Today on the Playbook podcast, Democrats are fretting about a certain kind of primary candidate in red and purple states.

The Commerce Department is releasing its preliminary estimate for third quarter growth.

Hello, I'm Adam Wren.

And I'm Andrew Howard. It's Tuesday, December 23rd.

Andrew, just two big stories to talk about today. The first story driving Washington's conversation is

Democrats are fretting about the certain profile of a kind of candidate in red and purple states

that is giving them some

heartburn right now. After Democrats' unexpected string of victories this year, special elections

across the map, particularly most recently in Tennessee, where Afton Bain cut into Donald Trump's

double-digit margin of victory from 2024.

There are still Democrats in the party who are fretting that she was too out there on defund the police and abolishing ICE and really could have actually won.

And so now, Andrew, Democrats are taking a closer look in some of their candidates in Democratic

primaries that are being

contested in places like Michigan, in places like Iowa, in places like Texas. And they're trying to

say, look, we should be very careful about nominating the kind of candidate who can win in a purple or

red state. So there's a few candidates that we can kind of walk through, Andrew, you can kind of guess

some of them. And so the first candidate that we have on the map, Andrew, is Zach Walls. He comes from a more

liberal part of reddening Iowa. And he has a history during the civil rights protest in the George

Floyd era of tweeting about, quote, extraditional killing of black people by white people is not a, quote,

black problem. It's a white problem. And he's also said that, you know, policing and policing

problems are not a, quote, bad Apple issue without looking it up. He asked one user approximately

how many U.S. civilians do you think are killed every year by police officers.

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