Democrats with Presidential Potential Discussed on Right Now With Perry Bacon

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 7 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I have two great guests today.

Seth Masket is a professor at the University of Denver in political science. Mark Schmitt is the director of the Political Reform Program at New America.

But I know they both have some interesting projects going on. So Seth, talk about—you’ve got a book and a Substack—tell everybody about what you’re doing first.

Seth Masket: Yeah, a couple of things going on. I just started a new Substack newsletter that’s called the SMOTUS Report—that’s S-M-O-T-U-S, Seth Masket of the United States. We just had a big launch earlier this week. I’m looking for supporters, so I’m hoping people will be interested. But basically, the focus there is a lot about U.S. politics, parties, campaigns, and a lot of other things, all with an eye toward the health of American democracy, which is obviously under a lot of strain right now.

And on that topic, I have a book coming out next month called The Elephants in the Room. The book is a look at how Republicans ended up nominating Donald Trump for a third consecutive time in 2024, how a lot of people in the party’s leadership were actually quite uncomfortable with that decision but had no way to move voters in a different direction.

Bacon: And Mark, talk about the political reform—is it still called that? I’m forgetting now what you guys call it.

Mark Schmitt: Yeah. I think we have layers, so now there’s a section called Democratic Futures—that’s what I was referring to—and I still want to keep—I like a nice, straightforward name like Political Reform, even though it always makes people say, “How is that going?” Yeah, we’re still doing our thing.

I think we’re putting out a lot of material right now about why proportional representation is a timely response, particularly with the Supreme Court ruling in Callais that really guts the Voting Rights Act. And there’s suddenly a—we’ve been harping on this for years, but there’s suddenly a recognition of: okay, maybe that is the answer. You’re seeing it from journalists, from conservatives as well. So we’re trying to take advantage of that moment.

Bacon: Just because even my nerd friends don’t always know—explain what proportional representation is, very briefly.

Schmitt: Proportional representation would be where you have, let’s say, we allow congressional districts to have multiple members of Congress. So you might create one district in Georgia that has five members, and then voters would rank—a candidate who got maybe 25 percent of the vote would have one of those congressional seats, depending on how it was allocated. And there’s super-nerdy different ways—party lists, things like that. I sometimes just nod along when people talk about the variations. But the essential idea is that