This is one of the most critical primary seasons of our lifetime — and a lot is happening. Tonight, voters in Texas will choose between Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general endorsed by Trump, or four-term Senator John Cornyn in a runoff election. Then, there are primary elections in six states next Tuesday, with another four the following week.
The results of these primaries will set the stage for the 2026 midterms. The question on everyone’s mind is ‘what do the voters actually care about?’
Dan Pfeiffer, co-host of Pod Save America and former advisor to President Obama, joins Jen to offer his analysis on the way forward for the Democratic party post-Callais. Together, they discuss the upcoming Texas primary runoff, the bloated ballot in California, and how candidates need to talk about corruption.
Dan Pfeiffer is a co-host of Pod Save America, the author of the Message Box newsletter and a former communications director for Barack Obama.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I am delighted to have with us Dan Pfeiffer, who needs no introduction for anyone who knows anything about politics. Welcome, Dan, good to see you again.
Dan Pfeiffer
Good to see you.
Jen Rubin
After Callais came down, there was a understandable freakout in Democratic corners. I did not think, and I still do not think, that Callais means Democrats still aren’t the favorites to take the House. What’s your take on how the numbers wash out?
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, Democrats are still a favorite to take the House, I think. This is an incredible political environment for Democrats. Trump’s incredibly unpopular, people are very unhappy with the war, unhappy with the economy. It’s a historically narrow Republican margin.
What Callais does is it dramatically limits the ceiling on how big a majority Democrats can build. You’re essentially losing as many as 17 seats that were either almost certainly Democratic or likely Democratic. Now, how we do what the environment looks like means we could do a little bit better than that, but we’re looking at a margin that is at its best in the teens, as opposed to a 30-seat majority, which was in cards before all of this.
Jen Rubin
Right. And that said, there was just a ruling today out of Alabama that puts back in, arguably, one of those, majority-minority seats, back in. We’re also talking on the afternoon of the primary in Texas. What do you make of the Texas Senate primary, and are you as optimistic as I, who’s very optimistic about Democrats’ chances in the Senate?
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I mean, I think my assumption is, I think most people have the same assumption, that Ken Paxton will win the primary tonight. He’s a candidate designed in a lab for Democrats to have a real shot at that state. He’s polarizing, he’s scandal-plagued, he has struggled to raise money, there’s clearly, at least as we sit here today, some swath of people who will vote for John Cornyn over James Talarico, but vote for James Talarico over Ken Paxton.
Democrats have our best shot at winning a Texas Senate seat since 1988, is my guess. Talarico’s a talented candidate. It’s still hard. We shouldn’t pretend it’s not hard. You know, Beto O’Rourke came within 3 points against Ted Cruz in 2018, and this is a better environment than that, and this is an impossible thing to say, but Ted Cruz is much better liked than Ken Paxton. But that last three points, those are the longest yards. So I think James Talarico has a very, very real shot to take this race. We’re gonna need a lot of things to break his way. He’s gonna have to continue to be the candidate he’s been. But anyone who says Democrats can’t win Texas is nuts.
Jen Rubin
Give me a ranking of where you see easiest to hardest for Democrats of the seats that are arguably in play for the Senate.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, so, I would say Maine is the easiest. North Carolina is the second easiest, and I would not say that North Carolina, or maybe even Maine are easy, but they should be very winnable in this environment, particularly in North Carolina with Roy Cooper as our nominee. So then you have these four other seats that are in states that Trump won by double digits. which is Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, and Texas. I would tend to rank Ohio and Alaska as the next easiest. I think you can flip those, depending how you look at it. Mary Peltola and Sherrod Brown are both well-known candidates who have a strong brand that’s independent of the Democratic Party.
So I think that they are well-positioned there. And then I’d probably pick Texas, and then Iowa last, but Iowa still, we have another, you know, week or two until the primary, and so we don’t know who our nominee is there. Iowa shouldn’t be in play at all, but because Trump has basically waged war on the farm economy, and voters are getting kind of sick of, like, non-stop Republican leadership in there over the last you know, 15 years or so. So we have a shot there, but we’ll have to see who the nominee is.
Jen Rubin
It seems that there’s no bottom yet to Trump’s polling numbers. They keep going down and down and down. At what point does it get baked in for the primaries? Obviously, individual races, individual contests, rather for the general election. I have to be one on the ground. But these are a point at which the electorate generically kind of makes up its mind.
Dan Pfeiffer
I don’t know if there’s a specific number. Look, if you’re in the incumbent party, you want the incumbent president to be as popular as possible. The direct one-to-one relationship between presidential approval and midterm performance has become somewhat attenuated in recent years because of polarization. We remember, you know, Joe Biden’s numbers are better than in 2018, were better than Trump’s are now, but not that much better, and Democrats still held on to the Senate and did less poorly in the House than we thought. But Trump being in the 30s, in the mid-30s, puts a lot of these seats in play.
Jen Rubin
You mentioned that candidates in, particularly in Ohio, Alaska, Roy Cooper in North Carolina, these are kind of dream candidates. With the Senate, there is always more individualization from the generic national ballot, like there is for our House members. How important do you think candidate quality is going to be in those races and some of the others?
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I think Canada quality’s gonna be incredibly important here. Look. I mean, it’s not a pleasant thing to say, but the Democratic brand is quite bad. A generic Democrat theoretically does quite poorly. And we have to win a bunch of seats that Trump won in 2018, either Senate seats, or sorry, in 2024, either Senate seats and House seats.
There are only a tiny handful of districts that have Republican incumbents that Kamala Harris won in 2024, and so much of the territory for the House is going to be fought in districts that Trump won by more than 5 points. And so you’re gonna need good candidates to do that. And I think we actually have a bunch of really good we have great Senate candidates we just talked about. I think there’s a bunch of really good House candidates. The recruiting effort was really good this year. You’re seeing a lot of really interesting candidates out there running in some really tough districts. And so, candidate quality’s gonna matter a lot here, because they’re gonna have to outrun the Democratic brand by you know, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 points in some cases.
Jen Rubin
Yep. You, wrote, rather, a great column on the main primary, where there still was a primary. Yeah. Looking at Janet Mills and looking at, Graham Platner. Talking about this electability issue, what matters, what turns people off, there still are a lot of Democrats out there, maybe me included, who are a little nervous about Platner. He does have baggage. Does that matter anymore? Does it matter in this race?
Dan Pfeiffer
Well, I mean, it doesn’t matter in the sense that he’s our nominee, he’s gonna be the nominee. He’ll officially be the nominee next week. There are two people, one of two people is gonna be the next senator for Maine. Graham Platner or Susan Collins. And so, whether you love Janet Mills, you have questions about Grant Platner, he is our choice. He is who the voters of Maine were overwhelmingly picking by, in some cases, by 30 points.
I think that his strengths and his weaknesses are intertwined. I think he’s clearly a very talented candidate. He is speaking to something that voters want, both in Maine and nationally. He is an outsider. He’s running against the establishment. He’s not a typical politician. He is a populist at a time in which Polling shows that voters really want big change, particularly on the economy and healthcare, and… But because he’s an outsider, because he hasn’t… like, voters love him in part because he has not spent his whole life preparing to run for office. And because he hasn’t spent his whole life preparing to run for office, he has a lot of baggage, if you will, right? And I give him a… you know, I find a lot of the things that he has posted earlier in his life to be incredibly distasteful and terrible, and he has said as much. I try to give a lot of grace and space to someone who was dealing with PTSD as they were coming home from war. How much is that stuff going to matter in a race against Susan Collins? I do not know.
Fortunately, Maine is a state the size of which Graham Platner will have the ability to really get in front of a lot of those voters, and show that this idea that he has this you know, horrible person who still believes these things, is, you know, a Nazi, all of these arguments. He has the ability to disabuse voters of that, almost on a one-to-one basis in that race. So, look, I’m nervous about that race, too. Beating Susan Collins is very hard. We should have beaten her in 2020. She outperformed, Joe Biden by, like, 17 points. This is not an easy race. But I think Platner’s pretty talented, and ultimately, we all have to get behind him, because he is the choice. And that’s what we have to do in all these races. Just as what happened in Texas, when all the Jasmine Crockett supporters got behind James Talarico, as I suspect will happen in Iowa, when either Josh Turek or Zach Walls wins, or in Michigan, we have another divisive primary there. We all, like, the voters are gonna pick. This is gonna be our nominee. And what matters is that the Democrats are in charge of the Senate, and John Thune, the Republicans are not.
Jen Rubin
Give me one state that isn’t on that list, that if it’s a really, really, really good night for Democrats, you can envision that flipping. Would it be Florida? Is there any other state?
Dan Pfeiffer
It’s Nebraska where Dan Osborne is running as an Independent. He’s a labor leader. He is the Democrat in the country who overperformed Kamala Harris the most. In 2024, he is running against a billionaire, which I think is a great contrast in this moment. He’s gonna need a lot of things to break his way. The Democrat will need to drop out of the race, although I suspect that’s probably gonna happen. But I think on the right night, in the right environment, Dan Osborne could be the next senator from Nebraska.
Jen Rubin
There’s always a debate for the party out of power. Do you need a positive message, or do you just need to run against the party that’s in power? Right now, running against Trump is kind of like, you know, shooting fish in a barrel. Do Democrats need any affirmative message other than, we’ll try to undo some of this stuff?
Dan Pfeiffer
This question kind of gets boiled down to, like, do we need our version of the contract for America? Do we need a 6 things we’re running on? I don’t think that nationally it makes sense for the Democrats to come out at this stage with, here are the 6 things we’re gonna do, given the fact that even out of the greatest scenario possible, it’s a Democratic House, Democratic Senate, and Donald Trump as president. I think each individual candidate who is running needs to have a series of ideas that address affordability. And affordability includes not just what you pay at the grocery store and the gas pump, but also healthcare, housing, and they need ideas on stopping the corruption in Washington. And so, I don’t think we’re in a place where we can have a nationally agreed upon set of ideas on those things at this point for the election, but I think every candidate running needs to have answers to those big, glaring questions in Trump’s America.
Jen Rubin
Corruption does seem to be the 800-pound gorilla. It’s so disgusting. The latest is the slush fund for J6ers. how do Republicans defend that, and how do Democrats talk about it in a way that voters understand it matters to them? This somehow affects their economic lives or their life…
Dan Pfeiffer
Republicans can’t defend it, it’s indefensible. You can see that in how they’re all running and hiding from it. This was one thing that was almost a bridge too far for the Republicans, that it squashed the reconciliation bill the House… the Senate was doing right before the break. I think Democrats have to change how we talk about corruption. I think our, and I’m guilty of this as well, is that our mentality is often like a prosecutor, where it’s like, as if we can present sufficient pieces of evidence to the public. that show corruption, they will decide Trump or Republicans are corrupt, and then they will stop supporting them. And that’s not the way it works.
What I think we need to do, and I think John Ossoff is doing this best, is we need to use corruption as an explainer for why everything in your life sucks. Right, why the rich people are getting tax cuts, and they’re getting away with crimes, and they’re getting taxpayer-funded, payouts from the government, and all these other things, and you’re paying more at the gas price, your rural hospital’s closing, you can’t afford your Obamacare anymore, and it has to be this explainer as to what’s happening. Because if it’s just a thing in and of itself, voters don’t buy it because they think everyone’s corrupt.
And Democrats too, and we have sometimes you know, it is nothing like what the Republicans are, but we have sometimes contributed to that in the way in which we have not held our own members to account when they have done the wrong thing. And so, if you just try to say, like, they’re corrupt, that’s not sufficient, because people also think you’re kind of corrupt.
Jen Rubin
Right. It’s funny you should mention, Ossoff. He seems to be this, I don’t want to even say diamond in the rough, because he’s not very rough anymore. He seems to be incredibly talented. Did this kind of emerge all at once, or have you been watching his evolution for a while?
Dan Pfeiffer
You know, he’s come a long way. I interviewed him in 2017, when he was running for the House Special Election for Tom Price this season in Georgia 6, and he was our nominee, and it ended up being one of these races that was gonna be a bellwether, and the Republicans ended up winning that seat. And at the time, I thought, fine. Like, I mean, he was clearly a very new candidate, he had just been a House staffer, essentially.
But I’ve been, you know, the fact that he won that Senate primary in 2020, and then won that runoff was impressive, and I’ve kind of seen his messaging from afar, and he’s gotten better and better, and he’s found his place where he is at his best. Which is in a rally setting. I think he’s a very talented messenger. What I’ve heard about him, and I don’t know him particularly well, is that he gets very involved in the writing of his speeches. And that is, like, that is something that obviously benefited Barack Obama very well, which is, like, you have a connection to the words. You’re not reading a script, you’re telling your story. And I think, that has helped him a lot, and he’s someone I very much have my eye on going forward.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. You know, I suppose every Democrat says, oh, that’s the next Obama. There is something Obama liked about him. Part of that is he doesn’t laugh at his own jokes. He has a little bit of a cool, a little bit of a reserve. He knows when he’s hitting home, he knows when he’s being funny. And there’s something almost elegant about the way he campaigns and the way he drives a message.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I mean, some people do Obama comparison is because he’s, like, tall, but, you know, every generation of politicians learns from the politicians they were raised on, right? Like, for years, people were doing, JFK and RFK, not Jr, RFK.
And then you had a bunch of Southern politicians who try to talk like Bill Clinton. And Ossoff is part of this generation of people who came up with Obama as the leader, and there are a lot of you who watch out there, there are a lot of people out there who are doing kind of a poor version of Obama karaoke, and I think he has internalized some of the speaking lessons of Obama without doing imitation.
Kind of the way he pauses, the tempo and cadence of his speeches, the mixing of humor with seriousness, the way in which he uses humor to go after his opponents. So I think he’s learned some lessons with Obama, but he doesn’t sound like Obama, which I think is probably the greatest form of flattery here.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. He’s better at being Obama and not seeming like he’s Obama than Josh Shapiro is, who is trying so hard, yes. That’s the quintessential advantage. All right, lightning round! Who’s gonna win the California governor’s race?
Dan Pfeiffer
I have no idea. My ballot is sitting on my kitchen table right now, as I’m trying to figure out who to vote for and how worried I am about a lockout as we sit here today, it seems—and then we have 3 big new polls coming this week, including, sort of the top-notch California poll we’ll see this week, which will give us a better hint, because there’s a lot of polling, a lot of it’s bad. It seems like it’s either gonna be, Becerra or Steyer will be the Democrat that advances to the top two, but I’m waiting to see other polls. But as we say, that’s kind of how it’s been for the last couple weeks here.
Jen Rubin
Between you and me, and all of our contrarians. I’m kind of disappointed with the California Democratic Party. I mean, this is it? This is the best we got?
Dan Pfeiffer
This could be a much longer conversation. All of these people are individually impressive. And collectively underwhelming to the crowd. Part of it is it’s—it’s incredible. California is so big, and so expensive, and like everywhere else in the country, our local news has been gutted, and so it’s nearly impossible for anyone who is not the governor or one of the two senators to become well-known.
And so you get a bunch of people who have really impressive resumes that no one knows who they are, and that has led to this underwhelming thing. And we had this thing where we’ve had 16 years of Jerry Brown who had already been governor, had run for president, back up when governments were quite famous, then you had Gavin Newsom who was famous because of what had happened in San Francisco, and gay marriage, and all of those other things, and so now we’re sort of back into a place where our governor will be more anonymous to the people, and so it’s led to this sort of underwhelming feeling.
They’ve all done impressive things, whether it’s Katie Porter, or you know, Javier Becerra, Tom Steyer has led organizations, he ran for president, like, there are people, it just feels, and I hear it every day in California, that people are underwhelmed with their choices, but I think that’s a collective feeling. When you look at the individual candidates, they have a lot to offer.
Jen Rubin
And in fairness, there are some huge talents in California, whether you look at Schiff, or you look at Padilla, or you look at someone like Robert Garcia, who I think is a absolute star. So I don’t want to denigrate my former home state of California too bad.
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, there are lots of talents, but if they were to run, like, if Robert Garcia, who you and I know to be very talented. His statewide name ID has to be 1%, you know?
Jen Rubin
Exactly, exactly. Unless you’re from Long Beach, you don’t really know. So, let’s end on this. Foreign policy is hardly ever an issue, particularly in midterms. Right now, we have probably the stupidest war of my lifetime.
Which is saying a lot, since I’ve lived through a lot of stupid wars. It’s hugely unpopular. Trump doesn’t know how to end it. It’s having a direct impact on people’s bottom line. Now he’s talking about invading Cuba. Does foreign policy register in any of this, or is it a matter of wanting Democrats in there to restrain Trump? Is it a check against more craziness?
Dan Pfeiffer
I think it’s a little bit of that, but it’s also all the foreign policy stuff, whether it’s the war in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, exacerbate what is Trump’s greatest vulnerability, which is, he’s focused on everything other than lowering your prices. And in the case of Iran War, in doing so, he’s actually raising your prices significantly. So, it’s not like a foreign policy, like, I think generally the American people would prefer not to be involved in any of this stuff, but it’s not like a foreign policy critique of his actual foreign policy, it’s why is he focused on this when my life is not as good as it should be, or as good as he promised it to be?
And the worst part of that, it’s one thing if you’re just dabbling overseas and it’s a priorities question, it’s another thing when you start a war that no one wants that raises everyone’s prices, that’s quite bad politically.
Jen Rubin
Yeah, I would think so. All right. I have a question. If you had to give one piece, generically, of advice to Senate candidates, House candidates, in this kind of environment, what would it be?
Dan Pfeiffer
Be willing to go big. People see really, really big problems, and they want big answers to those problems. They’re looking for solutions. They don’t want people nibbling around the edges, they don’t want a bunch of, you know, tax cuts for first-time homebuyers and things like that. They want big things that seem like they are commensurate with the problems. In the New York Times poll that came out over the weekend, they had this oversample of Democrats, and in it, but even of all voters, voters overwhelmingly think the system needs either to be torn down completely, or needs major changes. Almost no Americans think the system should stay the way it is, or even have minor changes. People want big change. Big change. And big change doesn’t necessarily have to be ideological. Right? But they want something that looks like populism, that understands that you’re going to try to fix a broken system, and if if you look like you’re nibble around the edges, you’re gonna look just like everyone else, and that’s not gonna be good.
Jen Rubin
Fair enough. And I think, at some level, that’s why Trump was able to win a second time.
Dan Pfeiffer
That’s exactly right.
Jen Rubin
They thought he was gonna tear it all down. And he did, but just not in the way we thought.
Dan Pfeiffer
Right, right, he burned it all down, yes.
Jen Rubin
Yeah, burned it all down. Dan, always great to talk to you. We’ll check in periodically as we get closer to the general election. Great seeing you, and have a great day.
Dan Pfeiffer
You too, this was fun.
Jen Rubin
Take care. Bye-bye.
