.
Shenker-Osorio: That’s the even meaner version, which I agree with. If you can’t run on your actual policies, if you can’t run on—what do we want, incremental change? When do we want it? Whenever I get around to it. If that can’t be your campaign slogan, which shockingly, even, you know, it can’t be then the only thing you can run on is, that person can’t win.
Kalmoe: Yes.
Shenker-Osorio: And so that has to be their campaign message, because the thing that they are actually selling themselves is, unfortunately, a lighter version of what voters are not that into. And so that’s what they got. And regardless, even still, this is a wave year. It is going to be a blue tsunami. This may be the Berkeley, or the Bay Area, in me, but you need to speak into existence the thing you want to occur—not for woo-woo reasons, but because humans are primates, we are social creatures, and we do the thing that people like us do.
And so what people like us are going to do, come November, is send these pedophile protectors, this MAGA murder regime of the bullies for the billionaires, packing, to try to save our own lives. That is what we are going to do, and that is what we should be saying.
Kalmoe: And it’s not going to be just the advertising that does that. It’s really—politics is relational and social, and it’s all of you out there talking to your friends, and them talking to their friends, and knocking on doors, that is going to make the difference.
Bacon: Nathan, Anat, thanks for joining me. Great place to end on. Good to see you all.
Shenker-Osorio: Great to see you.
Kalmoe: Thank you. Thanks, Perry.
