If only—it looks like Sliwa’s number dropped a lot, and it was like a two-man race. It appears Zohran’s gonna be about 50 and Cuomo around 42. So what do you make of—so the polling was mostly like 45, 35, 15. So what do you make of the results?
Shephard: I think that there was some, certainly, hope—talking to people in the Mamdani orbit earlier today—that there would be this kind of decisive mandate that would emerge from this.
And what they were looking for was an opportunity to essentially tell people to shut up when they said, like, oh, you know, you didn’t do enough. I think, you know, the kind of arbitrary standard for that is clearing 50%. It looks like he’s gonna probably be around there.
That said, I think that Cuomo’s performance here was strong enough, particularly in eroding support from Sliwa—which, you know, is sort of an accomplishment when you consider how many Republicans in New York State despise Andrew Cuomo and have despised him for many, many years.
I still think that the larger story here is that, you know, a 34-year-old Muslim who was born in Uganda, who no one had heard of a year ago, ran a, you know, just an incredible campaign here, inspired people, and activated voters who do not vote normally. And I think, in a lot of ways—well, I’ll have piece in our upcoming issue that’s about some of this—but he did all the things that people wanted Harris and Biden to do, right? He brought back Latino voters. He brought back Asian voters. He brought back young voters.
He was able to kind of go anywhere and talk to anyone. He did it with a very Bernie Sanders–y sort of message discipline—it’s very hard to knock him off his game. And I think that, you know, the story here is gonna be, well, what happens now? And I think that the party establishment, by keeping him at arm’s length for so long, has set him up to fail.
And I think that—I think the tension there is gonna reverberate in a lot of different ways. You saw this with Spanberger’s comments earlier. You know, looking at that race from afar, Spanberger’s message was not super different from Zohran, right? Zohran’s promises themselves are really, really small, right?
A free bus is not, you know, even a chicken in every pot—it’s a free bus. And, you know, Spanberger also talked about affordability issues, but when it came time to talk about him, she was like, oh no, this guy is, you know, beyond the pale. He is totally different.
And I think the party establishment is gonna have to kind of wake up to the fact that the energy right now is still all around these kind of left-populist insurgent candidates. So, you know, they can maybe weather out storms in places like Michigan in these primaries, but it doesn’t change the fact that what people are still looking for—we know from this race that it doesn’t matter—but what people are still looking for is enthusiasm.
Dynamism—things that were lacking in 2024. Mamdani had those things. He’s gonna win, you know, by a smaller margin. The party establishment is gonna crow tomorrow, and they’re gonna be wrong.
Bacon: Monica, what do you think about that?
Potts: Yeah, I think that’s right. And also, I would say that this was a citywide mayoral election, and Mamdani had almost the entire Democratic establishment sort of against him.
And so he ran anyway. And you know what? I thought Democrats were paying more attention to that race—and Republicans were paying more attention to that race—than the governor’s race in Virginia and the governor’s race in New Jersey. And so, you know, I think that the fact that he overcame that, despite that opposition really from everywhere, just showed how excited people were. And like Alex said, he ran a fantastic campaign. It was just really incredibly engaging, and it hit a lot of notes that people wanted to hear.
So, you know, a lot of his promises were stuff that other cities do—like free buses. That’s not a radical idea. A lot of cities have free buses around the world. But, you know, he has a lot of opposition in the state of New York.
Some of those things are gonna be harder to accomplish, but I think whether voters give him a bit of a pass for trying is something we’ll see. You know, they wanted somebody to champion their ideas, and how much he can bring to pass might not be necessarily something that they hold against him, as long as he’s earnestly trying and making headway on those things.
Bacon: I wanna zone on three things—three Democratic leaders. Over the weekend, or the last seven days, I think Hillary Clinton was asked somewhere, gave an answer that was asked about Jewish resident safety—and kind of a non-answer.
Schumer spent the last few days literally declaring he would not say who he voted for—kind of running away in a press conference— won’t say who he voted for. Barack Obama did this weird thing where, I guess, he leaked off his staff or—there was a phone call in The New York Times in which Obama said congratulations—congratulated Mamdani—and said he wanted to help him, but there was no public endorsement.
And so that was also bizarre. So what do you make of, like—so, of, of those—any of those three actions?
Shephard: I mean, I think that it—it points to a party that is still living in fear of taking any action that could get put on a mailer. Like, I think it’s not even just, you know, the sort of cowardice or lack of principle involved here—it’s that it’s an outdated way of thinking. They are—they are convinced that if they can somehow keep or maintain rhetorical distance from Mamdani, that it somehow won’t come back to bite them.
That’s not gonna happen, right? Mamdani is gonna be a focal point of Republican attacks in the next year. There is going to be a concerted effort, I think, by the Trump administration, but also by forces within this—New York City—probably the NYPD. Zohran’s actually, I think, walked a pretty fine tightrope with them so far.
But I think that people will be looking to see what happens there. But I think, in general, what we’ve seen, you know, is just an establishment that remains terrified of taking any kind of risk. They remain really scared of embracing people with new ideas, and I think that they’re always worried about how actions will come back to haunt them in some way.
But in this instance, I think what people are seeing—what a lot of the young voters, people of color who turned out here in New York are seeing—is a candidate who listened to them, who paid attention to them in the way that Democrats haven’t.
And I do think that if they throw him to the wolves—which is what I think that they are planning on doing—that that will come back to bite them in 2026 too.
Bacon: So your point essentially is like Mamdani is one of the most famous Democrats in the country now. He’s part of the team whether they want him or not, they should help him succeed. And their current posture here is basically rooting for him to fail. Is that what you’re getting at?
Shephard: I mean, I think that the—the point here—I think the general point of this race—is that Democrats everywhere are winning, and that Democrats everywhere are activated.
And I think that pushing that kind of enthusiasm is the way to win. And it’s gonna look like Abigail Spanberger probably in more places than it looks like Zohran Mamdani, and it looks somewhere in between in some other places too. But, you know, the party’s insistence on kneecapping those people is something that, you know, consistently hurts them.
It hurt them in 2024, right? I think that the decision by the Harris campaign to kind of modulate its rhetoric on Gaza while still refusing, for instance, to give them even a symbolic, non-televised speaking appearance at the DNC actually really did resonate for a lot of people. I think what people wanted to see, one, was that the Democratic Party had space for them—that they weren’t gonna be told to shut up about Gaza, or trans issues, or, you know, $15 minimum wage, whatever it is—that they didn’t wanna be condescended to in this way.
And that Democrats have consistently pushed the same kind of message, right? Which is that the stakes are too important for you to care about that—you need to trust us.
Right. We’re gonna sort of moderate to speak to this kind of hypothetical voter, and then we’ll win. Well, you know, certainly when I talk to people now—and this is, I think, the core difference between now and 2018—is that people are pissed off, and they don’t trust the Democrats because the Democrats keep saying, we know how to win, right?
We’ve picked these people—you know, we designed them in a lab to win. They don’t win, right? So, Graham Platner—like, he might have a Nazi tattoo, which is crazy and bad—but he can speak to people, right?
And I think that what the party hasn’t shown is any sense of humility that is interested in actually learning from these people or embracing them, especially in places where they can win.
Potts: Yeah, I think that’s right. You know, it is in the interest of Democrats for Mamdani to be able to deliver on some of his promises, because they wanna show that the Democratic Party can deliver things that they say that they’re gonna deliver on. You know, it’s important.
We haven’t talked about Katie Wilson in Seattle, but she’s another challenger to the left. We won’t find out about her race tonight on the East Coast, but, you know, it’s important that affordable housing is built in cities where Democratic voters are struggling to be able to pay their rents and can’t buy houses. It’s important for the Democratic Party to kind of get behind these ideas.
And I think that the other, you know, component of it is that, whatever happens—no matter who is elected anywhere in the country—the Republican Party is exceptionally skilled at painting the entire party as who they see as their most extreme members. They are good at attacks; they are good at political attacks, and the Democrats are terrified of it.
And they—I think they need to find a way to just say, you know, these are the positive things that we believe, that we believe that they can deliver for voters, without being so scared about that.
Bacon: Are we talking about one party or two parties? Like, are—I guess you all are describing a situation in which there’s a big party, and it’s socialist in New York City, but it’s moderate in Virginia, and it’s somewhere between in New Jersey, and so on.
I get the sense there can be a lot of people who are Democrats who are openly rooting against Mamdani—or privately, for sure. Same thing with Spanberger. If you’re more progressive—like, when I go on Twitter, I do not see people who seem to be in the same party. I see people who, like, maybe hate their intra-party rivals more than Trump.
Are we describing that accurately? Is the pro-Israel person in New York hoping he succeeds? I don’t think they are.
Shephard: No, I think you might be actively rooting against it, but—and I think that’s a problem. I think it’s a problem on the other side too, right? I think that there’s a desire for priors to be confirmed here. And the larger environment right now kind of suggests that everyone’s priors are being confirmed, which is, generally speaking, I think, a really good sign.
I mean, I focus on the sort of other part of it, partly ‘cause that’s where I am politically, but also just ‘cause I think it’s more interesting. That said, you know, I think that the party itself remains stuck in a way of thinking that they can kind of model tech—and sort of design their way out of these problems.
Bacon: The Popularism, DLCism modernism, centrism, that thing.
Shephard: It’s a party that’s afraid of politics, right? Like, I think that politics is talking to people, and it’s sort of shifting based on that. And I think that the sort of dream that every Democratic strategist has is that they can win elections without doing any politics at all.
Right? That somehow you can just sort of adopt the right positions and the voters will fall in line. Well, it doesn’t work like that. And, you know, I think one of the things on the left that’s a real problem is that everybody hates Trump because he is an authoritarian and he is a moron—but he is a damn good politician, right?
And he understands that. And I think that one of the things he understands as a campaigner is that people want you to tell them what you’re gonna do, right? They wanna hear how you’re gonna materially change their lives.
And I think that what you’re seeing on the Democratic side right now is still this over-willingness to sort of very carefully fine-tune policies so that you say, okay, yeah, you know, our new policy—we’re gonna ban congressional stock trading. Well, yeah, that communicates that you’re an anti-corruption party, sure. But like, how’s it gonna change somebody’s life, right?
Twelve-dollar minimum wage—that’s great. But the party said fifteen, you know, eight years ago, right?
What does that say about the party?
Potts: Yeah, and they have to connect those two—like, they have to connect those messages to how that’s gonna help the voters that are in front of them, because they should be talking to them about those ideas. Like you said, that was what Mamdani did. He campaigned—it was like an old-fashioned campaign—where he connected to voters and went to their neighborhoods and talked about the issues that they cared about, and talked about how his policy ideas would connect to those ideas that they cared about.
And I think that you’re right, Perry, about the pundit class. Like, this is definitely a conversation that they’re having online and in their Substack. I don’t know how much Democratic voters really and truly pay attention to that. I hope it’s less attention than we pay.
Bacon: So Alex has a piece that just—on the website—called, basically, The Democrats Are Having Their Tea Party Moment. And it really resonated with me ‘cause I’ve heard a lot of my friends basically saying, I used to trust the party’s view about electability or what have you. And two things—three things—happened. One: they insisted upon Biden running when I thought that was—when, you know, people thought that was—a mistake.
They insisted upon sort of anointing Harris in a way that people thought was a mistake. And three, I could see with my eyes that the Gaza policy was a mistake, but they kept doing it anyway.
And so, sort of raising these—I think that, so the point being that the Democratic Party doesn’t trust their leaders anymore, and I think that’s pretty obvious. I think the other point I wanna give is that—I think, Alex, you’re saying—is the Democratic leaders themselves don’t know that they’re distrusted.
Is that part of what’s going on here?
Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, part of the reason I wanted to write this piece is that I just think that Jefferies and Schumer are in really, really big trouble as they head into reelection years in 2026 and 2028… Schumer’s up in 28’.
Potts: Yeah.
Shephard: But you know, I think that there’s a larger sense within the party that the people that are running it don’t know what they’re doing.
And I think that that sense is really well deserved. Now, one of the other lessons, I think, from today is that you can kind of run anybody with a D next to their name right now, and they’re gonna do pretty good. But I think what you’re seeing is that the party establishment is not taking that as a sort of expansive idea.
They’re taking that as a restrictive idea, and I think that voters are responding to something different right now. Again, it’s just different than it was in 2018, when the candidates that the sort of voters largely coalesced around were very pragmatic. They were people that looked like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger.
They were kind of national-security-aligned, and, you know, I think the party is starting to look elsewhere. And, you know, I think one of the lessons for me of Mamdani’s victory is that Trump in 2016 understood that the media environment had changed fundamentally—and that you could kind of reach, you know, entirely new groups of voters with different types of messages. And you could, you know, you just have to go where they are.
And, you know, there are Democrats that are starting to understand that. Graham Platner, you know—I still think he should probably drop out—but he is one of those Democrats. And, you know, I think that the party establishment actually, you know, still favors these candidates that go on Meet the Press.
They don’t say anything substantively, because if you say anything substantively, then somebody’s gonna disagree with you. And, you know, that’s where the energy is now.
I think one of the takeaways from today is that maybe you don’t see the same kind of groundswell you saw in the base in 2010 and 2014 in particular, but I think that there is a lot of anger in the base right now that, you know, is directed at the leaders.
Bacon: Do you agree with that, Monica?
Potts: Yeah, I do. I mean, I think that what voters don’t wanna hear anymore is that things take time in Congress—that, you know, that our institutions have to be protected because they’ve already been wrecked.
You know, Trump could do a lot of things really quickly by being a bad president. He could do a lot of bad things really quickly. Why can’t we do good things more quickly? And I think that that’s what you’re gonna see a lot of Democratic voters, and especially the base, really demanding—is, you know, we don’t wanna hear about why things take time.
We don’t wanna hear about bipartisanship. We don’t wanna hear about the coalitions you’re building in D.C. We want you to do things, and we want you to do them quickly. And I think that’s a different environment.
Bacon: I agree with what Alex said generally, but it’s hard to look at a night in which the, the blah candidates won—one by 12, one by 13.
Is it possible that if JD Vance, or Trump, or let’s say JD Vance or somebody like him, is the— I can see the appeal of our candidate says nothing interesting, Trump destroys the country, JD Vance says, I agree with everything Trump did. That’s a safer strategy than, We’re gonna run a socialist or someone with a Nazi tattoo.
You can see how they arrive at their position. And my sense is tonight is gonna sort of reinforce that. Haley Stevens will never say anything interesting—so she’s the best candidate in Michigan. Janet Mills will never say anything interesting—she’s the best.
You can see how they can arrive there. And I worry—I think you start here, Alex—tonight is gonna reinforce it, right?
Shephard: I think absolutely. I think that, I think that there’s a, a general reminder of the value of safety and that that is true in a lot of cases. But you know, I think what you’re also seeing here is that you want to find energy, right? You in, in Virginia, I think Abigail Spanberger did a pretty good job of that and I think that the party is shifting its messaging.
I think in general…
Bacon: She was more anti-Trump than she used to be. She used to be very much, I’m bipartisan. Look how bipartisan I am. She actually was for the anti-Trump.
Shephard: That’s true. Yeah. And I think that—I think it’s a campaign that challenged my own expectations about how she was gonna run, and I think probably pointed to the way that a lot of kind of establishment-friendly Dems are going to run.
However, I think that the larger message here is still one in which the party, you know, is living in fear of new ideas and new types of candidates. And I think the voter base is not like that at all. And I think, again, what they’re not contending with is the rise of independent media outlets—particularly things like Midas Touch—and, like, the ability for people to reach voters directly.
And so I think that, you know, the—the overall thesis here that if you run a kind of Haley Stevens-type everywhere, then you can kind of sit back and just, you know, watch, watch the success roll in—I’m not so sure that that’s right. I think that what you wanna see is a party that is showing dynamism.
Right. And I think that, you know, Schumer and Jeffries…
Bacon: I think you’re saying something… sorry to interrupt. You’re saying that person may not win the primary anyway. Right. Even if they agree that they want to have the most boring candidate possible, it appears as if the people in Maine are gonna give Platner a shot. Like, I thought Platner was gonna be out.
And it looks like these people showing at his events are like creating a primary where I thought one would end. And I think that’s what you’re… it’s not just, I think that it may be bad for the general election, the primary voter may no longer take these kinds of candidates, right?
Shephard: Yeah. I think that it’s not necessarily the question of whether someone is more electable than somebody else. Like, I’m agnostic on that point. Like, I dunno. I mean, I have candidates that I like more, but I think that Democratic figures are, one, overstating their ability to select people based on electability criteria. They’ve, frankly, they’ve just made up.
But two, I think they’re frankly overestimating their ability to control the environment. That’s what I think. And that’s what you’re seeing in Michigan. And I think that what’s gonna play out over the next year is going to be very, very interesting.
And that, you know, I think that Mills may very well prevail in Maine, right? But that race is starting earlier than a lot of others, and I think you’re gonna see these things pop up.
The other thing, which I think is very interesting, is to look at Hakeem Jeffries here in New York. I think Jeffries is gonna face a sort of DSA-backed challenger, probably in the next week or two. And that race—how that race gets nationalized—is gonna be very interesting. But how that race affects others will too, because suddenly, you know, there will be the question of: if you think Chuck Schumer should remain, you know, Speaker, if you’re in a Senate race, is a very interesting one.
Bacon: I think Janet Mills wouldn’t even commit to that.
She kind of not answer ‘cause she knows where the numbers are. Monica talk about like, I mean, do Hakeem Jeffries and Schumer care if they’re popular or not? I mean, I guess they care if they lose their seats, but does it matter if they’re popular otherwise?
Potts: I mean, it matters if they’re popular in their districts.
That’s probably the only thing that matters to them. They want an effective caucus. They wanna be able to control their caucus and get what they want done in Washington. But I do think that, you know, there’s kind of a difference between winning in 2026 and in 2028, which—you know, in 2026, anybody with a D next to their name could probably win.
Depending on what happens in the next four years and who’s running on the Republican ticket, there’s gonna be a lot of anti-Trump sentiment still around. You know, if Trump wrecks the economy, then anybody with a D next to their name might be able to win. But there’s also a different question about actually building and using power effectively.
And so, you know, in 2020, electability was the main worry that Democrats had, and they chose Joe Biden. And that wasn’t a candidate who could last. He only could serve four years. Nobody wanted to support him again in 2024. Ultimately, he was kicked out of the race for a bunch of different reasons.
And so, do you wanna just win in ’26 and ’28, or do you wanna win in a way that helps you build power for the future—that helps you build a new majority, that helps you actually truly reverse a lot of the things that Trump did, and also really tackle inequality and make things better for your voters, and change the course of a lot of the things that have been going bad for a long time for a lot of voters in a way that will have an impact on their lives?
And so I think that if you just wanna win one race, you might not have to think about these questions a lot. But if you do wanna win kind of a lasting chance at really having the presidency for a while, really having the House and the Senate—then you do need to think about what your base wants, what the Democratic coalition you wanna build wants, and what voters wanna see you actually accomplish once you get there.
Bacon: So we didn’t learn much tonight, in part because it appeared to be anybody with a D on their name won. So you can’t really take much… Is that—is that the sort of subtext here?
Potts: I never thought that you were gonna be able to take a huge lesson from tonight.
Shephard: Yeah. I think that it buys everybody time to figure out what they’re gonna do.
Right. I think that that’s the big lesson right now. And Democrats have, you know, already had a lot of time—and they haven’t done anything with it, frankly. But I think what you have here is the sort of broad outlines of a party that can work to take on Trump.
You’ve got Mamdani and the kind of more, you know, activist left-wing policy laboratory way. I think Mamdani’s connection to the kind of abundance framework is something that’s often been misunderstood. But he’s very much an abundance, sort of YIMBY-style, you know, good-government, cut-red-tape-style Democrat.
And then on the other end you’ve got Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, who are, you know, less rhetorically interested, but I think generally aligned with the party’s overall image of itself as a kind of, you know, good-government, we-won’t-sort-of-bug-you-too-much, there’s-too-much-chaos-out-there, we’re-just-gonna-sit-down-and-get-stuff-done kind of party.
And I think that in terms of messaging, you see it everywhere, right? It’s—people hate this administration and they hate its policies, and they want anyone who will stand up to it. And they also think that everything’s way too expensive right now. And I think that that message itself is probably enough to carry them through the midterms.
Just briefly, in the last point though, what I think that they still have forgotten is just—the lesson of Barack Obama, but the lesson of Trump too—which is that voters belong to parties because they identify with them. They identify with people in them, and they have a sense that those people understand what they’re going for, and perform that in some way.
And I think that what is more concerning to me about the way that Spanberger and Sherrill have been embraced by the party and Mamdani has not, is that it suggests that Democrats still don’t understand that. That they still think that the party’s future is by showcasing, you know, a kind of version of politics that has no politics—that people just kind of, you know, put their heads down, they don’t distract you, you can just go about your life and watch, you know, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or whatever.
And I think that the party needs to get more comfortable with dynamic figures that challenge the assumptions about what the electorate wants, because those figures keep speaking to the electorate right now. And you need to have both. And what we’re gonna see, I think, are a lot of people that are gonna say you need to have one or the other.
Bacon: Okay. I think that was a great place to close on. Thanks you guys for joining me. Thanks for everybody that tuned in and we’ll be back in a few days.
