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00:00Joining us in the conversation now, we have Yale School of Management Executive Fellow,
00:02Bloomberg opinion columnist, Scott McHonda.
00:04Abby Livingston is still with us here from Puck News on set.
00:06Abby, let me turn to you quickly, or just get your reaction.
00:08Your question was right at the heart of what I think a lot of people are wondering here.
00:12You know, she's been sitting at the knee of the old guard of the Democratic Party,
00:17and how she's handling herself is how the old guard does it.
00:19As you get out immediately, you start campaigning.
00:22My question is, across the spectrum, are we going to see that?
00:26Because we're seeing, at least on Twitter, if you've gotten online this weekend,
00:29there's some very sore winners and very sore losers commentating about this race.
00:33And her, you know, she issued a statement very quickly, as you pointed out.
00:37It was a very conciliatory statement.
00:38Did that play out the way that you thought it might, in light of the Bruton campaign that you mentioned?
00:41It was really nasty, yeah.
00:43I was surprised at the speed.
00:44But I think this is someone who grew up in the era of the 2008 general election,
00:48and this is very much the model Hillary Clinton set.
00:51And so it doesn't surprise me when I look back at it.
00:54I want to ask you the question that the congresswoman just said she didn't want to get into, which, fair
00:59enough.
00:59Which is, you know, she has all these Democratic credentials.
01:02She's young.
01:03She's spunky.
01:04She's drinking Coke on TV.
01:05And she seems like the kind of person that would resonate with voters.
01:09She has all these credentials.
01:10She flipped the seat.
01:11But she did lose.
01:12And does that go to a bigger issue we're seeing in these races,
01:15where the establishment Democrats that Abby just talked about are not getting the job done, and why?
01:22So, I mean, there's no way to tell the story that doesn't involve problems for establishment Democrats, right,
01:27particularly given the financial advantage that she had.
01:29But I don't want to overread this either, right?
01:32So you are also seeing races where establishment Democrats are doing just fine,
01:35where, you know, in Virginia they ran the table.
01:37There's, you know, on Hawaii.
01:38Hawaii yesterday.
01:40Yeah, so this is not a story of the DSA just sort of suddenly taking over the Democratic Party.
01:46This is a story of, you know, an extremely aggressive faction that has great appeal in primaries,
01:51and from what we can tell, much less appeal in generals, that's able to pick off certain races.
01:56That matters a lot, right, when the balance of power is as narrow as it is.
02:00But it's not a story of the entire Democratic Party being taken over either.
02:04That's a very different tale.
02:06Abby, she was quick to say she's one person, one candidate.
02:09Don't extrapolate a lot about the kind of broader process from the way that this played out in Michigan.
02:14This is your daily work, though.
02:15You're looking for these trends.
02:17You're looking for indications of what a race like this might mean for the broader midterms.
02:20How do you think about that, the uniqueness of Michigan,
02:22the uniqueness in part because of the amount of money that flowed into it from outside groups?
02:27What, if anything, doesn't tell you about the way that these other races are going to shape out going into
02:31the midterms?
02:32I'm putting Michigan in its own category.
02:34You are.
02:34Now, there's an incredible amount of confidence on the left that el-Sayed and the progressives are going to come
02:41out.
02:41And it is this argument that basically Ted Cruz, Ronald Reagan have made on the reverse side.
02:46And then you've got the establishment saying you've got to win over those Republicans and independents.
02:51And so this is such a strange race.
02:53It has shattered all of the conventions of a conventional Senate Democratic primary that I'm very agnostic on it.
03:00And I think this will only make sense after it's over.
03:02I also want to ask you about the DSA itself and this word socialism.
03:07Because one thing that I found talking to people who have normal jobs and don't talk about this day in,
03:13day out,
03:13is the average American doesn't really understand what that means.
03:16And we're seeing Republicans kind of take that to their advantage, conflating it quite often with communism.
03:22According to Axios, the GOP is going to host a socialism telethon for the midterms.
03:27Do Democrats need to embrace this so that they can define it?
03:31Or is it better to try to stay away from a word that a lot of voters find triggering and
03:36an automatic no,
03:37even if they don't quite fully understand what it means?
03:39I'm not sure the DSA knows what socialism means, right?
03:42Which is one of these sort of weird things that's going around.
03:45So I'm in this call from Sweden where I'm staying for the summer.
03:49And Sweden is, you know, in many ways often described as a socialist country.
03:53And it has more billionaires per capita than the United States does.
03:57So you can see some conflicts there, right?
03:59And the policy proposals, not of the DSA itself, which is kind of out there,
04:03but the policy proposals of people like al-Sayed or AOC and things like that,
04:07in most of the world, we wouldn't call that socialist.
04:09We'd call it social democratic, which would be Germany or Sweden or Finland.
04:13And I think that the Democratic Party, right, is sort of dealing with a problem
04:18where there's a group of people in the party who are largely, you know,
04:22representative of the, I have to say, like the blue bubble of sort of very highly educated
04:27sort of people who maybe don't speak that much to people outside of that bubble
04:33and don't really necessarily get how that's perceived.
04:35And that's sort of, I think, where that's most strikingly showing up is in Wisconsin with Hong,
04:39who, I mean, looks like the weakest nominee for a statewide race that I can see
04:45since Christina O'Donnell was running ads declaring she was not a witch.
04:49That's right.
04:49Oh, I'd forgotten about those ads.
04:51Those are excellent.
04:53God, on this point, I mean, I think of the role of the DSA here.
04:57There are so many candidates I've heard in recent weeks saying that they
04:59maybe subscribe to some of the values the DSA espouses, but they're not members of the group.
05:04And I wonder sort of what's to be done about that.
05:07There is, as Christina was pointing out, I think, a tendency here to kind of clump
05:10some of these candidates in with DSA.
05:12You point out the kind of ambiguity of their policy positions, who they stand for,
05:15how it's structured, even.
05:18Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like what you're counseling here is that maybe
05:21we should have a more nuanced conversation.
05:23And perhaps this is what's happening within the Democratic Party now, just about how some
05:26of those policy platforms could be brought in or re-brought into the Democratic Party
05:29more broadly.
05:30I'm a professor.
05:31We should have a more nuanced conversation as just a macro that I hit for any question
05:36that you answer.
05:37But I think what we really need to do is twofold.
05:40One is we should say that, look, I would not count the establishment out.
05:43This is a huge phenomenon, and they are sort of scrambling to figure out how to make sense
05:47of it.
05:47And they may or may not succeed.
05:49Second, the argument that the DSA is making, and we should take it seriously, is that there
05:54are a bunch of unactivated voters who will get activated by their people who will come
05:58out to vote in much the same way that Donald Trump triumphed in 2016 and 2024.
06:02I'm not convinced that there's a lot of evidence supporting that, because the best data we have
06:07on 2024, for example, says that people who did not vote were slightly more likely to support
06:11Donald Trump than people who did vote.
06:14So what we are going to run that experiment, and the advantage they're going to have right
06:17now is that the baseline numbers for Democrats are so strong in this election that if, you
06:23know, Rogers lost in a nail-biter in 2024, 2026 is going to be like three to four, maybe
06:30five points more Democratic.
06:32So if Abdul Sayyid only underperforms by, let's say, three points, which is significant
06:37in most elections, he's still going to win.
06:39And so we should really, as we think through this, I think that the nuanced conversation
06:43has a lot to do with, like, who's getting attention, how much of that attention goes
06:47in the primaries, how much is the total dysfunction of the DCC, which is basically broke, and the
06:51central party, and how much of that will change once we get to the real media firestorm
06:56of 2027 and 2028 with the presidential election, when the people who set the tone for
06:59the Democratic Party are going to be running for the nomination, and I would put pretty
07:04high odds that, you know, with the possible exception of AOC making a run, none of them
07:09are going to be DSA members or even closely affiliated with it.
07:11I mean, before we end this, I want to pull back a little bit and talk about the president,
07:16his approval ratings, and what this means, because it seems to me at this point you've
07:19got a very unpopular president, but now you've got Democrats kind of getting in their
07:24own way, which should be an easier battle for them than they've had in the past, and
07:28when it comes to folks being leery about democratic socialism, and these candidates they don't
07:33understand, and the polling on the president's war, and the president's policy, and the disapproval
07:38rating, the approval rating hovering around 38.5 percent, where does that break?
07:44So, this kind of polling is so bad, I mean, I talked to, I called one Democrat last week
07:49who I thought was going to be very nervous about Michigan, and this person said, I don't
07:52know if Trump's done falling in the polls, and so his problems could paper over a lot
07:58of Democratic flaws in these campaigns that may not be visible this cycle, but could be
08:04used as arguments for why it was a successful campaign, and so a president's approval rating
08:09like that solves a lot of problems for Democrats.
08:11I think he's going to Ohio this week, I mean, how much currency does he have with Republicans
08:15now as a campaigner?
08:17There was talk at the beginning of this year that he'd be out every week campaigning for
08:19Republicans, Abby, do you think that he has as much currency as he thought he did in the
08:2330 seconds of the left here?
08:24I think it depends on where he goes.
08:26In 2018, he went to Texas, and there was some evidence that he may have hurt Republican
08:29voters in the Houston media market where it was all covered, and so I think it's very
08:34difficult to bring a president out with these sorts of numbers.
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