Hasan Piker has for years now been both an asset and a liability for Democrats. The Twitch streamer has elevated base-energizing progressives, such as Darializa Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in interviews and with endorsements. But he’s also stoked controversy with past anti-Israel commentary and generally caused headaches for establishment Democrats who would rather not see Hasan’s favored candidates get any more oxygen. 

Why? A familiar concept for these kinds of centrist Democrats: electability.

That concept has been on many left-leaning voters’ minds over the past few weeks, as primaries have put progressive candidates to the test — with very mixed results. Last week, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost her primary to establishment favorite David Crowley. Not long before that, though, progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won his primary against the more mainstream Democratic candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — albeit by a much smaller margin than many polls predicted.

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Piker to talk about whether the recent primary results have refined his understanding of how prepared Americans are to vote for democratic socialists, what support for unabashedly progressive candidates tells us about the changing working class in America, and the “pundit brain” problem in the Democratic Party.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Piker, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

The last two weeks have produced mixed results for left-wing candidates: a big win in Michigan and a win this week in Minnesota for Peggy Flanagan, but a loss for Francesca Hong, which was a surprise in Wisconsin.

What have been your takeaways from the last set of results?

I think the ground game is phenomenal. There’s a lot of excitement on the platform. There’s a lot of excitement for the first time for “Change Candidates.” It’s still a good environment to be in if you are a socialist.

The establishment does have a lot of juice still, for sure. And when they can put together a similar strategy to what happened in 2020 against Bernie Sanders with Joe Biden, especially in a place like Wisconsin where Tony Evers is very clearly still a very popular governor, they were able to elevate David Crowley’s campaign, who actually had dropped out and consolidated support behind Sara Rodriguez initially. And he had to drop out because he was only performing at, like, 6 percent.

Yeah, the consolidation was swift, and it was complete. I mean, you’re comparing it to 2020, in which the establishment lined up behind Joe Biden and kind of nixed that Bernie Sanders campaign in the blink of an eye. I imagine you were surprised at the result.

I never underestimate my opponents, whether they be Republicans or whether they be establishment Democrats. You have to always operate as though you’re down 10 points. I don’t believe in the notion that we are going to win easy victories at the end of the day.

There are a lot of powerful interests at play here. There are a lot of people in positions of power that don’t wanna lose their seats. So they’re gonna fight like hell, so we have to also fight like hell. We have to fight extra hard, as a matter of fact, because we’re almost always outspent, right?

I got an alert right before we started talking from the New York Times that said, “A democratic socialist lost in Wisconsin, which shows the movement’s surging wave might crash before rippling out from big cities.” Is that wrong?

Oh, I love that. Look, people are gonna have their opinions. I’ll just say it like this.

Abdul El-Sayed’s one-point victory margin showed that the Democratic socialist-aligned movement or the progressive movement was in tatters. It was obviously a failure. And now, David Crowley’s less-than-one-point victory proves that the centrist bulwark is still here, and that the Democratic socialist movement is dying.

It kind of feels like it’s wish-casting for the most part, from a lot of people who maybe want to go back to the way things used to be. My assessment on this is definitely a little bit different. I think, at the end of the day, these are insurgencies, right? These are insurgent candidacies.

We’re talking about no name recognition for a state legislator that was entirely propped up by local Wisconsin DSA chapters. These people didn’t have a lot of money necessarily, and they were able to defy the odds, and they continued defying the odds all the way until the end.

The idea that the polls showed that Francesca was a clear frontrunner and was running away with this race is utterly irrelevant. Especially if you were to look at this with a broader perspective, like thinking about where Democratic Socialists of America have gotten to in the last two years.

I mean, I remember how I felt in 2024, in the aftermath of the DNC, about where the American socialist movement was as opposed to where it is now. We are clearly a force to be reckoned with, and that’s precisely the reason why a lot of people are paying close attention to what’s going on.

And I’ll say it like this. The fact that the Hong campaign did not have any major progressive national endorsements, and that I was like their top surrogate.

There was no Bernie Sanders endorsement, there was no AOC endorsement. That did make the Hong campaign unique on that front.

I think there were a couple other races that I was also involved in where my candidates lost, right? 

I mean, Saikat Chakrabarti was another great example of this as well. It wasn’t a statewide race, and obviously, there’s always clear local differences that play a formative role in how these races turn out.

But we’ve looked back at this data. There are a couple different endorsement trackers out there, and they’ll put my endorsement up there, and they’ll put, like, AOC and Bernie Sanders. And it’s very clear that the best likelihood of success usually comes from a consolidation of national progressive forces, whether it be outside expenditures coming from Justice Democrats or things like that. And with the Francesca Hong campaign, I think it’s a testament to their success. It’s a testament to how popular the platform is in general.

And one thing I will have to stress here is the salience of the electability narrative. I think that’s still a real motivator for a lot of people.

Yeah, I hear that. Both El-Sayed’s campaign and Hong’s campaign did better among middle-class voters — I should say, than the data would tell us, among working-class voters. Considering how central working-class and bottom-up issues are to the DSA message, why has it not produced results that actually get it more working-class votes? Because that does seem to be something we’ve learned over the last three, four weeks.

I think that we have to dramatically reconstruct how we understand what it means to be working-class in this country. I think a lot of people will disagree with what I’m about to say here, but we have to do away with this fantastical notion that the working-class is one specific thing.

I think for the longest time, people have thought about this hardhat-wearing coal miner as the true working class, oftentimes White as well. And the working class is unbelievably diverse in this country, and it’s also a lot more college-educated than people actually give it credit for.

I think partially this is because if you look back to the ’90s as opposed to right now, yes, if you had a college education, you were upwardly mobile. You were probably a professional managerial class individual that was going to be able to retire at a reasonable age. You were doing fairly well. It was a guarantee for getting a good job, right? 

That’s not the case in America any longer. There are a lot more people who have a college degree who are downwardly mobile, who are having a very tough time in the current job market, who do not own a home, and it’s seemingly less likely than before that they will ever be able to own a home.

And that is the actual working class. It’s much broader, right? So we’ve seen in Zohran’s race and in Abdul’s race, there’s this massive group of working-class folks that constantly get cast aside as not being a true representation of the American working class, when I think like, No, that is the true representation.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The 2026 wildfire season on the West Coast is shaping up to be an especially bad one: In Oregon, more than 2 million acres have already burned, breaking a record set just a few years ago, in 2024. In neighboring Washington state, suburbs around the city of Spokane recently burned in an increasingly common example of fires reaching urban and suburban areas (as my colleague Caitlin Dewey covered recently). And the consequences are spreading far beyond where the fires are burning, with hazardous smoke from the Pacific Northwest drifting as far away as New England. 

Much of this is a story about climate change, as increasingly dry, hot summers provide ample fuel for fires. But the crisis is also being made worse by the Trump administration: Staff cuts to the US Forest Service have left the agency stretched thin and unable to respond as effectively to fires, while a planned reorganization is also set to shutter Forest Service labs researching and tracking wildfires. EPA research into wildfires and wildfire smoke has also been slashed. 

All of this — plus a Trump administration shift away from letting some fires burn themselves out, which has further increased the workload on wildland firefighters — has also resulted in a more dangerous fire season for firefighters; Reuters reported this week that firefighters are “being overrun by wildfires at the highest rate in two decades” — with months still to go until the end of the season.

Go a little deeper

As if the above weren’t enough to worry about, lawmakers are also raising a brand-new fire season concern: prediction markets. Specifically, the possibility that bettors could turn to arson in order to manipulate prediction markets — and earn themselves some money. 

Polymarket, on its international platform, has offered users the chance to bet on everything from when and where a fire might spread to when it could be contained or extinguished, which resulted in more than $1 million in bets on major fires in California last year. High Country News reported in June that a new prediction market, called Wyldfyre, had launched specifically for betting on wildfires.

Legislators like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have pointed out that, unlike most other natural disasters, fires are easily started or spread by humans, creating a real risk that people could attempt to manipulate markets. 

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” Merkley and eight other Democratic senators wrote in a letter to the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful. By offering contracts on fires, prediction market sites run the risk of encouraging people to influence fires that have already started, creating additional concerns around public safety and insider trading.

One link for later

➨ Build (your attention span) back better. Beset as we are by short-form video and tweets, it can often feel like our attention spans are slipping unavoidably away. The good news, it turns out, is that decline doesn’t have to be permanent — there are ways to rebuild attention, including by simply letting your brain rest more.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that feral pigs are a serious problem for parts of rural America? After a tweet about “30 to 50 feral hogs” went viral in August 2019, my former colleague Dylan Matthews embarked on a serious consideration of how the pigs impact the US — and how we impact them in turn. It’s still one of my favorite articles on the Vox site. 
• Today’s trivia: Which US president responded to inflation by ordering wage and price freezes? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you for the first woman to perform hip-hop at the White House. That was MC Lyte, who performed at the Obama White House in 2014.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Remember President Donald Trump’s first-term border wall? It’s still being built — through a pristine Texas national park.

What’s happening? The Trump administration is preparing to build hundreds of miles of roads through Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas as part of its latest border security project, despite a bipartisan outcry over damage to the beloved park. 

Starting last week, bulldozers and heavy machinery began to clear land for the construction of about 200 miles of patrol road, new border barriers, and electronic surveillance measures to cover the park’s 118 miles of shared border with Mexico. The construction is proceeding after the administration overrode environmental laws intended to protect places like Big Bend earlier this year.

What does a border wall look like in 2026? In this case, “wall” is a bit of a misnomer. Despite Trump’s fixation with an actual, physical wall circa 2016, the Trump administration’s current project isn’t always 30 feet high and topped with concertina wire.

Instead, the Big Bend project is part of what the administration has described as a “smart wall,” which will combine stretches of traditional wall elsewhere along the US-Mexico border with patrol roads and vehicle barriers like those planned for the park, all blanketed with surveillance. 

It’s a small retreat from the administration’s original plan for a border wall through Big Bend, which sparked outrage earlier this year. Still, the administration intends to build about 700 additional miles of “primary” wall, spanning all four border states. The whole project is slated to cost around $47 billion. 

Why Big Bend? It’s hard to say. As the New York Times reported earlier this year, the park has long been considered low-priority given its remote location and inhospitable weather. Only about 1 percent of those apprehended for crossing the US-Mexico border have been detained in Big Bend.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy Friday! Before we log off today, here’s a story from my colleague Allie Volpe about how to bring some playfulness back into your life and why we’d all stand to benefit from it. You can read it here with a gift link. 

Have a good weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!