Right Now With Perry Bacon

As a wave of Democratic candidates in swing and red districts distance themselves from LGBTQ+ advocacy, Evan Urquhart argues that attempting to win over moderate voters by sacrificing trans rights is a costly mistake.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡️ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡️ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon➡ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

Perry and Natasha discuss how conservative strategists capitalized on campus divisions following the 2023 Gaza protests, why faculty across the country are facing growing surveillance concerns in their classrooms, why state-level bans targeting disciplines like sociology show the right recognizes the power of systemic data, and how defenders of higher education must articulate a proactive, organized response rather than simply conceding ground.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon ➡ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

Despite years of procedural reforms, police in America continue to kill more than 1,000 people annually, and the political momentum from 2020 has faced massive pushback from both the right and the center. Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, joins the show to explain why post-Ferguson reforms like body cameras and implicit bias training fail to reduce harm—and why true public safety requires shrinking the footprint of policing altogether.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡️ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡️ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

Minneapolis became ground zero for resistance to ICE in 2026—and Michelle Phelps, sociologist at the University of Minnesota and author of The Minneapolis Reckoning, argues that’s not a coincidence. She joins the show to trace how networks, muscle memory, and skepticism of official narratives built during the 2020 protests carried directly into this year’s mobilization. We discuss why the city was already on the Trump administration’s radar, why the pullback of federal enforcement counts as a limited but real win, why Phelps calls it a “hollow” or “pyrrhic” victory given that deportations continue quietly elsewhere, and why she pushes back on the popular narrative—including recent comments getting called “woke 1.0”—that 2020 was simply a mistake the left overcorrected on.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡️ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡️ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

The American Association of University Professors made a rare move: endorsing Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s primary. Todd Wolfson, president of AAUP and a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, joins the show to explain why. We discuss El-Sayed’s own family ties to the union, why AAUP’s Michigan locals overwhelmingly backed him in internal polling, why AAUP says it would endorse any candidate—centrist or progressive—who champions public higher education, and why Wolfson argues that decades of defunding, not campus politics, is the real story behind the cost of college.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

AOC called it “woke 1.0” and cited a local official calling it “crazy”—and Deva Woodly, professor of political science at Brown University and a fellow at the Kettering Foundation, joins the show to push back. We discuss what AOC actually said about Francesca Hong and the political moment around 2020, why dismissing Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the Parkland gun-control movement as “crazy” cedes ground Democrats shouldn’t give up, and why politicians like AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani rarely credit the movements that helped get them elected.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

Michigan has voted, and now Minnesota and Wisconsin are up next in the Democratic primary wars. Ryan Cooper, senior editor at The American Prospect, joins the show to look back at what the Michigan results revealed and look ahead at what’s coming this week. We discuss why electability arguments are so hard to trust, why an outside spending gap didn’t stop Abdul El-Sayed’s win, why Francesca Hong is leading her Wisconsin race by 25 points despite skepticism from the governor and some national progressives, and why a spending advantage in a low-turnout, low-information primary might matter more than ideology.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s primary by a narrow margin—and Julia Azari and Seth Masket, political scientists and former FiveThirtyEight colleagues, return to the show to dig into what happened. We go county by county, discussing what the map suggests about the racial and geographic coalition behind El-Sayed’s win, why they’re cautious about reading too much ideology into the results, and how this fits a familiar establishment-versus-progressive pattern that’s played out in Democratic primaries for decades. We also look ahead to Wisconsin, where a similar dynamic is playing out in a closely watched race.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡️ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡️ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon

Michigan votes tomorrow, Wisconsin votes next week, and both primaries have become this cycle’s version of the New York primary—everyone left of center is watching. Anat Shenker-Osorio, who has run hundreds of Democratic focus groups since 2021, and Nathan Kalmoe, a professor who studies public opinion, join the show to break down what these races reveal before any votes are even counted. We discuss why voters are less ideological than pundits assume and more driven by dissatisfaction with Democratic “fight,” why polls showing Abdul El-Sayed slightly behind a Republican shouldn’t be read as an electability warning, why comparing Fran Hong’s genuine working-class background to Graham Platner’s “cosplaying fisherman” persona exposes a double standard in how “authenticity” gets judged, and why Shenker-Osorio’s research keeps landing on the same conclusion: voters think Democrats are weak, not woke.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

➡️ View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon

➡️ Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon