The project of Big Tenting will be assisted, I think, by returning to an earlier understanding of “allyship.”
During WWII, the US allied with the USSR in order to defeat Hitler. We were allies despite fundamental disagreements about political ideologies, values, and global aspirations. We were allied together for a specific purpose. And beyond that purpose there was no expectation of agreement.
Notably, the USSR never accused us of being “bad allies” for not supporting its plans to conquer Eastern Europe. It did not accuse us of being “bad allies” for not supporting Leninism.
Nothing about being an ally for the purpose of fighting X should be supposed to commit you to joining in the fight against Y.
And yet this is the understanding of “allyship” that has dominated left politics, and to a large extent Democratic politics, for the last decade.
It has been a disaster.
We need to be able to say: we stand with you against a common enemy, despite not supporting other parts of your agenda. That does not make us “bad allies.” It makes us genuine allies, in the traditional sense.
It seems like the Harris campaign tried that with Liz Cheney and it didn't really work. What other allies should the Democratic Party publicly seek for support?
*Ok editing this: Obviously there's no evidence that it hurt her campaign and there's a left critique that massively overstates how much it hurt. I just think the problem with the Cheney gambit is that it was seen as a token attempt at moderation, when Harris needed to take more actually moderate policy positions.
Liz Cheney was trotted out as a prop. Democrats were not willing to make any compromises on her policy views to try to bring her allies into the D tent. It was Cheney doing 100% of the compromising - and credit to her for that, but it only appealed to a small number of #nevertrump voters who were willing to sacrifice all their political values to oppose Trump.
I have more respect for the Bulwark Types and Cheney and Kinzinger than anyone associated with Dem politics since Obama.
The neocons made horrible mistakes thinking they could spread democracy in the middle east by toppling dictators but it seems at least that they genuinely value democracy and it was not all just a grift. That is rare these days.
Just doesn't feel like there was a ton of ore left in that vein. "Never Trump" Republicans are all just Democrats now. What independent who is on the fence cares what Liz Cheney thinks? How many even know who she is besides 'related to Dick Cheney'?
Mitt Romney on the other hand might have been a good proxy if she could've gotten him.
Liz Cheney used to be the third ranking Republican in the House. I think moderate scolds like Matt need to think long and hard about why that endorsement flopped yet some crazy antivaxx health nut was a huge get for Trump.
Literally no Americans know who the third ranking Republican in the house is. Most swing voters probably don't even know who Johnson or Thune are! People don't know anything about politics, it's a country of morons! The endorsement flopped because it was an endorsement from someone only high-info voters care about, and all high-info voters have very strong opinions on Trump at this point.
A lot of pundits keep insisting Democrats just need to come up with the right policy concessions yet everyone takes it for granted that a Joe Rogan endorsement would have been way more influential than Liz Cheney's despite the former being a podcast bro who sometimes indulges right-wing conspiracists and the latter actually deciding Republican policy during Trump's first term.
It is more apparent than ever that most of the electorate only talks about "policy" as a means of cultural signaling. Everyone tries to cloak their culture war shit in high-minded policy talk, but their revealed preference is culture war bullshit. The reason Matt isn't able to enact his political calculus is because no one actually wants to sacrifice their cultural positions to enact real policy objectives. They want to win the culture war.
FWIW, Matt has long been beating the drum that ceding conspiracy theorists to the GOP was a mistake. On Politix today, he was saying that safe-seat dems should try to make some political hay out of the administration's inability to produce an "Epstein list" (probably because it doesn't exist, but at least they would have to admit they were lying the whole time).
Republican politicians took their cue from far right influencers incessantly promoting conspiracy theories attaching prominent liberals to Epstein. The only equivalent dynamic among the left comes from the ultra-fringe left that Matt is actively instructing Democrats to ignore.
Getting real fucking tired of this "it didn't work" bullshit about literally anything the Kamala campaign did. No shit, political gestures and campaign stunts only move people on the very margins. Elections are mostly decided by the fundamentals, that's why they're called the fundamentals. And the fundamentals in 2024 were that every voter in the whole goddamn world hated the incumbents.
"Harris needed to take more actually moderate policy positions"
Kamala Harris' loss was way over-determined so it is hard to blame it on any one thing or subset of things.
But to this day I have no idea why Kamala Harris wanted to be President in the first place and I certainly hope she does not decide to run for the governor of CA.
" I just think the problem with the Cheney gambit is that it was seen as a token attempt at moderation, when Harris needed to take more actually moderate policy positions."
October 23, 1956: "We pledge to do better by supporting our Soviet allies during these unprecedented times. #checkyourhungarianprivilege #Sovietlivesmatter #silenceisbourgeois
Not sure I understand. Eisenhower basically did throw Hungary to the wolves, though for practical reasons and not to support our erstwhile Soviet "ally." I guess I'm not getting the joke. (Many times, I don't get *my* jokes, so no criticism.)
I'm curious if that's an actual quote, because I can't find it. I also can't be sure (even with the hash tags) if this is sarcastic, or if you're actually saying the US should have automatically committed to fighting a war against the USSR in Hungary in 1956.
I think it's a parody of the concept of "allyship" = "as our ally, you must follow our lead and support us in everything, even if it's (a) against your interests AND (b) you doubt we're right on the merits; you're with us 100%, no exceptions, or you were never an ally."
Following up on dysphemistic treadmill's comment, being allies traditionally meant only that you were making common cause against a mutual enemy for now. The WWII Allies are an example -- the US and UK remained friendly after the war, but their relations with the USSR soured. US-Soviet relations were not entirely friendly and trusting during the war either, but while they were at war with a mutual enemy, they prioritized winning that war over other concerns, and when the war ended, priorities necessarily changed.
Also, among friendly countries, the UK did not insist that if the Americans wanted to help, they needed to defer to Brits in all areas of controversy. They coordinated, but the US became the senior partner by virtue of its sheer size, strength, industrial might etc. Many power dynamics are possible in alliances, not just the one where the allies joining in are subordinate to the people they joined.
As C-man points out, being an ally of the Soviets against Germany in 1944 does not mean that the Americans need to support the Soviet repression of Hungary in 1956. Leftists would be a little less alienating if they were more accepting of traditional allyship -- if, for example, they'd be happy with supporters of Medicaid expansion who are centrist on late-term abortion or immigration enforcement. And to the point of today's column, they need to accept traditional allies to win the Senate -- the full leftist package is not popular enough in the majority of states, but they can still make common cause with people who agree with some parts of the package and don't want the Republicans in power.
During the 2020 primary a huge subtext of the debate was is Trump the problem or a symptom.
That it was never really settled remains a significant problem for the not-Trump coalition. Are we trying to fight the President or trying to win arguments about the shape of society.
Your assumption of a “we” is telling. The Democratic coalition should be 89 million often fractious voters who agree that broad prosperity for working stiffs and hard eyed decency towards the poor are good things.
The vast majority of Democrats *do* agree on those things! Hell, I’m the dreaded Highly Educated UMC Liberal Woman, and I want broadly shared prosperity and decency to the poor! And my husband and in-laws would say the same, as would, I bet, most if not all of my colleagues at the university.
The problem is politicizing questions of sexuality. There hasn’t been a broad consensus on sexual morality since the Civil War. During Victorian times, a significant fraction of working class men never married and prostitution was common. In the 1950s, 5% of all men listed on birth certificates were cuckholds and 30% of brides were pregnant on their wedding day. The gap between conservative and liberal views of sexuality has only diverged, and these sort of gaps have always cleaved the working class somewhat evenly.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that. Hell, I don't even know what the "conservative and liberal views on sexuality" are anymore!
It used to be straightforward: Conservatives used to be for chastity, purity, one man + one woman in marriage for life, sex for procreation only; liberals used to be the amoral hedonists who were like, anything goes, gay sex, serial monogamy, swinging, threesomes, abortion on demand, wheeee!
Now? It's all scrambled and confused. On the Democratic side, you've got sex-positivity along with activists who worry about how porn and prostitution are degrading and demeaning, plus all the worry about sex that is "problematic" and condemnation of any sexual relationships that have a whiff of a power imbalance about them. On the Republican side, we have an unholy alliance of manosphere bros who are like "you gotta slap a bitch if she gets uppity" and traditional Evangelicals who want to RETVRN to a lost past when man was the master of the household and woman was like one of the tradwives on social media, churning homemade butter while caring for her five children and looking angelic in her homemade linen dress.
Not to mention, awkwardly, it's those godless libertine liberals who are doing a much better job of following the traditional lifestyle: getting married, staying married, having children within wedlock. The lower-SES people are more likely both to vote Republican and to get divorced or have children while unmarried.
What exactly do you want Democrats to do about sexuality, other than to say "Your sexuality is none of the government's business, as long as it's consensual, because nonconsensual activity is sexual assault, which is a matter for the criminal justice system"?
I feel like defining the we is the central question of a primary campaign. What’s the platform and who’s the candidate. Of course there will be disagreements that should be getting hashed out in one or more venues right now.
If Biden had been capable of leading and not a last moment Hail Mary by people who only backed him in the way that he’s not Bernie instead of the awful rule by committee period where no one really got much of anything and the debate was settled democrats wouldn’t be so deep in the hole.
But that was all a complete waste of time, because it was not responsive to the needs of the moment. It blithely ignored the looming threat of Trump, thinking that if the inflation rate went down without sparking a recession everything would fall into place for Biden’s re-election, which turned out to be very, very wrong. Biden’s administration was very popular with true blue democrats and progressives (at least up until October 7, 2023, when it even lost a big chunk of them) but not the working class or the American people. There was always something odd about talking about threats to democracy while ignoring the will of the people at every turn.
Biden should have acted more swiftly on the explosion of asylum claims. There was little he could have done on inflation (it was a global phenomenon in the wake of COVID) but he should have done more symbolic things to create the appearance of acting. The BBB took long to happen but ended up as good legislation.
Other than that, I thought what the administration actually did was fine. I wish he had been ten years younger (same for me!) and that the Democratic brand hadn't become so terribly toxic over some number of years. But other than that I reject your contention that they were "ignoring the will of the public at every turn."
I don't exactly disagree but they proved to basically completely inept at responding to events because they weren't really executing anyone's vision for management.
There were a few areas that buck this trend but it simply seems to have been whatever someone could get away with got done and they wandered into one fire straight out of another one.
CHIPS, too much extraneous stuff but yes (and looks like it is not getting repealed)
IRA support for nuclear, geothermal, and CCS yes, very good. To much (more than needed to mimic a tax on net CO2 emissions) and too much for "investment in" rather than "output of" wind/solar.
>I feel like defining the we is the central question of a primary campaign.
It should be, but in practice, that doesn't seem to be true, because of who actually votes in primaries. Also, because there has to be a pool of candidates actually able and willing to run in key primaries who have a chance of winning a general, in order for the primary to matter.
This analogy has promise, but it goes a bit astray in that once the Nazis were eradicated, there was never any reasonable expectation to stay allied with the USSR. Indeed, they were always going to be a threat to the rest of the world. But Republicans are not going to be eradicated. They weren't even at their lowest moment in the 1930s. They can of course be contained, as they were then. But that requires an everlasting allyship to succeed at that.
Which reminds me of Matt straight up saying to Freddie that he should support Democrats of all stripes, because they're the most likely ones to defeat Republicans.
Oh the USSR accused us of being bad allies multiple times. Stalin constantly griped about our 'delays' in opening a true second front. Hated that the UK convinced FDR to go after the Mediterranean first, and there are MANY people today who would happily accuse the US of being a bad ally. Think Oliver Stone's (awful) TV series on the untold history of the US.
This does not even begin to address that Stalin was actively HELPING Hitler until inconveniently Hitler proved himself to be the man he literally declared himself to be for decades. Stalin further hindered his own cause by idiotically ordering his own military not to prepare for the invasion (and then countermanding orders right after).
I do get your point, but the example you use is a weird one. Now, Stalin still accepted US aid and still worked together (to a degree) for the common good. But most of the sacrifices and compromises came from the US & UK.
>But most of the sacrifices and compromises came from the US & UK.
For the negotiated concessions related to forming the alliance, plausibly, sure. But remember that the USSR had over 30x as many casualties as the US and UK in WWII, a majority of them civilians. Complaining about delays in opening a second front seems pretty natural in that context. Not that the US and UK necessarily should have done anything differently. But the USSR wasn't wrong or lying about that.
Stalin wasn't so much "on Hitler's side" as "on Stalin's side for focusing on what he thought was his political risk, his internal opposition" - of course this evily meant doing a 'alliance of convenience' (and the self-deception that Hitler would be too bogged down in the West to risk attacking the Sovs... oops).
Sure but they griped about things of actual focus of the alliance (attack Hitler), not other side factors / not-core-factors. (of course the griping was as always w Stalin & Co supremely hypocritical and self-interested but such griping doesn't undermine the actual analogy at all)
In an attempt to tell things from Stalin's perspective, I'd argue that he negotiated that awful agreement with Hitler because the UK and France handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler (with zero say from the USSR) and that removed the strongest barrier to Germany's eastward expansion and greatly increased the threat to the USSR. So he struck a deal because he decided he could not depend on the UK and France to do anything that would help protect his country.
Yes, I heard all about why omnicause is bad and then the Republicans just passed one big omnicause bill of their own where the most unpopular part is the headline item not some rider they snuck in. You guys are the "Japanese soldier who kept fighting" meme. Yes, the drawbacks are obvious, but it's beyond apparent that omnicauses are just how coalitional politics work in the 21st century.
The problem with this diagnosis is that it's reactive, while the matter of creating "culture war" issues is adaptive and adversarial.
You think that by "moving to the center" on a handful of simple issues you're going to cut the heart out of the culture war. But what will actually happen is that well-funded conservative think tanks and right-wing media will develop new culture-war stances. Maybe we'll go from "trans people in sports" to "should we throw trans people into forced 'conversion therapy' programs." Then folks on the left, being basically human and empathetic, will object to that plan.
Which, of course, is the whole point. And now the Overton window of 'shift to the center' is targeted around whether you're willing to throw trans people into forced 'treatment' or not, and moderates will sigh and say something like, ok, look, half the country wants to institutionalize trans people and some crazy left-wing progressives are against it, to win the Senate we need to moderate on this 'forced therapy' question... and so on and so forth. You can't win when you don't get to drive the terms of the argument and you're always playing on somebody else's home turf.
You think the right created trans as a culture war issue, and not, you know, the people who began pushing it relentlessly from the left? The Democrats and their most loyal voters opened with the terms of this argument and it's pretty blinkered to act like it was thrust upon them unwillingly.
Yes. I think the right created trans as a culture war issue. This is consistent with the history, and consistent with the fact that the trans panic began almost immediately after gay marriage collapsed as a wedge issue.
It was the people not only insisting against all evidence that men are women, but that everybody needed to sing along, that created the issue, not the people who take issue with that absurd statement and do not care to parrot it.
What trans panic? You mean that people didn't like men in women's locker rooms and on women's sports teams and children being told that dresses are for girls so if you like dresses you're a girl? That's a reasonable response. The right didn't have to go looking, it was put in everyone's face and we were told to celebrate it.
Look, I get that you hate trans stuff and/or you're an LLM that's been programmed on the prompt of "write posts that obsessively complain about trans stuff in a way that's super-not-normal," but this whole screed isn't really a response to anything. Also, in general it's just super weird. I'm almost certain you've never personally been harmed by a trans person showing up in your locker room, and obsessing over things that don't really affect you is not a sign of good mental health.
Actually it was my wife who was menaced by a grown man when she was by herself in a locker room. Responding to a comment you made, and continuing to argue for sense and reason is not obsessing. It's making an argument.
It's not weird to object to the lie that men are women. Nobody had to go looking for a 'trans panic' when I Am Jazz was on national TV and Jenner was being spotlit as stunning and brave. Even then it wasn't much of an issue until men began an aggressive push to be allowed into women's spaces and onto their teams, and now we have men in women's prison! The predictable outcome of trans activism has occurred and finally it's being challenged openly.
You can't make a persuasive case, so you try to limply insult me with noodle armed accusations. Yikes! Gross! Not very heckin' great my dude.
I think the consensus is that the various organizations fighting for gay marriage suddenly needed something else to justify their existence and shifted to trans issues.
The example used in the essay about the EPA zero-emissions vehicle exemption is a case in point. There was no national vote on banning gasoline engines, there was a vote on whether California should be allowed to do it, because (1) Californians support it, and (2) California has and has always had air pollution problems caused by internal combustion engine emissions. It was Republicans who converted this California issue (and whichever of the other states that chose to follow the California rule) into a performative national anti-EV vote by striking down the exemption and claiming that it was some sort of dire threat to the nation. Democrats voting to strike down the exemption was the farthest thing from a "big tent" move, because a "big tent" would definitely include the majority view in the single largest state in the nation wanting to adopt a rule that has nothing to do with the market for God-knows-what kind of vehicles on Oklahoma or Louisiana. Rather, this was an example of exactly the phenomenon you describe: right wingers seizing on an issue that is unpopular in places with high political salience to right wingers, then using that leverage to impose a hegemonic anti-liberal culture war position.
It makes me wonder what the Yglesias view will be when the right wing successfully pulls this trick on Medicaid or Medicare or any public provisions of health care funding (which they were able to do not very long ago with "Obamacare"). Probably more go-with-flow, don't-make-them-mad passivity in the face of this all too evident and predictable right-wing strategy of issue identification + toxification. The "slow boring of hard boards" is about the relentless pursuit of that which is right and good for people against the "hard boards" of ignorance, greed, corruption and lethargy that allow bad policy to persist. This inevitably involves persuasion, and while the right wing knows that it can use persuasion to "harden the boards", moderates seem to just sit around waiting for polls to tell them how hard the boards are, then get in line with whatever shockingly grotesque agenda the right has made "popular".
As someone who’s completely on board with the analysis of state level abortion politics, I think that’s substantially different from Schumer’s rank capitulations.
The idea should be that fighting on those sorts of measures serves as a Schelling point to rally the big tent around.
My general thesis is that moderate voters will give you credit if they see you using those opportunities to expand the tent — say, welcoming Mamdani’s or Bel Edwards’ encouragement — instead of Matt’s and Schumer’s fear that they’ll just mindlessly blame you for XYZ in a shutdown fight.
Addendum: The lack of blame probably doesn’t show up in immediate post-shutdown polls — hence why Republicans always seemed to get blamed for their Obama-era shutdowns — but also, the tent expansion effect probably takes a while to show up, if it’s actually detectable at all.
It sadly ends up being something where we can’t measure the hidden variable, so no “smart” Dem can be convinced to do it, but we keep seeing the price of NOT using various showdowns and fights as tent-expansion opportunities in the electoral end-results.
Stalin constantly accused the US and the UK of being bad allies for delaying the Normandy invasion. He thought we were actually colluding with the Nazis to weaken the USSR and to make it do the brunt of fighting to defeat Germany. Had we been the "good allies" he wanted, we would have launched D-Day in 1943 (many American military leaders wanted to do this). And probably it would have been a disaster, but that's another discussion.
So, no, we didn't agree with Stalin on 100%. But one of the things we disagreed about was of absolute importance to him.
MY says that the Democratic party should drop climate change as a party priority in order to help frontline candidates. I'm fine with this if we adopt the Trump approach to moderating on policy: i.e., lying through your teeth. Say one thing, win power, and do something entirely different. But if he's serious about it, then I have a big problem with that. We need the Senate of course, but we can't let the voters of Texas set the entire agenda for the Democratic party.
Matt does not think we should drop climate change as a policy priority. He thinks Dems should not pursue policies that do not help the issue and are so unpopular as to lose races. He thinks we should rapidly build out solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, natural gas, transmission lines, battery storage, and invest in research and carbon capture. That is different from banning ICE cars, gas stoves, and other performative stuff.
Another reason they didn't accuse us of being "bad allies" was because the very phrase invites mockery. You work together to get the job done, the job you both agree with.
... unless you're an ally because you like having the "ally" badge in your bio. Then it matters a lot if people say you're a "bad ally." It's like donating money to charity but then not getting to brag about it on insta.
Leftwing “allyship” has not been about an alliance, it’s been about intellectual vassalage. I agree factions in the Democratic tent need to accept allies and not demand vassals.
How you build a team, and what the team accomplishes, also matters. Wining covers a lot of sins and provides a lot of motivation and momentum. It also often creates opportunities to build a deeper coalition over time as you learn to work together and trust each other.
The movies where the Bad News Bears or the Mighty Ducks got along, and had a great time, but never won - those movies never got made, for obvious reasons. No one would want to watch them or get inspired by them, either.
The Chair recognizes Senator Zedong from West Virginia
Thank you Mister President. I yield myself as much time as I may consume. I also yield myself as much time as you may consume. And as much time as all these lame ass senators may consume.
Not sure this analogy holds up. The Soviets only joined with the allies reluctantly after Hitler attacked them and broke their pact. The US only joined the alliance reluctantly after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the US. The Soviets were critical of the allies for not opening up a second front sooner. But I get your point.
Wasn't this ham-fisted analogy of opposing Republicans to working with the Soviets to put down the mad dog of Nazism just the operating worldview of the Biden White House?
If you read Original Sin and come away with the idea that the Biden Whitehouse had a coherent worldview I'm curious how that's what you think it was.
It seemed to me that outside of a very few issues where Biden and the Politburo were personally invested everything was up for negotiation which led to incoherence. Then sort of papered over with odd attempts to be bipartisan.
Maybe that book is unfairly throwing Biden's people under the bus in some way I'm not seeing since the inside defense is so incomprehensible.
No, I mean that was all the worldview was, everything came down to "are we undoing Trump's threat to America or not," right down to the debate. I didn't say it lead to coherent action, quite the opposite. I have read Original Sin, everyone cited in Original Sin stresses how central the threat of Trump was to Biden's self-perception as a historic leader, to defining his cabinet's internal debates, to first arguing that Biden would fundamentally restore the country from evil, to later arguing that he was the only one who could beat Trump a second time because he beat him a first time. Biden was the perfect candidate for a pure anti-Trump coalition, but being a pure anti-Trump coalition doesn't easily resolve many political questions. You need something else, and there was nothing else.
For example, consider that any idiot advisor halfway awake from 2015 to 2020 could have said "do not rapidly increase immigration into a country with a decaying civic culture that has summoned an odd entertainer into politics on the cause of restricting immigration." But this question, like others the admin confronted, requires thinking about things by metrics other than "is our opponent as evil as Generalplan Ost" (which incidentally, is the only reason to work with a sociopathic murderer like Stalin.) Coming up with historical analogies for how evil your opponents are provides very little insight to governing well or winning elections. As Republicans are well on their way to finding out.
Is it possible that the geographic distribution of politically active Democrats is partially driving the stickiness of dead-end political ideas and excessive hopes around Mamdami? I had this thought while reading this article on the train and haven’t looked for data, but my vibes are that the median highly political activist Democrat lives somewhere much less representative of the median voter than the median political activist Republican. I am envisioning the DC area, NYC, or other large blue urban areas in contrast to the suburbs of a medium sized city in a red state. I’m trying to find explanations that go beyond left wing activists not caring about winning or being more misinformed since a large portion of right wing activists clearly don’t care either and also operate in echo chambers.
I think this is likely true. I knew when Mamdani won that it would lead to a lot of confusing takes about "what it means for the Democratic Party." When in fact, he's obviously just too left-wing on social issues and most economic issues to win anywhere else.
The social issues aren't the point. The point of Mamdani is that he's young, charismatic, focused on kitchen table issues, and he found a way to be the scrappy outsider in a system of powerful incumbents. These parts of the formula can be replicated in many places if the establishment doesn't block them.
I think this is true. Despite the image projected in the media, basically no areas are as red as dense urban areas are blue. And few people at all, let alone few conservative influencers, live in the extremely red parts of rural Texas, for example.
This used to be true 10 years ago (and because African-American areas were voting 95% Dem, not liberal activist areas, which were always closer to 85% Dem), but not any more. Lots of rural Red areas are 90%-95% Rep now, even as African-American areas have fallen from 95% Dem to 90% Dem: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/elections/2024-election-map-precinct-results.html
There were 10 Trump+50 Congressional districts, and 21+DC Harris+50 districts. Plus the Trump+50 ones feature few people with important positions in politics or media, and the Harris ones lots.
There are lots of Democrats in suburbs of medium sized cities in Red States; that’s pretty much the area where Trump had the least gains. On election night one of the first counties to report was a suburb of Indianapolis that showed Harris doing better than Biden that briefly got my hopes up…
Also the fact that there's so few elections in 2025 in which Democrats can really do anything. The VA and NJ gubernatorial elections have been pretty quiet.
I get that NYC is where the media is and the race was pretty exciting, but the now accepted conventional wisdom that Mamdani's victory Says Things About The Future of the Democratic Party whereas Spanberger's and Sherill's primary victories yield blank stares is not good for diagnosing the current political climate.
Surely, Democratic moderates winning statewide primaries means *something.*
Definitely. I kind of wonder if the fact that too many Virginia and Maryland governors were touted as future presidential candidates earlier this century, only got those campaigns to go nowhere, played a role in the media ignoring those races eventually.
I'm not really surprised that everyone is ignoring those two contests. Most of the time, local primary contests are of little wider interest. My problem is the mindless herd behavior that drives the conclusion that Mamdani's win means something larger than New York City.
I keep hearing both centrists and leftists say that Dems need a big tent on culture to promote their obviously more popular approach to economics (despite the fact that these two factions actually have very different views about what that approach entails).
Am I the only one who’s a little skeptical about this? Sure, the Dems’ current cultural brand is dogshit (in electoral terms), but it’s not like they’ve recently been super-popular on economics. Typically Republicans are more trusted to run the economy effectively.
Obama was popular because the US was in the midst of a massive recession and people genuinely wanted policies that would help the poor since they feared becoming poor themselves. Once the economy had recovered, America voted for a Republican again. Biden won because of the lawlessness and incompetence of the first Trump admin, not because of his views on economics. Kamala actually lost in large part because of Biden’s economic mistakes.
Maybe Dems need to wait for another recession for their approach to be popular again? I don’t think healthcare *for the poor* is necessarily the most important issue for swing voters.
I've been having this thing where I both feel the urge to roll my eyes some of the extreme gnashing of teeth over Medicaid cuts and at the same time am way more doomer about the situation than someone like Matt is and I think this is kinda at the core of it. In the past 6 years or so the country has genuinely driven the car off the fiscal cliff and no one seems to take it seriously. We're genuinely fucked and healthcare for the poor is the least of it. If the Dems want their redistributionist aims taken seriously, and I have sympathies that way, they absolutely have to take dramatic steps to restructure the federal budget. The plan cannot be to simply put it all on the credit card and you can't pay for it if you're splitting time with the degrowthers. As bad as the OBBBA is the Dems are not offering a viable alternative, they're fighting over the size of the slices of a shrinking pie on the titanic as the whole federal budget gets swallowed up by debt service and transfers to retirees.
Social Security Trust Fund Depletion Day will be the latest moment until heads get clunked. It's also quite something that this latest bill moves it up to 2032, an election year. Good luck to the next president in dealing with that in your reelection bid.
Only if a Ross Perot style independent makes it an issue. It would be a good issue for a charismatic billionaire to cleave the Republican coalition, and subsequently provide cover for a winning Democrat. This is basically what happened with Clinton.
I really don't think there's any magic about Social Security Trust Fund Depletion Day. On that day, after a lot of rending of garments, Congress will pass a simple stopgap measure that funds existing Social Security benefits out of general revenues "pending a long-term solution" (haha). Precisely nothing will change.
Even a stopgap that kicks the can down the road a few years still has to contain some form of benefit cuts and/or tax hikes. Probably the one that would make the fewest waves, especially if Democrats hold all the power, is abolishing the cap on FICA.
Since when have new expenditures ever been funded?! Why do you say it has to contain some form of benefit cuts or tax hikes? Just add the bill to the deficit, as we do for almost everything.
Ed: To be clear, there will be nothing different about the cash flows on that day. They will be exactly the same. We're effectively funding social security benefits out of general revenues and the deficit now, since outlays are greater than inputs.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to your argument, but imo it way undercounts what the Dems accomplished with IRA.
The Dem vision, as enacted with IRA, is very strongly pro-growth, pro US industrial base, and pro abundance. Despite its problems, the law had the potential to propel us into the 21st century as a major electro-state that had a shot at matching the capabilities of China.
The ultimate proof of this is that OBBA endorses a significant chunk of the IRA's economic and industrial policy programs. It keeps intact somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of IRA's spending on these things. The headlines focus on dismantling of support for EVs, solar, and wind, but ignore that OBBA keeps most of IRA's support for industrial policy, advanced nuclear and geothermal, and grid battery storage. In fact, OBBA even provides indirect support for utility scale wind and solar because most of the balance of system cost for these projects will end up getting subsidized under the battery storage tax credits (wind and solar projects are now almost always paired with batteries that still get subsidies).
I think that the IRA energy investments are mostly fine, but even in the best case they're not dramatically impacting GDP. And really "Don't crash the economy via awful industrial/tariff/degrowth/protectionist insanity" is the easy part of the problem. The hard part is funding the government, and the chances of that happening pre-catastrophic ramifications are rapidly approaching zero. Right now the federal budget is the car at the fade out at the end of Thelma & Louis.
I agree. I know it’s an n of 1, but when Paula Jean Swearingen was the Democratic nominee for Senate in West Virginia and went all in on Medicare for All and whatnot, she did much worse than Manchin. Lefty economic populism can poll well in the abstract, but I feel like it runs into the fact that most people also want to feel like they’re “making it on their own” and not just taking handouts from the government. Not to mention the fact that I think people are skeptical enough to grasp that something like Medicare For All would be really hard to actually pass and implement in a way that helps them.
The details are much more complex than "just" funding. Can patients opt out and buy private insurance? Can providers opt out and only accept private insurance? If the answer to either of those questions is no, I suspect there would be a ton of court challenges (and principled challenges) on liberty grounds. If patients or doctors CAN opt out, look for a lot of dissatisfaction with the fact that suddenly one's choice of providers is extremely limited, and you have to find a new doctor.
Well, yes and no - it goes back to “what does it mean?”.
If Medicare for All literally means “change today’s Medicare eligibility age to 0 and adjust the payroll tax to do it”, it might not be that expensive. We almost did that in 2009, after all, and I think it got a decent CBO score.
However, if it means “everyone gets copay-free care with no deductible or supplemental insurance needed”, then the price is WAY higher.
It would be incredibly expensive to offer actual Medicare for everyone. Also, it would be an enormous and expensive undertaking to change the source of funds, and there are many, many entrenched actors who would resist the change, and indeed who have resisted the change every time it's been proposed in a state.
It’d be expensive but relatively easy - just raise the Medicare payroll taxes a couple/few percent. You’d be covering younger and less expensive enrollees, so the cost per capita would be less and less as the eligibility age dropped.
Of course there’d be entrenched actors opposing. That’s true of every change everywhere, all the time. That’s not a reason not to do it. However, my guess is that this would have the least pushback because it’s already in place, just for older people.
I have some recent immigrant family members who supported Trump as their first Republican. By and large their main complaint against Democrats was about taxes and welfare for poor people that they saw as drains on society. One of them worked at an inner-city hospital and specifically complained about how much free healthcare some of the people were getting for self-inflicted problems. So I’m not really convinced that left-wing positions on economics are really going to be that much more popular than ones on culture. To be successful I think the left-wing economics positions have to be like Mamdanism and focused on reducing cost-of-living for everyone including through deregulation where appropriate like his famous halal cart video and not on improving things for the poor specifically. I personally think we should be more generous to the poor but don’t think it’ll be any more popular than trans swimmers…
The message needs to be, “We are looking out for the people who pay the bills.” Yes we care about all these edge cases fuckups - but we also care about hard working, tax paying, middle class people. Too much of progressive rhetoric is about very small often unsympathetic groups .
I don't even think it's a question of sympathy or no - plenty of people have sympathy for the poor or disadvantaged, but when Democratic messaging is focused around those cases, the normie voter hears that Democrats are fighting primarily for those people, not me.
Moreover, a good chunk of the unofficial (not from Democratic politicians) reponse to this fact that been to shame or scold folks who ask, "But, what's in it for me?"
It’s less that progressives are for these edge cases and more that the edge cases are taken as “must support” cases, and those just aren’t that popular.
I’m very supportive of queer and trans rights - let people live their lives in peace, dammit - but there are legitimate questions to be asked about gender-affirming care for minors, especially if government dollars are involved. That’s a very volatile part of someone’s life and every kid I’m aware of that has declared him/herself to be trans in the last 5 years has a pretty significant history of mental health issues or PTSD. They all happen to come from VERY liberal families, too. The Venmo diagram is nearly a circle. So, I’m not sure that all of these cases are so biologically natural, if I’m honest, which is why this should be handled when people are adults. Making Democrats take a position of “yeah, I’m fine with a 15-year-old electing to change genders and Medicaid paying for it” is, I think, unwise. Most Americans aren’t OK with doing this for minors, and that goes 5x if the parents aren’t on board.
When adults, this is a different story. Still a solid question to ask if government dollars are involved, but I think many fewer people are going to care about someone’s gender once they’re 20, 21, etc. The question then is just $$$.
Handling trans issues when someone is an adult means dooming trans people to being in the wrong adult body. Puberty is not going to wait until someone is an adult without medical intervention. I understand the politics of this, but I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that delaying gender affirming care until someone is an adult is anything other than a catastrophe for trans people. Yeah, some children might subsequently regret their gender affirming care, but *most of them won't*. What about them?
Would you think it was fine for you to be in an adult woman's body? Would you be comforted that people said, Well now you can chop off your breasts?
I get your point but 2020 wasn’t the first time someone felt as if they were in the wrong body and we’ve had transgender people for a long time. It was just…not a political issue. Why it was pushed SO HARD at that point in time, I don’t know. Regardless, it’s less that younger people were for it than that there was a VERY strong online push to get everyone to accept a maximalist position - and ostracize those that didn’t - and for government policy and even schools to accommodate it for minor children, sometimes even contrary to a parent’s desires, and even at the government’s expense.
We can argue all day the merits of the idea and talk about how this all went down but the fact is that it was very likely to result in a backlash (I remember saying this to many on Twitter at the time) because even those sympathetic but not enthusiastic about such a policy set were told to buck up and get on board. Those less sympathetic or outright hostile were likely to look at those pushing and be rightly annoyed or even horrified.
I think a lot of people genuinely found that they were dealing with gender dysphoria of some kind. Some also decided they wanted the freedom to experiment with the idea. Combine that with an extremely systematic conservative plan to weaponize trans issues [1] and you get a perfect storm.
The joke on everyone is that probably the conservative push on trans issues will result in some short-term political gains for conservatives, but it'll end up completely restructuring the way younger generations build their society. Parents never win, nor are they remembered fondly for trying to stop kids from doing what they want.
It's worth noting that "popular" doesn't mean "100%". There are probably 30-35% of the population who are philosophically opposed to anything more than a very basic welfare state and it's very easy to run into such people. They aren't swing voters.
I think most of them leave. The first 5 year quit rate for teachers is really high. It also seems to me teachers are much more like small c conservative than their unions would have you believe and have pretty strong beliefs in don't be lazy or a scumbag.
My synthesized viewpoint is that a lot of (but not all) poor people are poor because of incredibly stupid, selfish, and anti-social decision making (and we should help them anyways).
You’re right that Democrats haven’t been popular on economics lately — but that’s partly because they never get to talk about economics. The culture war eats all the oxygen. Imagine if, in 2024, they’d neutralized the bait with plain-language, normie-coded lines:
“Of course men shouldn’t play women’s sports. I love fracking. Every hard-working man should get to drive a big-ass truck.”
No culture-fight foxholes, no academic hedging — just move on.
Then they’d have the bandwidth to hammer Republicans where they’re soft: nearly killing the ACA, running up massive deficits, and passing tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981, 2001, 2017, and now again in 2025.
And here’s the thing: those economic positions poll really well.
66% of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy — including 55% of Trump voters.
63% want higher taxes on households earning over $400K.
62% say the government should guarantee health coverage.
Favorability for Medicare and Medicaid is 77–82%, across parties.
These are policies that poll thirty points above water. But to get traction, Democrats have to stop taking the bait and clear the culture-war wreckage first.
I’m not so sure. For one, I don’t really buy the premise that people don’t know what Democrats are all about on economics. I think most normal people understand that Democrats broadly want more programs to help the less fortunate and plan to fund this either by printing money or raising taxes on the rich. In fact, their approach to immigration isn’t really separable from this: it’s also premised on the fact that the party’s role is to help the less fortunate. (The economic benefits of immigration are a side effect, not the main motivation.)
Also, isn’t your messaging strategy kind of what Kamala did? She avoided cultural issues and instead was like “My economic plan is… um… opportunity economy! No tax on tips! And we’ll build some houses I guess?” At the end of the day, no one really thought that was so great, and they could tell she still had the moral commitments of your typical Democrat anyway.
The general public still wrongly thinks of democrats as the party of prolific and wasteful spending and higher deficits even though the facts have said otherwise for a couple of decades.
Republicans have consistently been much better at convincingly lying about their policies, democrats' policies, and everyone's record on the economy.
Democrarts say they want higher spending and Republicans don't. And people who don't pay attention to politics (most people) only hear what politicians say and don't know about what politicians actually do.
A general framing of helping the Working Stiff (not the Poors and Disadvantaged which codes as bleeding hearts giving freebies away, the Working Stiffs) and also Small & Medium Sized entrepreneurs over Big Boys, fair play.
And talking lowering costs, making level playing fields for the Not Big Boys
Fiscal good management, not expanding the freebies
I think hard eyed sympathy for the poor polls well. Eg, if you are poor because you get sick, you should get a hand up. But if you are sick because you weigh 300 pounds or drink a pint of liquor a day, not my problem.
>Biden won because of the lawlessness and incompetence of the first Trump admin, not because of his views on economics.<
The way I see things, most normies don't vote based on the "views" of the parties on economics. Not many voters have heard of Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman. It's more basic than that: Which party does the things I like? (Keep my taxes low. Don't touch my benefits.) and which party brings about things I don't like? (High gas prices. Harder to find a job.)
So, obviously national economic *conditions* play a big role. Republicans are highly likely to be vulnerable on this score in next year's midterms because of tariffs, interest rates, weaker hiring for new grads, and the slumping dollar. And by 2028 their Medicaid cuts will have begun to bite. So there's vulnerability there, and an opportunity for Democrats.
I basically agree with this. But then I think the strategy is “let them touch the stove and be a recession clean-up party” rather than “aggressively associate the Democratic Party with its views on economics.”
The first part either happens, or doesn't happen. Trump's policies plus the Fed plus the bond market will sort it out one way or another. If the stove gets hot enough, Democrats will benefit. My biggest concern about this is *timing*—I reckon thermostatic effects alone probably guarantee Democrats a lot of House seats (I agree with Yglesias that the Senate is another matter).
IOW even if there isn't too much in the way of economic turbulence over the next fifteen months, Democrats should probably have a good midterm at least in terms of House pickups. They don't need the economy to go into the tank, and it's probably bad for them if it does—too quickly. And that's because the average US recession only lasts about ten months or so. Even the longest ones in the postwar periods (73-75 and 07-09) only lasted about eighteen months. So if the next recession arrives too soon, there's a good chance we could have noticeably improving conditions in 2028. And that would be good for the Republican nominee.
The Republicans used to be the party of economic growth. They get some level of cred for now-abandoned positions. The Democrats have never in my lifetime actually been a party that mostly espouses reasonable economic views. We've had occasional centrist Democrats like Clinton who drag the party in reasonable directions, but it's never been a party consensus.
Matt is part of a factional project trying to claim the fallen mantle of "reasonable on economics" as a Democratic title, but note that like 50% of the party is fiercely fighting back on that.
Loosely agreed. The dynamic right now, I'd say, is that both parties have a wing that has basically sensible economic views and a wing that has crazy ones, but for Republicans the crazy one is in control and for the Democrats... it's mixed? The sane wing has been in control but makes significant concessions to the crazy one?
I mean, the economy did well under Trump 1, probably better than it did under Obama. Of course, the truth is that presidents have a lot less influence on the economy than people usually credit them for, and the difference between Trump 1 and Obama is almost entirely macro environment, but I'm not sure that cuts the way you want it to.
You understand that that's an article that is trying to be persuasive and chooses data carefully to try to make its case, right?
Like, it shows huge job growth under Obama and low job growth under Trump and Bush, and okay, but if you look at unemployment rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
You see what everyone straightforwardly experienced: the unemployment rate for almost all of both Trump 1 and Bush was massively lower than under Obama. Now, is that an unfair comparison? Sure. The pandemic sort of doesn't get counted towards Trump while Obama inherited the Great Recession and it does get counted towards him. But if you bury your head in the sand and say, "The economy was better from 2009 to 2013, than before or after," you're only fooling yourself. And if you say, "Actually mostly what changes the economy is macro circumstances, not presidents," then your entire point disappears.
Yeah this goes to my "grand normie party" theory. If the Dems want a durable coalition, they need to win over 50% of the votes from people who list the economy as their #1 issue. And for that, they need a credible story about how they'll be better for the economy than the other guys. Liberation Day was one opportunity, but that's in the rearview now. If this bill pushes up inflation and interest rates, there's another opportunity. And they don't need to give too many details, just "these guys were in charge when this happened, we won't let it happen." Problem is of course delivering on the second part.
Anyways, if you can develop a reputation of "the party that's better for the economy," plus a big tent approach on cultural issues, then you can use the Tim Walz "weird" line on the opposition. But if you just presided over 9% inflation, that's not going to stick.
I think if the border had been controlled (with "tough cop" Harris in charge) that might have been enough.
Inflation was tougher because that that the Fed's doing. The options there were systematic passive-aggressive blaming the Fed ("Great confidence that Powell will handle this") or demagogue it by raising taxes to "fight inflation." (That really would have let t he Fed handle it with lower interest rates.)
Yes, but do we always need to talk about what voters already believe? Should we not not assume that views on deficits, immigration and trade are somewhat malleable?
It's a lie, but sure, you might win with it. "Tax cuts for the rich" is just not an accurate description of what OBBBA does. Go look at the brackets / touch grass.
there is "the economy" and there are particular policies. voters seem to think the GOP is better at "the economy" but hate lots of GOP economic policies. so i think the idea would be to make it about medicaid, healthcare exchange subsidies, childcare, etc. and not the economy broadly
The economic policies of the Democratic party are better than Republicans -- less restriction of trade, higher taxes for lower deficits, secure the border but no deputations of settled immigrants, less discouragement of "high value" immigrants, except for immigration not by much. [I'm not sure if Democrats' over-subsidization of net CO2 emissions if farther from optimum that Republicans' zero subsidy/tax.]
Democrats policy of only tax increases on the rich is bad for growth. Middle class taxes in the US are too low, that's the main source of our deficit woes. Top rates (inclusive of state and local) are already among the highest in the world, and >50%.
I think that more can and should be collected from high income people by taxing their consumption progressively. But I also agree that we need to tax the consumption of the broad middle with a consumption VAT to pay for social insurance.
That combination a levels to make deficits no greater than public investent would be growth enhancing.
I think the Medicaid expansion has probably made the issue more salient, both by expanding the number who are participating in the program and by making accepting state funds an issue in state elections (which has either tended to benefit Democrats or force Republicans to concede to public opinion).
I think it's the case that there's a disconnect between Democratic economics and what society thinks Democratic economics actually is. I think the basis for most Democratic economic plans entails taxation of the rich and corporations, which I believe has broad public support. But there's been a very effective effort by Republicans to represent Democratic economics as "tax the shit out of everyone." Not to mention the continual smear campaign of labelling anyone who isn't a Republican as a socialist lunatic.
To some extent we need to just be proud that we want to tax "everyone" (and directly, not via the illusion of taxing "corporations.") The rich more and an EITC at the bottom, but the middle class has to pay for the cost (better with a VAT than a wage tax) of social insurance for the middle class or do without it.
Trump would win forever by being all “America First” about it. Lower taxes on Americans plus luxury safety net paid for by nuclear extortion of non-nuclear countries!
The problem with big tenting is going to be credibility. Republicans are likely to be able to successfully sell the idea that electing moderate Democrats will result in non-moderate policies being enacted. Policies they really dislike.
Many Republicans and R leaning independents may be unhappy with Trump. But they are still concerned about illegal immigration, skeptical of industrial scale solar, and convinced Democrats are hostile to small business. Heck, even Slow Boring is openly skeptical of small business.
Given that most R voters are not, short term, going to be losing health insurance, what is the pitch to them going to be? Because even WV voters turned against Manchin when they felt he was helping Biden. And Manchin is kind of the archetype of what’s being suggested.
I agree. "We will get much more progressive outcomes by remaking the party as a big tent that comfortably includes Manchin-like figures" is an ok way to sell big tent to progressives (if any of them are listening), but it makes me, a moderate, immediately suspicious. And since dems lately were mostly supporting progressive politics, they won't get leeway there either.
A lot of pro-big tent articles give me a vague impression that author's goal is to dupe moderates to vote for progressive policies, and not a genuine attempt to include moderate interests in the coalition. I may be wrong, but this impression isn't helpful.
Building trust is hard, but it is going to be the key to actually building a big tent party. As a progressive I worry about the opposite - that "big tent" actually just means "shut up and go away." If we're going to be a big tent party we're going to have to give each other the benefit of the doubt and trust that we're both approaching the job in good faith. Otherwise the project is dead before it starts.
The "big tent" rhetoric is stupid and the ultimate proof of moderate pundits not fucking getting it. The Republicans spent all of 2024 attacking Democrats for having too big of a tent. They literally turned "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" into a slur. Their pitch was more or less "Those bleeding heart libs are letting undeserving moochers into the tent and crowding out the hard-working, deserving Americans!"
How the fuck does "Don't worry guys, we're allowing conservatives into that tent now." answer that? Everyone already knew Democrats will pay lip service to anyone that asks. Meanwhile Republicans go around telling every voter, "We'll fight for you, exclusively. Anyone who doesn't like it can get lost." No fucking wonder voters trust Republicans more and regard Democrats as sellouts!
You are failing to see that efforts to expand the tent marginally (like DEI) are actually tent-shrinking, given the views of most voters. Attempts to ingratiate to small groups can alienate large groups. This isn't about merely "welcoming in" Conservatives, it's about accepting some of their positions. That means potentially alienating some smaller groups. Your claim that Dems are already maximally big-tented just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There are a lot of issues where a different stance would draw in more people then it would push out.
I'm not failing to see shit, that was my whole fucking point. What YOU'RE failing to see--which I thought I made clear but I guess I really have to spell it out for you--is the electoral math of lying.
Let's say we have an electorate of three people: Walter, Jesse, and Gus. You decide to sideline Jesse because Gus doesn't like him and Walter plus Gus is a winning coalition anyway. So you start campaigning on a Walter+Gus focused platform. But let's say I approach Walter and Gus separately and I promise Walter a Walter-focused platform and Gus a Gus-focused platform. I win the election.
I don't understand your point about "the electoral math of lying", and I stand by my earlier claim. You make the tent bigger by aligning to the views of the masses, not by declaring that you're more big-tent because DEI, even though DEI is wildly unpopular with most voters. You are confusing what progressives believe people's true interests should be, with their actual preferences.
No, you would wind up being outed on conservative social media as a liar. There are plenty of people who look for those inconsistencies, real or imagined, as their job.
If you're on the right edge of the current Democratic voting bloc, then yeah the policies that the party adopts, even with a bigger tent and Manchin-like figures, will probably be to your left, somewhat (Because even if Manchin shares your views, he's going to compromise _some_ with the left where he doesn't care as much/thinks his voters don't care as much)
But... those votes will still be to the right of what progressives want. A shift of the gravitational center of the tent is not going to leave it on the right edge of the tent, just more rightward than it would otherwise be, and probably dumping the things you think are _most_ outlandish.
I agree that you would ultimately have to compromise, but I don't see any sign that big tent proponents want to shift gravitational center to the right. All those pieces are centered on why big tent is good for progressives, that it isn't defeat of their priorities but is just necessary slowdown.
It is still very progressive-centric. You cannot help but ask, if they are so progressive-centric in their rhetoric, would they not also be progressive-centric in the legislature? Why would such big tent, with all the bills still much closer to progressive ideal than to moderate ideal, be good for moderates?
I understand it, progressives are a dominant force in a Democratic party and you have to appeal to them. But you also have to appeal to moderates, not only stop actively repealing them. Otherwise your strategy would be of limited success.
I think it gets pushed right in much the way Manchin pushed the BBB to the right. He refused to sign on to what he felt was the most irresponsible. If the big tent gets you to 62 senators, (or it gets to 52 and they eliminate the filibuster) they can ignore 2 of them. If it gets to 50, they have to pay attention to all of them. But even in the 52 case, those 3 can probably still exert some gravity.
Dems effectively passed the Green New Deal, unilaterally tried to cancel a bunch of student loans, and supported just about every progressive-supported social position, so I have no idea what you mean by them not supporting progressive causes.
Couple things here I think are important to consider.
1) The targets aren’t partisan republicans. Sure, eventually if given enough time and discipline you could start to get partisan defectors. Or alternatively, a wedge issue could be found to pry some voters away like Trump did with illegal immigration. But the main thing here is to target swing voters. These voters are cross-pressured and have idiosyncratic views across the ideological spectrum. They trust Democrats more on some issues and Republicans more on others. We want to increase the salience of issues they trust Democrats on (healthcare, taxing the rich) and decrease the salience of issues they trust Republicans on (immigration, crime).
2) Position-taking matters more and credibility matters less to average voters than partisans would like. Take Trump for example. Republicans are very well known and have an enduring image as the party that values business/the wealthy, oppose public benefits, and oppose abortion rights. Trump was able to effectively defend against those things by loudly and publicly taking positions saying that he opposed efforts to cut public benefits and opposed national abortion bans. He even took public positions that favored increased taxation of the wealthy. Once in power did he actually follow through on those things? Of course not, republicans have been trying (and as we see recently succeeding) to implement their long-held agenda of cutting taxes for wealthy people while taking benefits away from poor people. But Trump has been able to effectively counter those issues against him by engaging in strong position-taking which thereby made cross-pressured voters who agree with him on immigration feel safer voting for him and republicans.
What this means is that loud and energetic position-taking by candidates combined with party leadership and mainstream Democrats loudly and energetically saying that they are going to focus on healthcare, taxing the wealthy, reducing the cost of living, and protecting abortion rights while not making huge changes to energy policy other than trying to keep prices low, is a very effective political strategy. The key obstacle is that many activists and donors and interest groups don’t want them to do that.
I’m not referring to partisan MAGA. Old style Republicans actually are potentially in play because of realignment. I am talking about swing voters.
Healthcare and taxing the rich are relatively low salience issues. They’re popular, but not a high priority for most swing voters.
Crime and immigration were high salience issues for most voters last year, not just swing voters.
Position taking does not matter if the voters don’t believe you. Credibility does matter - it is not primarily of interest to partisans, but rather the opposite. Trump was able to distance himself by having a history of not following party orthodoxy. His voters believed he would not cut Social Security and Medicare and not ban abortion at the national level. They don’t care that much about the rich.
Focusing on healthcare and taxing the wealthy and abortion is not going to do it for swing voters. They are not motivators for them. The Democratic base yes, the rest no.
Focusing on things like Kaine’s Social Security funding proposal, which is pretty brilliant, helping small business, encouraging good jobs despite AI - those would help a lot. But healthcare and raising taxes are not the way.
"There could be federal legislation to secure abortion rights in the states where it’s now banned, but we’re not going to achieve the Freedom of Choice Act’s goal of setting a standard that goes well beyond the pre-Dobbs status quo."
One of the truly dumbest things Dems have done is not endorse Susan Collins' abortion bill that would restore the Casey standard. It's the only thing that could ever potentially pass on this, it's massively popular, and it could mean basically everyone who wants an abortion gets one.
But the Groups want 9 moths of legal abortion and a repeal of the Hyde Amendment so instead everyone is forced to endorse the Women's Health Protection Act which will never pass anyway and is less popular. Just a microcosm of how the Party works and its dysfunction.
My concern with merely codifying the Casey standard is that this SCOTUS could strike it down on federalism grounds. You might be able to assuage me that that concern is unfounded. But if it's not, I don't really see any other viable path to make abortion accessible in all 50 states other than repealing the Hyde Amendment, at least for early term abortions.
1. SCOTUS is not striking down an abortion bill. The votes aren't there and if they did it would also mean no federal abortion RESTRICTIONS either.
2. Liberals need to stop lying to themselves and the world that there are 5 votes to enact Clarence Thomas' views on the Court. There aren't and this sort of thing poisons the discourse with lies, paranoia, and BS.
I'm a slightly above average student at a somewhat below average law school (don't worry about it) and the way that liberal-leaning people who are clearly smarter than me talk about the Supreme Court makes me feel crazy. Do they honestly not understand what the conservative justices are up to, are they playing dumb, or what?
I think most liberal discourse on SCOTUS is driven by a few things, none of which really concern any honest assessment of what the Court is doing:
1. It is seen as politically beneficial to overstate how outrageous the conservatives are acting.
2. It is seen as politically beneficial to play up Clarence Thomas positions as if they are going to get a majority.
3. Democrats are the more neurotic party (Matt has written about this).
4. Many partisans (and TBC, this one is true of the way conservatives view liberal justices too) have cartoonish views of their political opponents, and thus don't understand the actual conservative legal project as opposed to what they imagine it to be.
"and if they did it would also mean no federal abortion RESTRICTIONS either" look I am not a big fan of spreading social policy across 50 different states, but I could totally see some Gorsuch-authored majority opinion arguing this.
This is not how it works. You need five votes. Five people on the Supreme Court do not believe that the federal government has no power to regulate the health care system. Indeed, if there had been 5 votes for that, NFIB v. Sibelius (the Obamacare case) would have been decided on that ground rather than the "regulating inactivity" thing.
Things like "I can see Gorsuch writing an opinion on that" are things people say based on their psychoanalysis of the justices, but it isn't real analysis, because the Supreme Court doesn't work like that. You need a position 5 justices agree on and which will be applicable to a lot of other cases (including restrictions on abortion, restrictions on gender affirming care, restrictions on recreational drugs, and just about any other federal regulation of health care). This is not happening and there's a reason that the Court isn't reversing the New Deal era precedents on the Commerce Clause even though they have had many chances to.
This is a nonstarter. Just pass the damned Casey bill. It will get upheld by SCOTUS.
Maybe SCOTUS will strike it down, but it's better to force them to do that than advocate something that will never pass. If they strike it down, now Democrats have another issue to run on.
"The maximalist position that Democrats have outlined as party orthodoxy is not the most popular position on abortion. Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas are not Louisiana, but it’s crazy to run in states where the electorate is baseline skeptical of Democrats while making zero concessions to mass opinion on late-term abortions."
Another baby step toward the truth — and one that was obvious in 2024. Late-term abortions have never polled well. Elective abortions at 15 weeks are basically 50/50. There’s no secret sauce here. It’s as simple as reading the polls and not picking priggish and mostly symbolic arguments with voters.
Part of the Issue isn’t the policies - it’s the intentionally offensive framing. As an example - if you want to make the case for EVs and renewables there any number of national defense, energy independence and economic reasons for them that have nothing to do with climate. If one really cared about climate change you’d go with the messaging that appealed to the greatest number of people.
As an example the was in Ukraine has shown that drones will be to the next war was machine guns and airplanes were to previous wars. In time air peace the largest demands for batteries will be EVs in times of war those batteries will go into drones.
But for some reason the activists need to go with messaging that repulses a huge percentage of the population.
One thing that mystifies me is why the focus of environmentalists shifted so starkly to just CO2 emissions. Non-carbon emissions get completely ignored even though air pollution is less controversial and is a much more local and immediate problem.
I've posted this before, but while estimates are all over the place, the lifetime cost of non-carbon emissions from a gas car is around $5k, while the lifetime cost of non-carbon emissions from an EV is around $500. Plus the EV emissions cost is dropping every year as the grid gets cleaner.
There are hardly any PM 2.5 or NOx deniers out there, yet most on the left only talk about CO2 emissions.
I'd think the answer to that is a combination of (1) CO2 presents a semi-plausible apocalyptic threat and (2) a small, but influential and nontrivial, fraction of the environmental coalition also have the objective of strangling economic growth and attacking CO2 emissions has been and will continue to be a particularly effective means of doing that until fusion or other major clean energy source comes on-line.
“ strangling economic growth and attacking CO2 emissions has been and will continue to be a particularly effective means of doing that until fusion or other major clean energy source comes on-line”
Will fusion stop the degrowthers?
I noticed with the recent heat wave in France the far right has put forth an AC plan for France. And the left and the greens are apoplectic. But France is 85% renewables or nuclear. There is little climate impact to AC. If EdF needs to build a few new plants then that’s what they should do.
Fusion wouldn't stop them from being degrowthers, but the question from MagellanNH was why the environmental movement has become so focused on CO2 emission reduction as compared to other issues. As long as carbon-based energy underpins a substantial part of the economy, aggressive tactics to cut CO2 will have the collateral "benefit" of kneecapping economic growth. I.e., if fusion became ubiquitously available and hydrocarbon fuels became largely irrelevant to economic activity, that segment of the environmental movement would keep looking for agenda items that also hurt economic growth, but they wouldn't devote much effort to fighting CO2 emissions.
The focus on CO2 from environmentalist is entirely sensible - it is not that as the issue
It is focus on first strangling and blocking off hydrocarbons rather than growing RE and growing infrastructure, that's the focus point bizareness.
Totally pro-growth people - e.g. myself - are focused on CO2 as it is CO2 that is fundamentally the problem (along w methane, in fact both) but that is not a polution issue (plants in fact love CO2 and there is unexepcted regreening occuring on the edges of the Sahara, de-deserfification in some reas...) it is a global temperature issue - which is not a problem for The Planet - it is a problem for us humans in terms of our agriculture notably.
But the focus on strangling hydrocarbons rather than enabling non-carbon emitiing power (RE, nuclear [see Greens in Germany whose forcing the nuclear shut down... saw German emissions go up as it got replaced by coal... brilliant) by accelerating build, that's the perverse de-growth aspect
<<< which is not a problem for The Planet - it is a problem for us humans in terms of our agriculture notably.<<<
This is true only if you mean "the literal rock called Earth." Most employment of the term "The Planet" in this context accounts for non-human organisms adapted to a pre-Anthropocene climatic context.
There are people against a/c? That’s where I would draw the line on freedom of speech - to be against air conditioning is a thoughtcrime if anything is!
The nice thing about air pollution as a topic is that the costs and benefits are local, unlike global warming where the costs are local and the benefits global.
I live in California and most people here understand that an extra $1.50 for gas is a price worth paying if we don't have to live with smog alerts. But it's becoming increasingly clear that paying an extra $3.00 for gas so that people in the global south have a more stable climate isn't worth it.
the "global south" (stupid term even stupider than its predeccessors) may benefit in some places others not
And equally the 'global north' the same
Overall the Human Globe has the major food and economic collapse risk.
And further for future economic growth, greater energy efficiency of electrificatio is a growth factor - being fundamentally thermodynamically more efficient in conversion.
If I convince all 14M people in Los Angeles to drive their cars into the Salton Sea will it make any noticeable difference to that trajectory? Probably not. Will it make a difference in air pollution? Absolutely.
Why would I do that? It has fuck all to do with the subject of decarbonisation as such (that 50k people die, asserted - one has to benchmark against - out of 340 million people this is to be benchmarked against other deaths, as like deaths from cars hitting pedestrain etc etc.) Ratios and risk.
Now if you want to continue the failed Everything Bagelism, can't stop you but pollution is not the key item for EV
Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree, but imo you're ignoring both the science and math on this.
As I said above, the costs of air pollution are well studied and not very controversial compared to climate costs. The costs include loss of QALYs, healthcare costs, and economic losses.
The big challenges with convincing the public to pay for climate externalities are 1) many of the costs will not be borne by voters and 2) the models estimating those costs are necessarily long term and highly probabilistic
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but if you can justify a $7500 EV tax credit by claiming all it does is refund EV drivers for not polluting the air and not contributing to climate change, isn't that a straightforward message and a win? Seems like more of a big tent thing than an everything bagel thing.
I am ignoring none of the science nor the math - my literal job is investments in climate stuff.
Pollution is a seperate issue, it is not the primary of electrification although for some developing country geographies, China, India not trivial given utterly shit baseline, but much improvement could be hand on ICE basis.
However the greeny Left has an enviro-pollution lens and that's how you look at shit.
Non-CO2 emissions are, to a first approximation, a solved problem in the US. Not perfectly, but the situation is so much better than 50 years ago that it’s a much less compelling issue, and further reductions are starting to run into diminishing returns and rising costs.
It's solved in terms of maybe being an order of magnitude lower than it used to be, but the actual dollar costs of these emissions are still crazy high.
Metrics like cost of lost QALYs, healthcare costs, and cost of productivity loss put the cost of auto emissions very high as I said above. Estimates are about 50k people die each year from non-carbon pollution from ICE cars. With power sector and industrial emissions, that goes up to 200k per year.
Maybe you're right that no one cares about this anymore, but given how flat the climate message has fallen on half the voters, it seems worth a try to add this to the messaging. Asthma alone affects 20-30 million Americans, including 5 million children and I bet a bunch of those folks voted for Trump and would love to get fewer "stay indoors, air quality is bad" warnings.
I’m not sure the hypothetical war argument would be more appealing to people than the climate one. A lot of people aren’t too happy about barely noticeable financial sacrifices supporting Ukraine’s actual war where it’s clearly the innocent victim, would they support actual sacrifices for a completely hypothetical war? Climate is at least something that impacts people now, as we saw with the heat wave and Texas floods.
Also the key barrier to EV adoption in the US right now is the tariffs against Chinese EVs. The climate frame is an argument for removing those tariffs, the war frame is not.
While it is never possible to "prove" that any particular extreme weather event was caused by climate change, climate change does make extreme weather events more likely in general.
The extent to which it does depends, of course, on the amount of greenhouse gasses in the air, which increases each year.
"In Texas, higher temperatures have already translated into more intense rainfall. In a 2024 report, Nielsen-Gammon found that “extreme one-day precipitation” had increased by 5% to 15% since the late 20th century. By 2036, he expected an additional increase of about 10% in extreme rainfall intensity."
"A world warming due to fossil fuel pollution is tipping the scales toward more heavy rainfall events like this. Hourly rainfall rates have intensified in nearly 90% of large US cities since 1970, a recent study found."
Texas could see the light on climate change and vote to end all fossil fuel burning - but it would scarcely move the needle on CO2 emissions worldwide.
It would make a bigger difference than you personally choosing to cast a vote or not in your local congressional election. (Texas is about 1/200,000 of the world population, so surely a higher proportion of emissions. Congressional elections regularly have more than 200,000 voters, and additional votes make zero difference unless they tip the balance, unlike emissions decisions, which each contribute to the outcome.)
As people become more well-off, their engagement with politics seems to become more about an expression of their values than of material concerns (e.g. none of the people here talking about Medicaid are actually on Medicaid).
So if politics is about value expression, then the reason to want a big tent is not for direct material concerns but to express the value of pragmatism and rationality. But it's not about, you know, getting Medicaid.
Not every issue is purely expressive. ACA reforms were good for people with employer health insurance too. And most of the abundance agenda is about material concerns.
Medicaid is just a particular stinker of an issue. For the 15 years that I've been politically aware, elites have been trying to help poor people in Mississippi, and in return Mississippi has been telling the elites to F off and stop trying to help. So now here we are all touching the stove together.
Even if we give up on material politics, and we shouldn’t, any shift to values politics should be to create a values coalition that includes noncollege people, both for simple electoral reasons and because education polarization is a threat to the Republic.
Don’t think that would look like “rationality and pragmatism”.
I don't think we would have gotten the Tennessee law (which I disagree with) if there hadn't been an influential movement to cut "families" out of "let families and their doctors decide".
I've got two close friends that have been performing gender-affirming surgeries, including for minors, for more than 𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴. Until a few years ago, they had to deal with disapproval and sometimes even hostility, but were not worried about formal opposition. People that didn't like it weren't influential enough or motivated enough to try to outlaw it.
Once you cut families out [edit: as some activists propose], "let their doctors decide" is a dodge. My friends are conscientious and rigorous, but not everyone is.
I don't know that the explanation is as much about material prosperity as the discourse machine. Social media is one obvious aspect of this where highly active political types reinforce and hype each other up around expressive clout building stances. But the regular media is also less broad ideologically, but more broad geographically, every left of center highly engaged type reads the NYT, from Seattle to St Louis.
The engagers are not, however, representative of swing voting not engaged types who swung to Trump largely on material concerns.
I feel like I'm insane sometimes, why is it fair to assume that policy positions taken by the Democrats have any meaning whatsoever to the Average American Voter, consuming a steady diet of right wing propaganda on your platform of choice: every single social media platform, legacy news, etc? Seriously.
The American voting public's beliefs about Democrats (and therefore voting intentions) have nothing to do with anything democrats actually do, and everything to do with what the incredibly strong right wing messaging pipelines tell them - all of which are owned and co-opted by either foreign interference propping up the right wing, or just plain old right wing ownership (or a fun combo of both!)
In a rational world, Matt's arguments make sense. We left that world behind a while ago, and I doubt we'll ever return.
If you can't see this, I worry for you. There is no disaster that isn't successfully spun as "liberals fault" to the vast majority of American voters. The propaganda pipeline is far far stronger than actual meaningful democrat policy.
"right wing propaganda on your platform of choice: every single social media platform, legacy news, etc"
what evidence leads you believe this?
i agree that people are exposed to right-wing arguments, some of which are dishonest, on every major platform. but people are also exposed to left-wing arguments, some of which are dishonest, on most major platforms (i.e., everything but the RW media ecosystem, to which there's no real parallel). i take your point to mean that there's at least a decisive right-wing slant across the media and i don't know that that's true without an extremely broad definition of right-wing
the NYT and WP, for instance, both primarily print left-leaning editorials; the occasional right-leaning op-ed just gets a lot more attention, precisely because it is unusual, and perhaps because of a sense that those platforms "belong to" the left like Fox belongs to the right
i understand that Tltwitter, specifically, has moved right since the musk takeover, and occasionally i browse reddit which if anything seems far more left-wing these days. but i don't really use social media much; what evidence makes you believe social media is predominantly rw propaganda?
"The American voting public's beliefs about Democrats ... have nothing to do with anything democrats actually do, and everything to do with what the incredibly strong right wing messaging pipelines tell them"
if this were true the democratic party would be polling around 0%. but the democrats are currently ahead in the polls for 2026 (https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/generic-congressional-vote); and, of course, kamala very nearly won the presidency less than a year ago and control of the HoR was decided by three races with a margins less than 1.1%.
i agree that voter perceptions of the parties are filtered through what they see in the media or hear from others, and those filters often reduce the usefulness of position-taking. but there's not *no* relationship to actual policy. some of the major rw attack lines include transgender issues, immigration, and "DEI", all of which were supported by Biden.
some of these attacks are dishonest and exaggerated, and most of them obscured important nuance, but they are fundamentally rooted in the policies of the most recent Democratic administration. only the most fringe Republicans go around saying things like "democrats are pedophiles" or "democrats want to ban computers", even though those would be extremely potent attacks if people believed them. so i think major RW propaganda clearly faces some sort of factual constraints. in that case, changing the facts can change how effective that propaganda is
i assume you're exaggerating on this point and don't believe there's truly zero relationship between democratic policy and voters beliefs, but in that case i don't really know exactly what it is you do believe
NYT and Wapo have far less reach than Fox. I was in Texas recently and there was just Fox News playing in the background of nearly every restaurant we went to. It’s a huge difference from blue areas where restaurants don’t normally even play TV and if they do it’s usually sports and almost never politics.
This is right, Republicans seethe with frustration they have no "Indigo blob" where people doing the high-brow reporting are all Democrats with +2 SD lib social views. Democrats seethe with frustration they have no mass social base like Republicans with an explicitly partisan mass media ecosystem full of cultural in-group joking and jostling. Everyone sees the grass is greener on the other side.
You can't wish away the Left. Matt's whole tactic of trying to browbeat progressives into moderation is going to backfire. It just makes people angry and dig in their heels. You don't need to convert them, you just need to redirect their anger at a useful target.
Right, the wrench in this whole theory is the fact that people with more political engagement vote Dem and it’s the people with low engagement, who don’t even know which party is pro-choice and which is pro-life, that put Trump in office. How much can changing positions really matter when the swing voters don’t even know your positions?
kamala only won 52% of highly engaged voters. there's potentially lots of room for improvement there!
politically engaged voters tend not to be very persuadable but this is in part because they already know what each party's positions are, and those positions are relatively stable. but when there are dramatic changes in the positions the parties take there is also dramatic realignment in voting patterns (e.g., the Southern Strategy or 2016-present)
Democrats need better messaging and more outreach to disengaged voters. Send Buttigieg on every bro podcast that will have him! The Joe Rogan experience with Pete Buttigieg!
You may be right or you may be wrong, I've seen this theory of "conservative media spin means Democrats can never win" before. If you're wrong, Matt's plan may work. If you're right, it's all hopeless and Matt's plan has no downside.
Do people actually think Schumer did, "the right thing over the government shutdown"? Sure seems like giving the R's room to get there ducks in a row hasn't played out very favorably. Seems like it would been nice if a few more chickens were coming home to roost instead of most of the pain getting pushed off to 2028 and later.
Matt's argument AIUI was essentially that by cutting off funding, DOGE would have a legitimate legal justification for their cuts, which could complicate lawsuits and maybe make them more durable
Democrats owning a government shutdown would have gone badly for them at the time, as they were seen by their most passionate supporters as feckless and doing nothing about DOGE firing countless government employee. But embracing a shutdown means mechanically accelerating the furloughing of government employees. So it would have given their most news-engaged supporters nothing. It would have confirmed, like the Biden scandal, that Democrats do not always walk the walk of their campaign marketing as the "no chaos/the buck stops here/court" party to highly educated swing voters.
Now that Musk is out and the Trump admin has been rehiring some of the fires, this is forgotten, but at the time this decision would have given Schumer virtually no leverage and all risk. Republicans quite explicitly dared him to make this error, and he held back. When Democrats most likely take back the House due to a higher turnout coalition in non-presidential races, this will be a different story.
In two years, there will be actual budget stakes to leverage with a House majority and an incumbent White House that largely represents government more than a hostile fire-and-furlough takeover of government. But Schumer's call, (in my view as someone who isn't a Democrat), was the correct decision for his cause to not take the GOP bait, and Yglesias is right about this one.
I don’t think it’s clear what the best option was - both were bad.
The problem with shutting down the government is that is a tactic, not a goal. What goal would that tactic serve? What would it actually accomplish? Democrats could never agree and that just highlights the problem.
Hard disagree. Was the right call at the time - literally there was nothing the Democrats wanted that they were gonna get by shutting down the govt. Fighting just to fight without a politically achievable goal is wasting political capital.
The fact that the majority party continues to do things that the minority party does not like doesn't mean it was the wrong call at the time.
Giving the Rs a free pass on funding the government is the reason they were able to hold their shit together long enough to pass the OBBBA. If the Dems had kept the pressure on the cracks in their coalition they may well have had to settle for much less.
They could have fought for something small like the last minute DC cuts and gotten something out of it. But in the grand scheme of things wouldn't make too much of a difference.
It seems to me that if all the arm twisting of the R budget hawk types had happened 3 months ago with them getting nothing for upping the debt limit it sure would have made it a lot harder to get them on board with the OBBBA.
Matt the people are clamoring for a NGO Borg Breakdown post. You talk about The Groups and write whole posts about how they warp democratic politics. But there’s never any specificity. You should name the groups, the people running them, and (to the extent one can know) the donor complex that supports them, and explain the incentives for why Democratic politicians are so in hock.
“[P]arty leadership needs to make it clear that the legislative agenda will consist of policies that frontline members who need to run tough races are enthusiastic about running on.”
In practice, would this process be visible to me, a midwestern schmo with internet access? What would those things be? Like, beyond Schatz doing tweets, what would Dem leadership do that I might end up reading about in nyt that would demonstrate their seriousness about the big tent project?
I asked this question in the mailbag but I think is true, one of the notable elements about the organized left has been Bernie Sander's hostility to the establishment since 2016. I have seen several interviews with Zohran where he takes a much more conciliatory approach, and even acknowledges NYC politics might not extrapolate to other places, while bragging about the universal appeal of his politics. AOC has tried but she is not as talented as Zohran to thread this line and usher in the change. Ezra Klein called his politics "pluralistic leftism" as opposed to "populist". In the long run, if he de facto becomes the leader of the left and changes leftist attitude towards mainstream pols giving them breathing room to moderate without sustaining leftist ire, would it be the best thing to come out of all of this?
Reduce red tape for permitting and allow people to build in cities, popular.
Eliminate all local control of zoning, including outside of cities, and turbo-charge solar farms on agricultural and forest land, REALLY not popular.
Sit down and figure out the acreage you need for industrial solar farms if data center growth continues as expected. It’s a LOT. You already have backlash, and it’s growing fast. I like home solar and am not anti-solar in general, but the scale required is not politically feasible.
Eliminate all rural zoning and you have summer camps in flood plains, to give one timely example.
I agree but how is that relevant to the point I’m making that Zohran seems less inclined to do Bernie style “We will overthrow the corrupt disgusting Dem establishment” and seems more conciliatory to mainstream Dems. He doesn’t punch center is what I’m trying to say, which might be helpful in giving breathing room for mainstream Dems.
But Greedflation was the popular framing of what happened in the Biden years on the left so government run zero margin grocery stores are a totally sensible answer because the prices went up because marked uptick in greed in 2022. (I hope the sarcasm is evident here).
I think you are overrating the level of engagement and intelligence of certain swing voters. The types right now obsessed with Epstein Files used to be Obama voters. Dems need to stop being woke cringe and not screw up the entire economy. I really really doubt Elisa Slotkin with her War Plan will bring these people back into the Dem coalition. You need low IQ Dems willing to do gutter politics to win these people back or someone with Zohran level charisma, in addition to moderation on issues.
"it down and figure out the acreage you need for industrial solar farms if data center growth continues as expected. It’s a LOT"
Yes, but there is huge amounts of room in the desert southwest that nobody really cares about.
Also that summer camp was build in 1926. zoning wouldn't have fixed that. And zoning isn't really about safety anyway, it's about preventing neighborhood change.
Zoning affects new and upgraded/ renovated buildings for existing businesses. Not just new businesses. So, for example, new cabins might have to be built further up the hill.
Much rural zoning IS about safety and livability. Spacing of lots with private well and septic keeps the water table safe in rural and exurban areas. Large animal confinement facilities are restricted, same reason. Shooting ranges, private or commercial, have to be a certain distance from residences. Building on floodplains is typically restricted.
If you like water free of e coli and not to be hit by stray bullets and not to be washed downstream, zoning can be pretty helpful.
Another Slow Borer in this comment section made a good point when they said that Matt Y is too focused on policy, that the median undecided disengaged voters votes not on policy but on "vibes." Are we barking up the wrong tree here? How much mileage can we get, electorally, by simply moderating on policy and not focusing on outreach?
I'm not saying policy is unimportant and we should proudly run on trans athletes in women's sports and on banning internal combustion engines, just, I am saying that it irks me when Matt Y treats public opinion as a fact of nature, like a flood or a hurricane - you can't change it or stop it, you can only get out of the way. No. Public opinion is malleable; it has changed before; it can change again.
This requires good spokespeople who are comfortable talking in the language of the median undecided swing voter, so, basically, the polar opposite of me.
I mean, after the 2012 election Republicans had this whole postmortem on how "we're bleeding support from people of color, we need to change and move with the times, we should be more progressive on social issues, like more welcoming to immigrants." It sounded sensible and practical, right? Except then the Republicans were like, "Nah, fuck that" and they backed Donald Trump, who ran on pure lies and grievance and appealing to people's worst selves.
And he won.
I am absolutely NOT saying that Democrats should turn to the Dark Side and become the left-wing version of the Trump cult; I am saying that sometimes the sensible, reasonable plan is not what ends up working. Thoughts?
Also! Matt Y keeps mentioning "The Groups." Guess what, in a country where the First Amendment still applies, you won't be able to get Teh Groupz to shut up by fiat. You can try to *persuade* them; Senator Schumer can meet with some representatives of Teh Groupz privately and tell them, "You're making it harder for us to win the Senate next year, knock it off," but how likely are they to listen to him? The more extreme they are, the more likely they are to dismiss Schumer as a contemptible centrist sellout.
What shall it profit the Democratic Party to be all "we are a Big Tent on policy" when it can all be undone, in the eyes of the Median Undecided Swing Voter, but a couple lefty activists Xeeting* "Free, free Palestine" or "No one is illegal on stolen land"?
*Or Bleeting, or whatever the heck it's called when people post on Bluesky.
3. He supported Clinton over Sanders even when Sanders was not woke.
4. He would have voted for Cuomo
His blog is literally called Slow-Boring because his theory of change is one of going with the flow and only making tiny adjustments to where ever the flow is taking us. He does not think the flow itself should be fought.
If the flow is taking us into a techno feudalist kleptocracy, there is nothing we can or should do, we should just make small adjustments to slightly improve the lives of those of us living in said techno feudalist kleptocracy because raising taxes is hard.
Adams, Cuomo, and Mamdani are all in the general election. Matt can’t vote in either the primary or the general election anyway, so him saying who he “would” vote for is inherently counterfactual anyway.
Fair enough, there is no need to nitpick. The biggest difference I have with the DLC Dems like Matt Y is that they do not think gratuitous corruption is a deal breaker because the median voter is too low info and hard scrabble to notice/care. For me corruption is a red line as it degrades society like a cancer even if the median voter is too ignorant to notice.
So his vote for Adams over Cuomo does not refute my main thesis about his theory of politics.
I could be wrong but I remember he belatedly came around to Sanders in 2020 in a "the sky is not going to fall" kind of way when it was looking like Sanders was going to win before South Carolina. He did not sound to me like a 2016 Sanders supporter.
Sure, but we know that's a cop-out. I would have also chosen a middle-aged non-threatening Irish last name guy if I were chairman of the smoke filled room but that was not on the cards.
What I remember from 2016 was Vox was hitting Sanders "technocratically" even as Sanders was connecting on the ground and trying to fight the corruption in the Democratic party. I suppose its a matter of differing priorities.
Ok, but again, this isn't a law of nature. Can Democrats either build some outlets to rival the Republican ones, or infiltrate the Republican ones, like, by sending some well-spoken Democrats to speak on the manosphere podcasts?
Anyone who thinks Joe Rogan is right wing needs to get their brain examined.
If Ro Khanna can go on Theo Von's podcast and Bernie can go on Joe Rogan's podcast there's no excuse for other Democrats not to go. You don't even need to be well spoken, all you need to do is speak like a normal human being.
viscerally I sympathize entirely, but rationally it is absolutely crucial that we refrain from declaring anyone who once voted maga anathema and unforgivable. *Let people change.* If we can’t bring ourselves to let people outside the tent in, they’ll entrench where they are and not bother trying. Result: we continue losing.
No, I don't. If you endorse the right-wing candidate, how are you not right wing? It's not like Rogan was contractually obligated to endorse anyone! I didn't expect him to love Kamala, but he could have refrained from endorsing. He could have publicly announced that he's voting for a third party candidate or abstaining from voting. He chose to endorse the Tangerine Turd. End of story.
Definitely. But the problem is we don’t have a particularly well educated or attuned electorate and that opens the door to all sorts of bad actors as we’ve seen.
The founders were acutely aware of this risk and tried to constraint it but ultimately in our system even the constitution doesn’t protect against the whims of the electorate (see SCOTUS bending over backward for Trump)
The propaganda is only possible because the GOP owns the culture. They own the Churches, Foot ball, Boxing, UFC, NASCAR and online hustle culture.
The problem once again is that post DLC Dem is either a careerist lawyer type who cannot connect to voters culturally and is completely clueless about what is happening on the ground or an Ilhan Omar type identarian who only gets elected because they represent a geographically concentrated minority out-group.
The party is fundamentally broken. It needs to be dismantled and reconstrued from scratch and what would be a better time to do that than after losing to Trump?
Idk about that. Dispute football. Some churches (definitely not mine). Boxing, UFC and NASCAR are niches, not by themselves sufficient to ‘own’ the culture. We are after all talking about an extremely narrow ~1% loss. Depressing it is even that close of course.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘dismantle and reconstruct’ the party?
We need large scale primaries to diversify the party beyond the "lawyer and boring Reagan-consensus technocrat" mindset and deliberately move towards a culturally moderate coded but economically populist party.
Culturally left wing + economically DLC-technocrat is a toxic dead end (this what we have now)
Culturally fascist + economically far-right is already taken by Trump/GOP.
Culturally moderate + economically left-technocrat is open.
We need to completely change the face of the party by actively recruiting more veterans, blue collar candidates, farmers and service sector workers.
Well the party is the people it elects. Obviously there can be only two major parties in our system and one of them will be called "The Democrats" which is actually a private corporation for some legal reason.
I want to replace every Adam Schiff (my useless Senator) with a Ruben Gallego basically.
It's not a contradiction at all. To reach the median voter you need to code as a populist. (See WelcomeFest favorite MGP).
But you need to govern as a left-technocrat to actually solve problems rather than just do upward redistribution as the right-technocrats and neoliberals prefer.
Campaign like Mamdani, govern like Brad Lander is not a contradiction.
Trump is a populist coded right wing authoritarian. Statements like "Tariffs is economic populism that the left is known for" are complete red herrings when we all know that Trumps tariff use is all about his own personal power and corruption and not a coherent left coded economic theory.
I maintain Trump didn't win the general election in 2016 (or 2024 for that matter) because Trump was so great, but because Dems nominated back candidates, and swung WAY to far to the left.
Think about this, Obama of 2008 would be a racist, sexist homophobe to today's Democratic party.
If Republicans had nominated someone like Nikki Haley, I think Harris would have lost by a LOT more.
I don't have time for a long comment, but I'll paraphrase what I said before: Anytime someone says "welp voters didn't *like* Trump, they voted for him because Kamala was so bad" it makes me think "I didn't *like* the bowl of dog excrement, but I chose to eat it because the only alternative was a bowl of plain oatmeal, and that was just too boring and bland." Like, dude, yes, plain oatmeal is bland, but also, you chose to eat a bowl of goddamn dog excrement.
I'd be more sympathetic to this point of view had it been Biden vs. Trump. I could then see more voters saying "Biden is senile and not up to the job, I hate Trump, who is an asshole, but at least he's more mentally functional." But Trump vs. Harris? Nope.
“Obama of 2008 would be a racist, sexist homophobe to today's Democratic party.”
Citation needed.
A candidate saying, ten years after Obergefell, that we shouldn’t have same-sex marriage, would seem pretty bigoted to most republicans as well as democrats - but Obama didn’t do that, he said it years before Obergefell.
Is there anything else he did in 2008 that seems racist or sexist to you?
Obama's position in 2008 was no same sex marriage. If a politician took that position now, he would be lambasted. IE, the party has swung left.
Obama of 2008 also took pretty strong stances against illegal immigration, and as president deported a LOT of people. Again in certain quarters that would make you a racist (the insinuation being the only reason you don't want illegal immigration is because you are a racist).
Same would likely be said regarding Obama's positions regarding crime and education in 2008.
Let's ignore the same-sex marriage one, because that is the difference between advocating a change in policy and advocating no change in policy. The party has not swung left here - actual policy has swung left, and the majority of people in both parties at both times are in favor of no change in policy.
I want to see actual positions Obama took on illegal immigration, crime, or education that would be out of the ordinary for Democrats in 2024 or 2025. My impression is that all of his stated policies from then would be pretty standard now, and vice versa, except that there's a small minority of people in the party who more vocally advocate some radical views (in each direction!) on these issues today.
In 2024, it was also a case of running against a failed incumbent party. I don't think policies that Trump or Harris campaigned on really determined the outcome of the election.
Once again Matt's central thesis is based on his own Twitter account because it's the only thing happening in politics. I think the kids call this main character syndrome.
I agree, Matt seems to put himself with in regular contact with left-wing loonies but seemingly never encounters the crazy people on the right. It reads like parody whenever Matt describes how Trump has moderated the right, and then I log into a gaming forum where they're all talking about Jews using DEI to extinguish the white race.
Having just spent two weeks touring the Midwest, absolutely. I think Matt’s seriously underrating how common and vituperative a lot of right wing media and culture is, and how little it’s based on policy.
As the power of the US Supreme Court has grown, so has the power imbalance between the Senate and the House of Representatives in a way that I don't think gets enough attention.
The Supreme Court was not intended to have this much power, and indeed it didn't have this much power for most of American history. In the beginning of the republic, justices resigned from the Supreme Court very quickly because the job was difficult (justices had to "ride circuit") and boring. For generations thereafter, Supreme Court appointments were often patronage-based or just geographic balancing. In the Antebellum period, the only time the SCOTUS declared a law unconstitutional was Dred Scott.
Now, the SCOTUS is a de facto superlegislature, with the final say on the constitutionality of all legislation, federal and state, and since it's impossible to pass a constitutional amendment, the SCOTUS's constitutional decisions are de facto constitutional text. Given the vagueness of ordinary legislature and Congress's inability to pass clarifying legislation, the SCOTUS often has a determinative role in statute, and even its unpopular statutory decisions have a permanence which they shouldn't have and didn't originally have
Since the Supreme Court is an extension of the presidency and Senate, the electoral college and Senate malapportionment have a consequence that they weren't meant to have. Four sitting justices, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, were confirmed by Senators who actually represented a minority of the country. Since the Supreme Court can overrule the House of Representatives, it means that the Senate can de facto overrule the House of Representatives in a way that the Founders never intended. Since the Senate is affected by severe malapportionment, it's a form of minority rule.
Thus, as the Supreme Court has grown in power, so has the Senate, vis-a-vis the House.
Anyway, Americans who follow international politics recognize that Canada, the UK, and most continental European countries have unbalanced bicameralism, where one chamber is much more powerful than the other. However, rarely do we apply that to ourselves, even though the Senate filibuster and monopoly on confirming judges give it negative and positive powers which the House lacks.
I'm surprised there isn't more punditry about how inconsequential the House is except in budget bills which pass through reconciliation, and how this is inconsistent with the intent of the Founding, US history, and peer democracies.
The House passes legislation, but the bills die in the Senate. The House has no role in confirmations, either executive branch or judicial, so its ability to check the executive is limited, and judiciary non-existent.
Functionally, the House is to posture. Except in budgeting, the work of policy change is done by the executive-judicial dyarchy, over which the "People's House" has no power.
The project of Big Tenting will be assisted, I think, by returning to an earlier understanding of “allyship.”
During WWII, the US allied with the USSR in order to defeat Hitler. We were allies despite fundamental disagreements about political ideologies, values, and global aspirations. We were allied together for a specific purpose. And beyond that purpose there was no expectation of agreement.
Notably, the USSR never accused us of being “bad allies” for not supporting its plans to conquer Eastern Europe. It did not accuse us of being “bad allies” for not supporting Leninism.
Nothing about being an ally for the purpose of fighting X should be supposed to commit you to joining in the fight against Y.
And yet this is the understanding of “allyship” that has dominated left politics, and to a large extent Democratic politics, for the last decade.
It has been a disaster.
We need to be able to say: we stand with you against a common enemy, despite not supporting other parts of your agenda. That does not make us “bad allies.” It makes us genuine allies, in the traditional sense.
It seems like the Harris campaign tried that with Liz Cheney and it didn't really work. What other allies should the Democratic Party publicly seek for support?
*Ok editing this: Obviously there's no evidence that it hurt her campaign and there's a left critique that massively overstates how much it hurt. I just think the problem with the Cheney gambit is that it was seen as a token attempt at moderation, when Harris needed to take more actually moderate policy positions.
Liz Cheney was trotted out as a prop. Democrats were not willing to make any compromises on her policy views to try to bring her allies into the D tent. It was Cheney doing 100% of the compromising - and credit to her for that, but it only appealed to a small number of #nevertrump voters who were willing to sacrifice all their political values to oppose Trump.
I have more respect for the Bulwark Types and Cheney and Kinzinger than anyone associated with Dem politics since Obama.
The neocons made horrible mistakes thinking they could spread democracy in the middle east by toppling dictators but it seems at least that they genuinely value democracy and it was not all just a grift. That is rare these days.
Just doesn't feel like there was a ton of ore left in that vein. "Never Trump" Republicans are all just Democrats now. What independent who is on the fence cares what Liz Cheney thinks? How many even know who she is besides 'related to Dick Cheney'?
Mitt Romney on the other hand might have been a good proxy if she could've gotten him.
Liz Cheney used to be the third ranking Republican in the House. I think moderate scolds like Matt need to think long and hard about why that endorsement flopped yet some crazy antivaxx health nut was a huge get for Trump.
Literally no Americans know who the third ranking Republican in the house is. Most swing voters probably don't even know who Johnson or Thune are! People don't know anything about politics, it's a country of morons! The endorsement flopped because it was an endorsement from someone only high-info voters care about, and all high-info voters have very strong opinions on Trump at this point.
A lot of pundits keep insisting Democrats just need to come up with the right policy concessions yet everyone takes it for granted that a Joe Rogan endorsement would have been way more influential than Liz Cheney's despite the former being a podcast bro who sometimes indulges right-wing conspiracists and the latter actually deciding Republican policy during Trump's first term.
It is more apparent than ever that most of the electorate only talks about "policy" as a means of cultural signaling. Everyone tries to cloak their culture war shit in high-minded policy talk, but their revealed preference is culture war bullshit. The reason Matt isn't able to enact his political calculus is because no one actually wants to sacrifice their cultural positions to enact real policy objectives. They want to win the culture war.
you dont win culture wars by losing elections, though
They don't even want to win the culture war, they want to talk about winning the culture war. Which is even worse.
It's beyond obvious that a Joe Rogan endorsement, hypothetically speaking, would be a thousand times more impactful than a Liz Cheney endorsement.
FWIW, Matt has long been beating the drum that ceding conspiracy theorists to the GOP was a mistake. On Politix today, he was saying that safe-seat dems should try to make some political hay out of the administration's inability to produce an "Epstein list" (probably because it doesn't exist, but at least they would have to admit they were lying the whole time).
Highlighting the conspiracy that Epstein was a Mossad agent should help shore up some of the Democrats weakness with the left.
Republican politicians took their cue from far right influencers incessantly promoting conspiracy theories attaching prominent liberals to Epstein. The only equivalent dynamic among the left comes from the ultra-fringe left that Matt is actively instructing Democrats to ignore.
“… and it didn't really work….”
It was not sufficient, evidently. Is there research showing that it reduced Harris’ share of the votes?
Getting real fucking tired of this "it didn't work" bullshit about literally anything the Kamala campaign did. No shit, political gestures and campaign stunts only move people on the very margins. Elections are mostly decided by the fundamentals, that's why they're called the fundamentals. And the fundamentals in 2024 were that every voter in the whole goddamn world hated the incumbents.
"Harris needed to take more actually moderate policy positions"
Kamala Harris' loss was way over-determined so it is hard to blame it on any one thing or subset of things.
But to this day I have no idea why Kamala Harris wanted to be President in the first place and I certainly hope she does not decide to run for the governor of CA.
" I just think the problem with the Cheney gambit is that it was seen as a token attempt at moderation, when Harris needed to take more actually moderate policy positions."
THIS
and it needed to start when Biden took office.
October 23, 1956: "We pledge to do better by supporting our Soviet allies during these unprecedented times. #checkyourhungarianprivilege #Sovietlivesmatter #silenceisbourgeois
Not sure I understand. Eisenhower basically did throw Hungary to the wolves, though for practical reasons and not to support our erstwhile Soviet "ally." I guess I'm not getting the joke. (Many times, I don't get *my* jokes, so no criticism.)
:-(
I'm curious if that's an actual quote, because I can't find it. I also can't be sure (even with the hash tags) if this is sarcastic, or if you're actually saying the US should have automatically committed to fighting a war against the USSR in Hungary in 1956.
I think it's a parody of the concept of "allyship" = "as our ally, you must follow our lead and support us in everything, even if it's (a) against your interests AND (b) you doubt we're right on the merits; you're with us 100%, no exceptions, or you were never an ally."
Following up on dysphemistic treadmill's comment, being allies traditionally meant only that you were making common cause against a mutual enemy for now. The WWII Allies are an example -- the US and UK remained friendly after the war, but their relations with the USSR soured. US-Soviet relations were not entirely friendly and trusting during the war either, but while they were at war with a mutual enemy, they prioritized winning that war over other concerns, and when the war ended, priorities necessarily changed.
Also, among friendly countries, the UK did not insist that if the Americans wanted to help, they needed to defer to Brits in all areas of controversy. They coordinated, but the US became the senior partner by virtue of its sheer size, strength, industrial might etc. Many power dynamics are possible in alliances, not just the one where the allies joining in are subordinate to the people they joined.
As C-man points out, being an ally of the Soviets against Germany in 1944 does not mean that the Americans need to support the Soviet repression of Hungary in 1956. Leftists would be a little less alienating if they were more accepting of traditional allyship -- if, for example, they'd be happy with supporters of Medicaid expansion who are centrist on late-term abortion or immigration enforcement. And to the point of today's column, they need to accept traditional allies to win the Senate -- the full leftist package is not popular enough in the majority of states, but they can still make common cause with people who agree with some parts of the package and don't want the Republicans in power.
You are putting way more effort into explaining my joke than I did writing it!
You should have capitalized “Do Better.”
Fun fact, the clapback originated during the Bolshevik / Menchevik split.
This. Roosevelt and Churchill pointed the way forward way back in 1941 when they signed the Allyship Charter.
It’s very clearly sarcastic.
I thought so, and now I know so, but I've been wrong before in cases that seemed even more obvious to me.
Poe’s Law says hi!
Precisely!
During the 2020 primary a huge subtext of the debate was is Trump the problem or a symptom.
That it was never really settled remains a significant problem for the not-Trump coalition. Are we trying to fight the President or trying to win arguments about the shape of society.
Your assumption of a “we” is telling. The Democratic coalition should be 89 million often fractious voters who agree that broad prosperity for working stiffs and hard eyed decency towards the poor are good things.
The vast majority of Democrats *do* agree on those things! Hell, I’m the dreaded Highly Educated UMC Liberal Woman, and I want broadly shared prosperity and decency to the poor! And my husband and in-laws would say the same, as would, I bet, most if not all of my colleagues at the university.
The problem is politicizing questions of sexuality. There hasn’t been a broad consensus on sexual morality since the Civil War. During Victorian times, a significant fraction of working class men never married and prostitution was common. In the 1950s, 5% of all men listed on birth certificates were cuckholds and 30% of brides were pregnant on their wedding day. The gap between conservative and liberal views of sexuality has only diverged, and these sort of gaps have always cleaved the working class somewhat evenly.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that. Hell, I don't even know what the "conservative and liberal views on sexuality" are anymore!
It used to be straightforward: Conservatives used to be for chastity, purity, one man + one woman in marriage for life, sex for procreation only; liberals used to be the amoral hedonists who were like, anything goes, gay sex, serial monogamy, swinging, threesomes, abortion on demand, wheeee!
Now? It's all scrambled and confused. On the Democratic side, you've got sex-positivity along with activists who worry about how porn and prostitution are degrading and demeaning, plus all the worry about sex that is "problematic" and condemnation of any sexual relationships that have a whiff of a power imbalance about them. On the Republican side, we have an unholy alliance of manosphere bros who are like "you gotta slap a bitch if she gets uppity" and traditional Evangelicals who want to RETVRN to a lost past when man was the master of the household and woman was like one of the tradwives on social media, churning homemade butter while caring for her five children and looking angelic in her homemade linen dress.
Not to mention, awkwardly, it's those godless libertine liberals who are doing a much better job of following the traditional lifestyle: getting married, staying married, having children within wedlock. The lower-SES people are more likely both to vote Republican and to get divorced or have children while unmarried.
What exactly do you want Democrats to do about sexuality, other than to say "Your sexuality is none of the government's business, as long as it's consensual, because nonconsensual activity is sexual assault, which is a matter for the criminal justice system"?
I feel like defining the we is the central question of a primary campaign. What’s the platform and who’s the candidate. Of course there will be disagreements that should be getting hashed out in one or more venues right now.
If Biden had been capable of leading and not a last moment Hail Mary by people who only backed him in the way that he’s not Bernie instead of the awful rule by committee period where no one really got much of anything and the debate was settled democrats wouldn’t be so deep in the hole.
Biden and the Democrats passed some really good legislation, miraculously with a paper thin majority.
But that was all a complete waste of time, because it was not responsive to the needs of the moment. It blithely ignored the looming threat of Trump, thinking that if the inflation rate went down without sparking a recession everything would fall into place for Biden’s re-election, which turned out to be very, very wrong. Biden’s administration was very popular with true blue democrats and progressives (at least up until October 7, 2023, when it even lost a big chunk of them) but not the working class or the American people. There was always something odd about talking about threats to democracy while ignoring the will of the people at every turn.
Biden should have acted more swiftly on the explosion of asylum claims. There was little he could have done on inflation (it was a global phenomenon in the wake of COVID) but he should have done more symbolic things to create the appearance of acting. The BBB took long to happen but ended up as good legislation.
Other than that, I thought what the administration actually did was fine. I wish he had been ten years younger (same for me!) and that the Democratic brand hadn't become so terribly toxic over some number of years. But other than that I reject your contention that they were "ignoring the will of the public at every turn."
I don't exactly disagree but they proved to basically completely inept at responding to events because they weren't really executing anyone's vision for management.
There were a few areas that buck this trend but it simply seems to have been whatever someone could get away with got done and they wandered into one fire straight out of another one.
CHIPS, too much extraneous stuff but yes (and looks like it is not getting repealed)
IRA support for nuclear, geothermal, and CCS yes, very good. To much (more than needed to mimic a tax on net CO2 emissions) and too much for "investment in" rather than "output of" wind/solar.
>I feel like defining the we is the central question of a primary campaign.
It should be, but in practice, that doesn't seem to be true, because of who actually votes in primaries. Also, because there has to be a pool of candidates actually able and willing to run in key primaries who have a chance of winning a general, in order for the primary to matter.
Even though we disagree on how to deliver those.
This analogy has promise, but it goes a bit astray in that once the Nazis were eradicated, there was never any reasonable expectation to stay allied with the USSR. Indeed, they were always going to be a threat to the rest of the world. But Republicans are not going to be eradicated. They weren't even at their lowest moment in the 1930s. They can of course be contained, as they were then. But that requires an everlasting allyship to succeed at that.
Which reminds me of Matt straight up saying to Freddie that he should support Democrats of all stripes, because they're the most likely ones to defeat Republicans.
Oh the USSR accused us of being bad allies multiple times. Stalin constantly griped about our 'delays' in opening a true second front. Hated that the UK convinced FDR to go after the Mediterranean first, and there are MANY people today who would happily accuse the US of being a bad ally. Think Oliver Stone's (awful) TV series on the untold history of the US.
This does not even begin to address that Stalin was actively HELPING Hitler until inconveniently Hitler proved himself to be the man he literally declared himself to be for decades. Stalin further hindered his own cause by idiotically ordering his own military not to prepare for the invasion (and then countermanding orders right after).
I do get your point, but the example you use is a weird one. Now, Stalin still accepted US aid and still worked together (to a degree) for the common good. But most of the sacrifices and compromises came from the US & UK.
>But most of the sacrifices and compromises came from the US & UK.
For the negotiated concessions related to forming the alliance, plausibly, sure. But remember that the USSR had over 30x as many casualties as the US and UK in WWII, a majority of them civilians. Complaining about delays in opening a second front seems pretty natural in that context. Not that the US and UK necessarily should have done anything differently. But the USSR wasn't wrong or lying about that.
Stalin was most definitely wrong, was always a bad ally to the US, and was actively helping Hitler until his own stupidity smashed him in the face.
Both are true:
1. Stalin was an evil motherfucker who was on Hitler’s side until Hitler literally attacked his country
2. Far, far more Soviet citizens (including civilians who starved to death during the siege of Stalingrad) died during WWII than UK or US citizens.
Except that second point is unrelated to how good of an ally the USSR was
I don’t believe Stalin gave a hoot about civilian deaths. He killed millions himself
Stalin wasn't so much "on Hitler's side" as "on Stalin's side for focusing on what he thought was his political risk, his internal opposition" - of course this evily meant doing a 'alliance of convenience' (and the self-deception that Hitler would be too bogged down in the West to risk attacking the Sovs... oops).
I don't think a Normandy invasion in 1942 would have been successful. That is why the US and UK did not invade France then.
I mostly agree, and I am not taking Stalin's side. I'm simply pointing out that the USSR griped continuously during the alliance.
Sure but they griped about things of actual focus of the alliance (attack Hitler), not other side factors / not-core-factors. (of course the griping was as always w Stalin & Co supremely hypocritical and self-interested but such griping doesn't undermine the actual analogy at all)
In an attempt to tell things from Stalin's perspective, I'd argue that he negotiated that awful agreement with Hitler because the UK and France handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler (with zero say from the USSR) and that removed the strongest barrier to Germany's eastward expansion and greatly increased the threat to the USSR. So he struck a deal because he decided he could not depend on the UK and France to do anything that would help protect his country.
Basically all of this is wrong
The freaking blobbing of causes is so asinine.
Yes, I heard all about why omnicause is bad and then the Republicans just passed one big omnicause bill of their own where the most unpopular part is the headline item not some rider they snuck in. You guys are the "Japanese soldier who kept fighting" meme. Yes, the drawbacks are obvious, but it's beyond apparent that omnicauses are just how coalitional politics work in the 21st century.
The senate at least dumped the extra tax on renewables (AIUI it dumped the subsidy but at least didn't add on the extra tax)
It’s also stupid.
That's a fair point.
The problem with this diagnosis is that it's reactive, while the matter of creating "culture war" issues is adaptive and adversarial.
You think that by "moving to the center" on a handful of simple issues you're going to cut the heart out of the culture war. But what will actually happen is that well-funded conservative think tanks and right-wing media will develop new culture-war stances. Maybe we'll go from "trans people in sports" to "should we throw trans people into forced 'conversion therapy' programs." Then folks on the left, being basically human and empathetic, will object to that plan.
Which, of course, is the whole point. And now the Overton window of 'shift to the center' is targeted around whether you're willing to throw trans people into forced 'treatment' or not, and moderates will sigh and say something like, ok, look, half the country wants to institutionalize trans people and some crazy left-wing progressives are against it, to win the Senate we need to moderate on this 'forced therapy' question... and so on and so forth. You can't win when you don't get to drive the terms of the argument and you're always playing on somebody else's home turf.
You think the right created trans as a culture war issue, and not, you know, the people who began pushing it relentlessly from the left? The Democrats and their most loyal voters opened with the terms of this argument and it's pretty blinkered to act like it was thrust upon them unwillingly.
Yes. I think the right created trans as a culture war issue. This is consistent with the history, and consistent with the fact that the trans panic began almost immediately after gay marriage collapsed as a wedge issue.
It was the people not only insisting against all evidence that men are women, but that everybody needed to sing along, that created the issue, not the people who take issue with that absurd statement and do not care to parrot it.
What trans panic? You mean that people didn't like men in women's locker rooms and on women's sports teams and children being told that dresses are for girls so if you like dresses you're a girl? That's a reasonable response. The right didn't have to go looking, it was put in everyone's face and we were told to celebrate it.
Look, I get that you hate trans stuff and/or you're an LLM that's been programmed on the prompt of "write posts that obsessively complain about trans stuff in a way that's super-not-normal," but this whole screed isn't really a response to anything. Also, in general it's just super weird. I'm almost certain you've never personally been harmed by a trans person showing up in your locker room, and obsessing over things that don't really affect you is not a sign of good mental health.
Actually it was my wife who was menaced by a grown man when she was by herself in a locker room. Responding to a comment you made, and continuing to argue for sense and reason is not obsessing. It's making an argument.
It's not weird to object to the lie that men are women. Nobody had to go looking for a 'trans panic' when I Am Jazz was on national TV and Jenner was being spotlit as stunning and brave. Even then it wasn't much of an issue until men began an aggressive push to be allowed into women's spaces and onto their teams, and now we have men in women's prison! The predictable outcome of trans activism has occurred and finally it's being challenged openly.
You can't make a persuasive case, so you try to limply insult me with noodle armed accusations. Yikes! Gross! Not very heckin' great my dude.
I think the consensus is that the various organizations fighting for gay marriage suddenly needed something else to justify their existence and shifted to trans issues.
If you say "I think the consensus is" before a random claim, that doesn't make the claim true. There's a pretty well-documented history here, going way back to before 2016. You can read about some of it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/politics/transgender-conservative-campaign.html
That's fair. I wish I could remember now where I've come across this argument. It could be both.
It was obviously both. The right nutpicked and the left was all too happy to provide lots of nuts!
The example used in the essay about the EPA zero-emissions vehicle exemption is a case in point. There was no national vote on banning gasoline engines, there was a vote on whether California should be allowed to do it, because (1) Californians support it, and (2) California has and has always had air pollution problems caused by internal combustion engine emissions. It was Republicans who converted this California issue (and whichever of the other states that chose to follow the California rule) into a performative national anti-EV vote by striking down the exemption and claiming that it was some sort of dire threat to the nation. Democrats voting to strike down the exemption was the farthest thing from a "big tent" move, because a "big tent" would definitely include the majority view in the single largest state in the nation wanting to adopt a rule that has nothing to do with the market for God-knows-what kind of vehicles on Oklahoma or Louisiana. Rather, this was an example of exactly the phenomenon you describe: right wingers seizing on an issue that is unpopular in places with high political salience to right wingers, then using that leverage to impose a hegemonic anti-liberal culture war position.
It makes me wonder what the Yglesias view will be when the right wing successfully pulls this trick on Medicaid or Medicare or any public provisions of health care funding (which they were able to do not very long ago with "Obamacare"). Probably more go-with-flow, don't-make-them-mad passivity in the face of this all too evident and predictable right-wing strategy of issue identification + toxification. The "slow boring of hard boards" is about the relentless pursuit of that which is right and good for people against the "hard boards" of ignorance, greed, corruption and lethargy that allow bad policy to persist. This inevitably involves persuasion, and while the right wing knows that it can use persuasion to "harden the boards", moderates seem to just sit around waiting for polls to tell them how hard the boards are, then get in line with whatever shockingly grotesque agenda the right has made "popular".
As someone who’s completely on board with the analysis of state level abortion politics, I think that’s substantially different from Schumer’s rank capitulations.
The idea should be that fighting on those sorts of measures serves as a Schelling point to rally the big tent around.
My general thesis is that moderate voters will give you credit if they see you using those opportunities to expand the tent — say, welcoming Mamdani’s or Bel Edwards’ encouragement — instead of Matt’s and Schumer’s fear that they’ll just mindlessly blame you for XYZ in a shutdown fight.
Addendum: The lack of blame probably doesn’t show up in immediate post-shutdown polls — hence why Republicans always seemed to get blamed for their Obama-era shutdowns — but also, the tent expansion effect probably takes a while to show up, if it’s actually detectable at all.
It sadly ends up being something where we can’t measure the hidden variable, so no “smart” Dem can be convinced to do it, but we keep seeing the price of NOT using various showdowns and fights as tent-expansion opportunities in the electoral end-results.
Stalin constantly accused the US and the UK of being bad allies for delaying the Normandy invasion. He thought we were actually colluding with the Nazis to weaken the USSR and to make it do the brunt of fighting to defeat Germany. Had we been the "good allies" he wanted, we would have launched D-Day in 1943 (many American military leaders wanted to do this). And probably it would have been a disaster, but that's another discussion.
So, no, we didn't agree with Stalin on 100%. But one of the things we disagreed about was of absolute importance to him.
MY says that the Democratic party should drop climate change as a party priority in order to help frontline candidates. I'm fine with this if we adopt the Trump approach to moderating on policy: i.e., lying through your teeth. Say one thing, win power, and do something entirely different. But if he's serious about it, then I have a big problem with that. We need the Senate of course, but we can't let the voters of Texas set the entire agenda for the Democratic party.
Damn it, Marc, I thought you were my ally.
Matt does not think we should drop climate change as a policy priority. He thinks Dems should not pursue policies that do not help the issue and are so unpopular as to lose races. He thinks we should rapidly build out solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, natural gas, transmission lines, battery storage, and invest in research and carbon capture. That is different from banning ICE cars, gas stoves, and other performative stuff.
Another reason they didn't accuse us of being "bad allies" was because the very phrase invites mockery. You work together to get the job done, the job you both agree with.
... unless you're an ally because you like having the "ally" badge in your bio. Then it matters a lot if people say you're a "bad ally." It's like donating money to charity but then not getting to brag about it on insta.
Leftwing “allyship” has not been about an alliance, it’s been about intellectual vassalage. I agree factions in the Democratic tent need to accept allies and not demand vassals.
I think a better example is NATO. You have a diverse group of countries organized around a clear long-term goal.
Those countries, plus Hungary.
(You have both Greece and Turkey too which makes it even more fun.)
Yes, Hungary, Greece and Turkey are all in NATO despite their issues.
True but uninspiring. People want ti be part of a team. Knowing you will all play for different teams once the transfer window opens breeds cynicism.
How you build a team, and what the team accomplishes, also matters. Wining covers a lot of sins and provides a lot of motivation and momentum. It also often creates opportunities to build a deeper coalition over time as you learn to work together and trust each other.
The movies where the Bad News Bears or the Mighty Ducks got along, and had a great time, but never won - those movies never got made, for obvious reasons. No one would want to watch them or get inspired by them, either.
Where would Stalin play well in the 2026 map? Montana and South Dakota could do with some industrialization. With a side of collectivized farming.
Not sure about Uncle Joe. But Chairman Mao would absolutely crush it in the red states.
The Chair recognizes Senator Zedong from West Virginia
Thank you Mister President. I yield myself as much time as I may consume. I also yield myself as much time as you may consume. And as much time as all these lame ass senators may consume.
It would be Senator Mao. His family name ("last name") is Mao, his given name is Zedong.
Ah of course, thank you!
Iron foundries in every yard! We’re going to Manify our Medicaid swilling, video game playing mens!
Not sure this analogy holds up. The Soviets only joined with the allies reluctantly after Hitler attacked them and broke their pact. The US only joined the alliance reluctantly after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the US. The Soviets were critical of the allies for not opening up a second front sooner. But I get your point.
Wasn't this ham-fisted analogy of opposing Republicans to working with the Soviets to put down the mad dog of Nazism just the operating worldview of the Biden White House?
If you read Original Sin and come away with the idea that the Biden Whitehouse had a coherent worldview I'm curious how that's what you think it was.
It seemed to me that outside of a very few issues where Biden and the Politburo were personally invested everything was up for negotiation which led to incoherence. Then sort of papered over with odd attempts to be bipartisan.
Maybe that book is unfairly throwing Biden's people under the bus in some way I'm not seeing since the inside defense is so incomprehensible.
No, I mean that was all the worldview was, everything came down to "are we undoing Trump's threat to America or not," right down to the debate. I didn't say it lead to coherent action, quite the opposite. I have read Original Sin, everyone cited in Original Sin stresses how central the threat of Trump was to Biden's self-perception as a historic leader, to defining his cabinet's internal debates, to first arguing that Biden would fundamentally restore the country from evil, to later arguing that he was the only one who could beat Trump a second time because he beat him a first time. Biden was the perfect candidate for a pure anti-Trump coalition, but being a pure anti-Trump coalition doesn't easily resolve many political questions. You need something else, and there was nothing else.
For example, consider that any idiot advisor halfway awake from 2015 to 2020 could have said "do not rapidly increase immigration into a country with a decaying civic culture that has summoned an odd entertainer into politics on the cause of restricting immigration." But this question, like others the admin confronted, requires thinking about things by metrics other than "is our opponent as evil as Generalplan Ost" (which incidentally, is the only reason to work with a sociopathic murderer like Stalin.) Coming up with historical analogies for how evil your opponents are provides very little insight to governing well or winning elections. As Republicans are well on their way to finding out.
Is it possible that the geographic distribution of politically active Democrats is partially driving the stickiness of dead-end political ideas and excessive hopes around Mamdami? I had this thought while reading this article on the train and haven’t looked for data, but my vibes are that the median highly political activist Democrat lives somewhere much less representative of the median voter than the median political activist Republican. I am envisioning the DC area, NYC, or other large blue urban areas in contrast to the suburbs of a medium sized city in a red state. I’m trying to find explanations that go beyond left wing activists not caring about winning or being more misinformed since a large portion of right wing activists clearly don’t care either and also operate in echo chambers.
I think this is likely true. I knew when Mamdani won that it would lead to a lot of confusing takes about "what it means for the Democratic Party." When in fact, he's obviously just too left-wing on social issues and most economic issues to win anywhere else.
"As goes New York City, so goes San Francisco."
And this time not even that!
The social issues aren't the point. The point of Mamdani is that he's young, charismatic, focused on kitchen table issues, and he found a way to be the scrappy outsider in a system of powerful incumbents. These parts of the formula can be replicated in many places if the establishment doesn't block them.
I think this is true. Despite the image projected in the media, basically no areas are as red as dense urban areas are blue. And few people at all, let alone few conservative influencers, live in the extremely red parts of rural Texas, for example.
This used to be true 10 years ago (and because African-American areas were voting 95% Dem, not liberal activist areas, which were always closer to 85% Dem), but not any more. Lots of rural Red areas are 90%-95% Rep now, even as African-American areas have fallen from 95% Dem to 90% Dem: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/elections/2024-election-map-precinct-results.html
There were 10 Trump+50 Congressional districts, and 21+DC Harris+50 districts. Plus the Trump+50 ones feature few people with important positions in politics or media, and the Harris ones lots.
Yep, and Trump carried Beverly Hills.
Working class movement!
Wow I thought this was sarcastic at first but it’s actually true.
As someone who lives very close to Beverly Hills, this didn't surprise me at all.
Rural areas have less than 20% of the population.
Seems like the conservative influencers have settled in the suburbs of Nashville, to Tennessee’s detriment
There are lots of Democrats in suburbs of medium sized cities in Red States; that’s pretty much the area where Trump had the least gains. On election night one of the first counties to report was a suburb of Indianapolis that showed Harris doing better than Biden that briefly got my hopes up…
Also the fact that there's so few elections in 2025 in which Democrats can really do anything. The VA and NJ gubernatorial elections have been pretty quiet.
I get that NYC is where the media is and the race was pretty exciting, but the now accepted conventional wisdom that Mamdani's victory Says Things About The Future of the Democratic Party whereas Spanberger's and Sherill's primary victories yield blank stares is not good for diagnosing the current political climate.
Surely, Democratic moderates winning statewide primaries means *something.*
Definitely. I kind of wonder if the fact that too many Virginia and Maryland governors were touted as future presidential candidates earlier this century, only got those campaigns to go nowhere, played a role in the media ignoring those races eventually.
I'm not really surprised that everyone is ignoring those two contests. Most of the time, local primary contests are of little wider interest. My problem is the mindless herd behavior that drives the conclusion that Mamdani's win means something larger than New York City.
For what it’s worth, the most impactful GOP activist right now, Charlie Kirk and his org, is based out of the key swing state of Arizona
> the most impactful GOP activist right now, Charlie Kirk and his org, ...
https://youtu.be/O7QP9Zqge4s
I keep hearing both centrists and leftists say that Dems need a big tent on culture to promote their obviously more popular approach to economics (despite the fact that these two factions actually have very different views about what that approach entails).
Am I the only one who’s a little skeptical about this? Sure, the Dems’ current cultural brand is dogshit (in electoral terms), but it’s not like they’ve recently been super-popular on economics. Typically Republicans are more trusted to run the economy effectively.
Obama was popular because the US was in the midst of a massive recession and people genuinely wanted policies that would help the poor since they feared becoming poor themselves. Once the economy had recovered, America voted for a Republican again. Biden won because of the lawlessness and incompetence of the first Trump admin, not because of his views on economics. Kamala actually lost in large part because of Biden’s economic mistakes.
Maybe Dems need to wait for another recession for their approach to be popular again? I don’t think healthcare *for the poor* is necessarily the most important issue for swing voters.
I've been having this thing where I both feel the urge to roll my eyes some of the extreme gnashing of teeth over Medicaid cuts and at the same time am way more doomer about the situation than someone like Matt is and I think this is kinda at the core of it. In the past 6 years or so the country has genuinely driven the car off the fiscal cliff and no one seems to take it seriously. We're genuinely fucked and healthcare for the poor is the least of it. If the Dems want their redistributionist aims taken seriously, and I have sympathies that way, they absolutely have to take dramatic steps to restructure the federal budget. The plan cannot be to simply put it all on the credit card and you can't pay for it if you're splitting time with the degrowthers. As bad as the OBBBA is the Dems are not offering a viable alternative, they're fighting over the size of the slices of a shrinking pie on the titanic as the whole federal budget gets swallowed up by debt service and transfers to retirees.
Social Security Trust Fund Depletion Day will be the latest moment until heads get clunked. It's also quite something that this latest bill moves it up to 2032, an election year. Good luck to the next president in dealing with that in your reelection bid.
Do you think it will come up at all during the 2028 presidential race?
Only if a Ross Perot style independent makes it an issue. It would be a good issue for a charismatic billionaire to cleave the Republican coalition, and subsequently provide cover for a winning Democrat. This is basically what happened with Clinton.
Seems doubtful to me. What do you think?
I really don't think there's any magic about Social Security Trust Fund Depletion Day. On that day, after a lot of rending of garments, Congress will pass a simple stopgap measure that funds existing Social Security benefits out of general revenues "pending a long-term solution" (haha). Precisely nothing will change.
Even a stopgap that kicks the can down the road a few years still has to contain some form of benefit cuts and/or tax hikes. Probably the one that would make the fewest waves, especially if Democrats hold all the power, is abolishing the cap on FICA.
Since when have new expenditures ever been funded?! Why do you say it has to contain some form of benefit cuts or tax hikes? Just add the bill to the deficit, as we do for almost everything.
Ed: To be clear, there will be nothing different about the cash flows on that day. They will be exactly the same. We're effectively funding social security benefits out of general revenues and the deficit now, since outlays are greater than inputs.
That would set a new precedent on how SS is funded. Certainly plausible, but it's still a big change.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to your argument, but imo it way undercounts what the Dems accomplished with IRA.
The Dem vision, as enacted with IRA, is very strongly pro-growth, pro US industrial base, and pro abundance. Despite its problems, the law had the potential to propel us into the 21st century as a major electro-state that had a shot at matching the capabilities of China.
The ultimate proof of this is that OBBA endorses a significant chunk of the IRA's economic and industrial policy programs. It keeps intact somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of IRA's spending on these things. The headlines focus on dismantling of support for EVs, solar, and wind, but ignore that OBBA keeps most of IRA's support for industrial policy, advanced nuclear and geothermal, and grid battery storage. In fact, OBBA even provides indirect support for utility scale wind and solar because most of the balance of system cost for these projects will end up getting subsidized under the battery storage tax credits (wind and solar projects are now almost always paired with batteries that still get subsidies).
I think that the IRA energy investments are mostly fine, but even in the best case they're not dramatically impacting GDP. And really "Don't crash the economy via awful industrial/tariff/degrowth/protectionist insanity" is the easy part of the problem. The hard part is funding the government, and the chances of that happening pre-catastrophic ramifications are rapidly approaching zero. Right now the federal budget is the car at the fade out at the end of Thelma & Louis.
I agree. I know it’s an n of 1, but when Paula Jean Swearingen was the Democratic nominee for Senate in West Virginia and went all in on Medicare for All and whatnot, she did much worse than Manchin. Lefty economic populism can poll well in the abstract, but I feel like it runs into the fact that most people also want to feel like they’re “making it on their own” and not just taking handouts from the government. Not to mention the fact that I think people are skeptical enough to grasp that something like Medicare For All would be really hard to actually pass and implement in a way that helps them.
The problem I find with Medicare for All is that it means like 20 things and the devil is very much in the details.
The details are much more complex than "just" funding. Can patients opt out and buy private insurance? Can providers opt out and only accept private insurance? If the answer to either of those questions is no, I suspect there would be a ton of court challenges (and principled challenges) on liberty grounds. If patients or doctors CAN opt out, look for a lot of dissatisfaction with the fact that suddenly one's choice of providers is extremely limited, and you have to find a new doctor.
That’s kinda why I hate M4A being some kind of litmus test - need details.
It’s also going to be expensive. The popularity of Medicare for All plummets when an actual and realistic funding mechanism is included.
Well, yes and no - it goes back to “what does it mean?”.
If Medicare for All literally means “change today’s Medicare eligibility age to 0 and adjust the payroll tax to do it”, it might not be that expensive. We almost did that in 2009, after all, and I think it got a decent CBO score.
However, if it means “everyone gets copay-free care with no deductible or supplemental insurance needed”, then the price is WAY higher.
It would be incredibly expensive to offer actual Medicare for everyone. Also, it would be an enormous and expensive undertaking to change the source of funds, and there are many, many entrenched actors who would resist the change, and indeed who have resisted the change every time it's been proposed in a state.
It’d be expensive but relatively easy - just raise the Medicare payroll taxes a couple/few percent. You’d be covering younger and less expensive enrollees, so the cost per capita would be less and less as the eligibility age dropped.
Of course there’d be entrenched actors opposing. That’s true of every change everywhere, all the time. That’s not a reason not to do it. However, my guess is that this would have the least pushback because it’s already in place, just for older people.
I have some recent immigrant family members who supported Trump as their first Republican. By and large their main complaint against Democrats was about taxes and welfare for poor people that they saw as drains on society. One of them worked at an inner-city hospital and specifically complained about how much free healthcare some of the people were getting for self-inflicted problems. So I’m not really convinced that left-wing positions on economics are really going to be that much more popular than ones on culture. To be successful I think the left-wing economics positions have to be like Mamdanism and focused on reducing cost-of-living for everyone including through deregulation where appropriate like his famous halal cart video and not on improving things for the poor specifically. I personally think we should be more generous to the poor but don’t think it’ll be any more popular than trans swimmers…
The message needs to be, “We are looking out for the people who pay the bills.” Yes we care about all these edge cases fuckups - but we also care about hard working, tax paying, middle class people. Too much of progressive rhetoric is about very small often unsympathetic groups .
I don't even think it's a question of sympathy or no - plenty of people have sympathy for the poor or disadvantaged, but when Democratic messaging is focused around those cases, the normie voter hears that Democrats are fighting primarily for those people, not me.
Moreover, a good chunk of the unofficial (not from Democratic politicians) reponse to this fact that been to shame or scold folks who ask, "But, what's in it for me?"
It’s less that progressives are for these edge cases and more that the edge cases are taken as “must support” cases, and those just aren’t that popular.
I’m very supportive of queer and trans rights - let people live their lives in peace, dammit - but there are legitimate questions to be asked about gender-affirming care for minors, especially if government dollars are involved. That’s a very volatile part of someone’s life and every kid I’m aware of that has declared him/herself to be trans in the last 5 years has a pretty significant history of mental health issues or PTSD. They all happen to come from VERY liberal families, too. The Venmo diagram is nearly a circle. So, I’m not sure that all of these cases are so biologically natural, if I’m honest, which is why this should be handled when people are adults. Making Democrats take a position of “yeah, I’m fine with a 15-year-old electing to change genders and Medicaid paying for it” is, I think, unwise. Most Americans aren’t OK with doing this for minors, and that goes 5x if the parents aren’t on board.
When adults, this is a different story. Still a solid question to ask if government dollars are involved, but I think many fewer people are going to care about someone’s gender once they’re 20, 21, etc. The question then is just $$$.
Liked for "the Venmo Diagram". Gonna totally steal that.
And that was totally DYAC 😂
Handling trans issues when someone is an adult means dooming trans people to being in the wrong adult body. Puberty is not going to wait until someone is an adult without medical intervention. I understand the politics of this, but I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that delaying gender affirming care until someone is an adult is anything other than a catastrophe for trans people. Yeah, some children might subsequently regret their gender affirming care, but *most of them won't*. What about them?
Would you think it was fine for you to be in an adult woman's body? Would you be comforted that people said, Well now you can chop off your breasts?
I get your point but 2020 wasn’t the first time someone felt as if they were in the wrong body and we’ve had transgender people for a long time. It was just…not a political issue. Why it was pushed SO HARD at that point in time, I don’t know. Regardless, it’s less that younger people were for it than that there was a VERY strong online push to get everyone to accept a maximalist position - and ostracize those that didn’t - and for government policy and even schools to accommodate it for minor children, sometimes even contrary to a parent’s desires, and even at the government’s expense.
We can argue all day the merits of the idea and talk about how this all went down but the fact is that it was very likely to result in a backlash (I remember saying this to many on Twitter at the time) because even those sympathetic but not enthusiastic about such a policy set were told to buck up and get on board. Those less sympathetic or outright hostile were likely to look at those pushing and be rightly annoyed or even horrified.
I think a lot of people genuinely found that they were dealing with gender dysphoria of some kind. Some also decided they wanted the freedom to experiment with the idea. Combine that with an extremely systematic conservative plan to weaponize trans issues [1] and you get a perfect storm.
The joke on everyone is that probably the conservative push on trans issues will result in some short-term political gains for conservatives, but it'll end up completely restructuring the way younger generations build their society. Parents never win, nor are they remembered fondly for trying to stop kids from doing what they want.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/politics/transgender-conservative-campaign.html
if only there were some way to delay the onset of puberty until the patient is mature enough to decide...
I would argue puberty is a necessary but not sufficient precursor to maturity
It's worth noting that "popular" doesn't mean "100%". There are probably 30-35% of the population who are philosophically opposed to anything more than a very basic welfare state and it's very easy to run into such people. They aren't swing voters.
How likely is it that people from that 30% work at inner-city hospitals?
An experience like that can push you right frankly. I'm surprised more teachers don't become reactionary.
I think most of them leave. The first 5 year quit rate for teachers is really high. It also seems to me teachers are much more like small c conservative than their unions would have you believe and have pretty strong beliefs in don't be lazy or a scumbag.
Particularly on matters on school discipline, I think there's a disconnect between the unions and their members.
A friend of mine used to be a social worker on Chicago's south side and it made him very hard hearted.
My synthesized viewpoint is that a lot of (but not all) poor people are poor because of incredibly stupid, selfish, and anti-social decision making (and we should help them anyways).
I grew up in the South, so ymmv, but I had a LOT of conservative teachers
Well yeah, I'm talking about teachers who were liberal when they went in.
Some of them do!
You’re right that Democrats haven’t been popular on economics lately — but that’s partly because they never get to talk about economics. The culture war eats all the oxygen. Imagine if, in 2024, they’d neutralized the bait with plain-language, normie-coded lines:
“Of course men shouldn’t play women’s sports. I love fracking. Every hard-working man should get to drive a big-ass truck.”
No culture-fight foxholes, no academic hedging — just move on.
Then they’d have the bandwidth to hammer Republicans where they’re soft: nearly killing the ACA, running up massive deficits, and passing tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981, 2001, 2017, and now again in 2025.
And here’s the thing: those economic positions poll really well.
66% of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy — including 55% of Trump voters.
63% want higher taxes on households earning over $400K.
62% say the government should guarantee health coverage.
Favorability for Medicare and Medicaid is 77–82%, across parties.
These are policies that poll thirty points above water. But to get traction, Democrats have to stop taking the bait and clear the culture-war wreckage first.
I’m not so sure. For one, I don’t really buy the premise that people don’t know what Democrats are all about on economics. I think most normal people understand that Democrats broadly want more programs to help the less fortunate and plan to fund this either by printing money or raising taxes on the rich. In fact, their approach to immigration isn’t really separable from this: it’s also premised on the fact that the party’s role is to help the less fortunate. (The economic benefits of immigration are a side effect, not the main motivation.)
Also, isn’t your messaging strategy kind of what Kamala did? She avoided cultural issues and instead was like “My economic plan is… um… opportunity economy! No tax on tips! And we’ll build some houses I guess?” At the end of the day, no one really thought that was so great, and they could tell she still had the moral commitments of your typical Democrat anyway.
The general public still wrongly thinks of democrats as the party of prolific and wasteful spending and higher deficits even though the facts have said otherwise for a couple of decades.
Republicans have consistently been much better at convincingly lying about their policies, democrats' policies, and everyone's record on the economy.
Democrarts say they want higher spending and Republicans don't. And people who don't pay attention to politics (most people) only hear what politicians say and don't know about what politicians actually do.
This proves too much. If I concede your position, nothing Dems say ever matters.
It matters in a negative way for Democrats. Like, no one actually abolished the police, but Democrats still lost a bunch of elections in 2020 anyway.
did nobody think it was so great or did they not trust the sincerity of her pivot
A general framing of helping the Working Stiff (not the Poors and Disadvantaged which codes as bleeding hearts giving freebies away, the Working Stiffs) and also Small & Medium Sized entrepreneurs over Big Boys, fair play.
And talking lowering costs, making level playing fields for the Not Big Boys
Fiscal good management, not expanding the freebies
I think hard eyed sympathy for the poor polls well. Eg, if you are poor because you get sick, you should get a hand up. But if you are sick because you weigh 300 pounds or drink a pint of liquor a day, not my problem.
>Biden won because of the lawlessness and incompetence of the first Trump admin, not because of his views on economics.<
The way I see things, most normies don't vote based on the "views" of the parties on economics. Not many voters have heard of Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman. It's more basic than that: Which party does the things I like? (Keep my taxes low. Don't touch my benefits.) and which party brings about things I don't like? (High gas prices. Harder to find a job.)
So, obviously national economic *conditions* play a big role. Republicans are highly likely to be vulnerable on this score in next year's midterms because of tariffs, interest rates, weaker hiring for new grads, and the slumping dollar. And by 2028 their Medicaid cuts will have begun to bite. So there's vulnerability there, and an opportunity for Democrats.
I basically agree with this. But then I think the strategy is “let them touch the stove and be a recession clean-up party” rather than “aggressively associate the Democratic Party with its views on economics.”
The first part either happens, or doesn't happen. Trump's policies plus the Fed plus the bond market will sort it out one way or another. If the stove gets hot enough, Democrats will benefit. My biggest concern about this is *timing*—I reckon thermostatic effects alone probably guarantee Democrats a lot of House seats (I agree with Yglesias that the Senate is another matter).
IOW even if there isn't too much in the way of economic turbulence over the next fifteen months, Democrats should probably have a good midterm at least in terms of House pickups. They don't need the economy to go into the tank, and it's probably bad for them if it does—too quickly. And that's because the average US recession only lasts about ten months or so. Even the longest ones in the postwar periods (73-75 and 07-09) only lasted about eighteen months. So if the next recession arrives too soon, there's a good chance we could have noticeably improving conditions in 2028. And that would be good for the Republican nominee.
The Republicans used to be the party of economic growth. They get some level of cred for now-abandoned positions. The Democrats have never in my lifetime actually been a party that mostly espouses reasonable economic views. We've had occasional centrist Democrats like Clinton who drag the party in reasonable directions, but it's never been a party consensus.
Matt is part of a factional project trying to claim the fallen mantle of "reasonable on economics" as a Democratic title, but note that like 50% of the party is fiercely fighting back on that.
Granted but the problem is that Republicans leapfrogged from being better on economics to being worse.
Loosely agreed. The dynamic right now, I'd say, is that both parties have a wing that has basically sensible economic views and a wing that has crazy ones, but for Republicans the crazy one is in control and for the Democrats... it's mixed? The sane wing has been in control but makes significant concessions to the crazy one?
"The Democrats have never in my lifetime actually been a party that mostly espouses reasonable economic views."
And yet the economy consistently does better under Democratic management than Republican. Proof meet pudding.
I mean, the economy did well under Trump 1, probably better than it did under Obama. Of course, the truth is that presidents have a lot less influence on the economy than people usually credit them for, and the difference between Trump 1 and Obama is almost entirely macro environment, but I'm not sure that cuts the way you want it to.
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2024/10/the-u-s-economy-performs-better-under-democratic-presidents
You understand that that's an article that is trying to be persuasive and chooses data carefully to try to make its case, right?
Like, it shows huge job growth under Obama and low job growth under Trump and Bush, and okay, but if you look at unemployment rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
You see what everyone straightforwardly experienced: the unemployment rate for almost all of both Trump 1 and Bush was massively lower than under Obama. Now, is that an unfair comparison? Sure. The pandemic sort of doesn't get counted towards Trump while Obama inherited the Great Recession and it does get counted towards him. But if you bury your head in the sand and say, "The economy was better from 2009 to 2013, than before or after," you're only fooling yourself. And if you say, "Actually mostly what changes the economy is macro circumstances, not presidents," then your entire point disappears.
Yeah this goes to my "grand normie party" theory. If the Dems want a durable coalition, they need to win over 50% of the votes from people who list the economy as their #1 issue. And for that, they need a credible story about how they'll be better for the economy than the other guys. Liberation Day was one opportunity, but that's in the rearview now. If this bill pushes up inflation and interest rates, there's another opportunity. And they don't need to give too many details, just "these guys were in charge when this happened, we won't let it happen." Problem is of course delivering on the second part.
Anyways, if you can develop a reputation of "the party that's better for the economy," plus a big tent approach on cultural issues, then you can use the Tim Walz "weird" line on the opposition. But if you just presided over 9% inflation, that's not going to stick.
I think if the border had been controlled (with "tough cop" Harris in charge) that might have been enough.
Inflation was tougher because that that the Fed's doing. The options there were systematic passive-aggressive blaming the Fed ("Great confidence that Powell will handle this") or demagogue it by raising taxes to "fight inflation." (That really would have let t he Fed handle it with lower interest rates.)
Cutting X to pay for tax cuts for the rich is unpopular, pretty much anywhere for pretty much any X.
As long as that’s the Republican’s core economic policy, Dems who can make the election about that can win.
Go for it but the effect of deficits on growth are the bigger economic issue. The BBB woud have been horrible with no cuts to Medicaid.
Yes, and the 12 voters who understand that are probably already voting Democratic.
Yes, but do we always need to talk about what voters already believe? Should we not not assume that views on deficits, immigration and trade are somewhat malleable?
It's a lie, but sure, you might win with it. "Tax cuts for the rich" is just not an accurate description of what OBBBA does. Go look at the brackets / touch grass.
there is "the economy" and there are particular policies. voters seem to think the GOP is better at "the economy" but hate lots of GOP economic policies. so i think the idea would be to make it about medicaid, healthcare exchange subsidies, childcare, etc. and not the economy broadly
More specifically, people care most about their own personal economic situation.
The economic policies of the Democratic party are better than Republicans -- less restriction of trade, higher taxes for lower deficits, secure the border but no deputations of settled immigrants, less discouragement of "high value" immigrants, except for immigration not by much. [I'm not sure if Democrats' over-subsidization of net CO2 emissions if farther from optimum that Republicans' zero subsidy/tax.]
Why do we have to make it such a close call?
Democrats policy of only tax increases on the rich is bad for growth. Middle class taxes in the US are too low, that's the main source of our deficit woes. Top rates (inclusive of state and local) are already among the highest in the world, and >50%.
I think that more can and should be collected from high income people by taxing their consumption progressively. But I also agree that we need to tax the consumption of the broad middle with a consumption VAT to pay for social insurance.
That combination a levels to make deficits no greater than public investent would be growth enhancing.
do you mean CO2 emission reduction?
Yes. Net reduction. :)
I think the Medicaid expansion has probably made the issue more salient, both by expanding the number who are participating in the program and by making accepting state funds an issue in state elections (which has either tended to benefit Democrats or force Republicans to concede to public opinion).
I think it's the case that there's a disconnect between Democratic economics and what society thinks Democratic economics actually is. I think the basis for most Democratic economic plans entails taxation of the rich and corporations, which I believe has broad public support. But there's been a very effective effort by Republicans to represent Democratic economics as "tax the shit out of everyone." Not to mention the continual smear campaign of labelling anyone who isn't a Republican as a socialist lunatic.
Guess who corporate taxes are actually incident on?
Hint-- It's not just corporate shareholders!
To some extent we need to just be proud that we want to tax "everyone" (and directly, not via the illusion of taxing "corporations.") The rich more and an EITC at the bottom, but the middle class has to pay for the cost (better with a VAT than a wage tax) of social insurance for the middle class or do without it.
Trump would win forever by being all “America First” about it. Lower taxes on Americans plus luxury safety net paid for by nuclear extortion of non-nuclear countries!
But that woud require the “extortion” to lead to more trade.
Nah man, middle class taxes are evil, rich just need to pay their fair share. /s
Were the pre 2017 taxes on middle class incomes evil? Is it evil if people pay for social insurance in proportion to their consumption?
The "/s" indicated sarcasm. I think you missed that.
Totally. Is "/s" becoming standard as a sarcasm marker?
The problem with big tenting is going to be credibility. Republicans are likely to be able to successfully sell the idea that electing moderate Democrats will result in non-moderate policies being enacted. Policies they really dislike.
Many Republicans and R leaning independents may be unhappy with Trump. But they are still concerned about illegal immigration, skeptical of industrial scale solar, and convinced Democrats are hostile to small business. Heck, even Slow Boring is openly skeptical of small business.
Given that most R voters are not, short term, going to be losing health insurance, what is the pitch to them going to be? Because even WV voters turned against Manchin when they felt he was helping Biden. And Manchin is kind of the archetype of what’s being suggested.
I agree. "We will get much more progressive outcomes by remaking the party as a big tent that comfortably includes Manchin-like figures" is an ok way to sell big tent to progressives (if any of them are listening), but it makes me, a moderate, immediately suspicious. And since dems lately were mostly supporting progressive politics, they won't get leeway there either.
A lot of pro-big tent articles give me a vague impression that author's goal is to dupe moderates to vote for progressive policies, and not a genuine attempt to include moderate interests in the coalition. I may be wrong, but this impression isn't helpful.
Building trust is hard, but it is going to be the key to actually building a big tent party. As a progressive I worry about the opposite - that "big tent" actually just means "shut up and go away." If we're going to be a big tent party we're going to have to give each other the benefit of the doubt and trust that we're both approaching the job in good faith. Otherwise the project is dead before it starts.
The "big tent" rhetoric is stupid and the ultimate proof of moderate pundits not fucking getting it. The Republicans spent all of 2024 attacking Democrats for having too big of a tent. They literally turned "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" into a slur. Their pitch was more or less "Those bleeding heart libs are letting undeserving moochers into the tent and crowding out the hard-working, deserving Americans!"
How the fuck does "Don't worry guys, we're allowing conservatives into that tent now." answer that? Everyone already knew Democrats will pay lip service to anyone that asks. Meanwhile Republicans go around telling every voter, "We'll fight for you, exclusively. Anyone who doesn't like it can get lost." No fucking wonder voters trust Republicans more and regard Democrats as sellouts!
You are failing to see that efforts to expand the tent marginally (like DEI) are actually tent-shrinking, given the views of most voters. Attempts to ingratiate to small groups can alienate large groups. This isn't about merely "welcoming in" Conservatives, it's about accepting some of their positions. That means potentially alienating some smaller groups. Your claim that Dems are already maximally big-tented just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There are a lot of issues where a different stance would draw in more people then it would push out.
I'm not failing to see shit, that was my whole fucking point. What YOU'RE failing to see--which I thought I made clear but I guess I really have to spell it out for you--is the electoral math of lying.
Let's say we have an electorate of three people: Walter, Jesse, and Gus. You decide to sideline Jesse because Gus doesn't like him and Walter plus Gus is a winning coalition anyway. So you start campaigning on a Walter+Gus focused platform. But let's say I approach Walter and Gus separately and I promise Walter a Walter-focused platform and Gus a Gus-focused platform. I win the election.
I don't understand your point about "the electoral math of lying", and I stand by my earlier claim. You make the tent bigger by aligning to the views of the masses, not by declaring that you're more big-tent because DEI, even though DEI is wildly unpopular with most voters. You are confusing what progressives believe people's true interests should be, with their actual preferences.
No, you would wind up being outed on conservative social media as a liar. There are plenty of people who look for those inconsistencies, real or imagined, as their job.
If you're on the right edge of the current Democratic voting bloc, then yeah the policies that the party adopts, even with a bigger tent and Manchin-like figures, will probably be to your left, somewhat (Because even if Manchin shares your views, he's going to compromise _some_ with the left where he doesn't care as much/thinks his voters don't care as much)
But... those votes will still be to the right of what progressives want. A shift of the gravitational center of the tent is not going to leave it on the right edge of the tent, just more rightward than it would otherwise be, and probably dumping the things you think are _most_ outlandish.
I agree that you would ultimately have to compromise, but I don't see any sign that big tent proponents want to shift gravitational center to the right. All those pieces are centered on why big tent is good for progressives, that it isn't defeat of their priorities but is just necessary slowdown.
It is still very progressive-centric. You cannot help but ask, if they are so progressive-centric in their rhetoric, would they not also be progressive-centric in the legislature? Why would such big tent, with all the bills still much closer to progressive ideal than to moderate ideal, be good for moderates?
I understand it, progressives are a dominant force in a Democratic party and you have to appeal to them. But you also have to appeal to moderates, not only stop actively repealing them. Otherwise your strategy would be of limited success.
I think it gets pushed right in much the way Manchin pushed the BBB to the right. He refused to sign on to what he felt was the most irresponsible. If the big tent gets you to 62 senators, (or it gets to 52 and they eliminate the filibuster) they can ignore 2 of them. If it gets to 50, they have to pay attention to all of them. But even in the 52 case, those 3 can probably still exert some gravity.
Dems effectively passed the Green New Deal, unilaterally tried to cancel a bunch of student loans, and supported just about every progressive-supported social position, so I have no idea what you mean by them not supporting progressive causes.
Couple things here I think are important to consider.
1) The targets aren’t partisan republicans. Sure, eventually if given enough time and discipline you could start to get partisan defectors. Or alternatively, a wedge issue could be found to pry some voters away like Trump did with illegal immigration. But the main thing here is to target swing voters. These voters are cross-pressured and have idiosyncratic views across the ideological spectrum. They trust Democrats more on some issues and Republicans more on others. We want to increase the salience of issues they trust Democrats on (healthcare, taxing the rich) and decrease the salience of issues they trust Republicans on (immigration, crime).
2) Position-taking matters more and credibility matters less to average voters than partisans would like. Take Trump for example. Republicans are very well known and have an enduring image as the party that values business/the wealthy, oppose public benefits, and oppose abortion rights. Trump was able to effectively defend against those things by loudly and publicly taking positions saying that he opposed efforts to cut public benefits and opposed national abortion bans. He even took public positions that favored increased taxation of the wealthy. Once in power did he actually follow through on those things? Of course not, republicans have been trying (and as we see recently succeeding) to implement their long-held agenda of cutting taxes for wealthy people while taking benefits away from poor people. But Trump has been able to effectively counter those issues against him by engaging in strong position-taking which thereby made cross-pressured voters who agree with him on immigration feel safer voting for him and republicans.
What this means is that loud and energetic position-taking by candidates combined with party leadership and mainstream Democrats loudly and energetically saying that they are going to focus on healthcare, taxing the wealthy, reducing the cost of living, and protecting abortion rights while not making huge changes to energy policy other than trying to keep prices low, is a very effective political strategy. The key obstacle is that many activists and donors and interest groups don’t want them to do that.
I’m not referring to partisan MAGA. Old style Republicans actually are potentially in play because of realignment. I am talking about swing voters.
Healthcare and taxing the rich are relatively low salience issues. They’re popular, but not a high priority for most swing voters.
Crime and immigration were high salience issues for most voters last year, not just swing voters.
Position taking does not matter if the voters don’t believe you. Credibility does matter - it is not primarily of interest to partisans, but rather the opposite. Trump was able to distance himself by having a history of not following party orthodoxy. His voters believed he would not cut Social Security and Medicare and not ban abortion at the national level. They don’t care that much about the rich.
Focusing on healthcare and taxing the wealthy and abortion is not going to do it for swing voters. They are not motivators for them. The Democratic base yes, the rest no.
Focusing on things like Kaine’s Social Security funding proposal, which is pretty brilliant, helping small business, encouraging good jobs despite AI - those would help a lot. But healthcare and raising taxes are not the way.
"There could be federal legislation to secure abortion rights in the states where it’s now banned, but we’re not going to achieve the Freedom of Choice Act’s goal of setting a standard that goes well beyond the pre-Dobbs status quo."
One of the truly dumbest things Dems have done is not endorse Susan Collins' abortion bill that would restore the Casey standard. It's the only thing that could ever potentially pass on this, it's massively popular, and it could mean basically everyone who wants an abortion gets one.
But the Groups want 9 moths of legal abortion and a repeal of the Hyde Amendment so instead everyone is forced to endorse the Women's Health Protection Act which will never pass anyway and is less popular. Just a microcosm of how the Party works and its dysfunction.
My concern with merely codifying the Casey standard is that this SCOTUS could strike it down on federalism grounds. You might be able to assuage me that that concern is unfounded. But if it's not, I don't really see any other viable path to make abortion accessible in all 50 states other than repealing the Hyde Amendment, at least for early term abortions.
1. SCOTUS is not striking down an abortion bill. The votes aren't there and if they did it would also mean no federal abortion RESTRICTIONS either.
2. Liberals need to stop lying to themselves and the world that there are 5 votes to enact Clarence Thomas' views on the Court. There aren't and this sort of thing poisons the discourse with lies, paranoia, and BS.
I'm a slightly above average student at a somewhat below average law school (don't worry about it) and the way that liberal-leaning people who are clearly smarter than me talk about the Supreme Court makes me feel crazy. Do they honestly not understand what the conservative justices are up to, are they playing dumb, or what?
I think most liberal discourse on SCOTUS is driven by a few things, none of which really concern any honest assessment of what the Court is doing:
1. It is seen as politically beneficial to overstate how outrageous the conservatives are acting.
2. It is seen as politically beneficial to play up Clarence Thomas positions as if they are going to get a majority.
3. Democrats are the more neurotic party (Matt has written about this).
4. Many partisans (and TBC, this one is true of the way conservatives view liberal justices too) have cartoonish views of their political opponents, and thus don't understand the actual conservative legal project as opposed to what they imagine it to be.
"and if they did it would also mean no federal abortion RESTRICTIONS either" look I am not a big fan of spreading social policy across 50 different states, but I could totally see some Gorsuch-authored majority opinion arguing this.
This is not how it works. You need five votes. Five people on the Supreme Court do not believe that the federal government has no power to regulate the health care system. Indeed, if there had been 5 votes for that, NFIB v. Sibelius (the Obamacare case) would have been decided on that ground rather than the "regulating inactivity" thing.
Things like "I can see Gorsuch writing an opinion on that" are things people say based on their psychoanalysis of the justices, but it isn't real analysis, because the Supreme Court doesn't work like that. You need a position 5 justices agree on and which will be applicable to a lot of other cases (including restrictions on abortion, restrictions on gender affirming care, restrictions on recreational drugs, and just about any other federal regulation of health care). This is not happening and there's a reason that the Court isn't reversing the New Deal era precedents on the Commerce Clause even though they have had many chances to.
This is a nonstarter. Just pass the damned Casey bill. It will get upheld by SCOTUS.
Maybe SCOTUS will strike it down, but it's better to force them to do that than advocate something that will never pass. If they strike it down, now Democrats have another issue to run on.
Oh sure, best to take a shot and lose than not take a shot at all--especially if experts like Dilan think it'll be a good shot.
"The maximalist position that Democrats have outlined as party orthodoxy is not the most popular position on abortion. Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas are not Louisiana, but it’s crazy to run in states where the electorate is baseline skeptical of Democrats while making zero concessions to mass opinion on late-term abortions."
Another baby step toward the truth — and one that was obvious in 2024. Late-term abortions have never polled well. Elective abortions at 15 weeks are basically 50/50. There’s no secret sauce here. It’s as simple as reading the polls and not picking priggish and mostly symbolic arguments with voters.
Part of the Issue isn’t the policies - it’s the intentionally offensive framing. As an example - if you want to make the case for EVs and renewables there any number of national defense, energy independence and economic reasons for them that have nothing to do with climate. If one really cared about climate change you’d go with the messaging that appealed to the greatest number of people.
As an example the was in Ukraine has shown that drones will be to the next war was machine guns and airplanes were to previous wars. In time air peace the largest demands for batteries will be EVs in times of war those batteries will go into drones.
But for some reason the activists need to go with messaging that repulses a huge percentage of the population.
One thing that mystifies me is why the focus of environmentalists shifted so starkly to just CO2 emissions. Non-carbon emissions get completely ignored even though air pollution is less controversial and is a much more local and immediate problem.
I've posted this before, but while estimates are all over the place, the lifetime cost of non-carbon emissions from a gas car is around $5k, while the lifetime cost of non-carbon emissions from an EV is around $500. Plus the EV emissions cost is dropping every year as the grid gets cleaner.
There are hardly any PM 2.5 or NOx deniers out there, yet most on the left only talk about CO2 emissions.
I'd think the answer to that is a combination of (1) CO2 presents a semi-plausible apocalyptic threat and (2) a small, but influential and nontrivial, fraction of the environmental coalition also have the objective of strangling economic growth and attacking CO2 emissions has been and will continue to be a particularly effective means of doing that until fusion or other major clean energy source comes on-line.
“ strangling economic growth and attacking CO2 emissions has been and will continue to be a particularly effective means of doing that until fusion or other major clean energy source comes on-line”
Will fusion stop the degrowthers?
I noticed with the recent heat wave in France the far right has put forth an AC plan for France. And the left and the greens are apoplectic. But France is 85% renewables or nuclear. There is little climate impact to AC. If EdF needs to build a few new plants then that’s what they should do.
Fusion wouldn't stop them from being degrowthers, but the question from MagellanNH was why the environmental movement has become so focused on CO2 emission reduction as compared to other issues. As long as carbon-based energy underpins a substantial part of the economy, aggressive tactics to cut CO2 will have the collateral "benefit" of kneecapping economic growth. I.e., if fusion became ubiquitously available and hydrocarbon fuels became largely irrelevant to economic activity, that segment of the environmental movement would keep looking for agenda items that also hurt economic growth, but they wouldn't devote much effort to fighting CO2 emissions.
The focus on CO2 from environmentalist is entirely sensible - it is not that as the issue
It is focus on first strangling and blocking off hydrocarbons rather than growing RE and growing infrastructure, that's the focus point bizareness.
Totally pro-growth people - e.g. myself - are focused on CO2 as it is CO2 that is fundamentally the problem (along w methane, in fact both) but that is not a polution issue (plants in fact love CO2 and there is unexepcted regreening occuring on the edges of the Sahara, de-deserfification in some reas...) it is a global temperature issue - which is not a problem for The Planet - it is a problem for us humans in terms of our agriculture notably.
But the focus on strangling hydrocarbons rather than enabling non-carbon emitiing power (RE, nuclear [see Greens in Germany whose forcing the nuclear shut down... saw German emissions go up as it got replaced by coal... brilliant) by accelerating build, that's the perverse de-growth aspect
<<< which is not a problem for The Planet - it is a problem for us humans in terms of our agriculture notably.<<<
This is true only if you mean "the literal rock called Earth." Most employment of the term "The Planet" in this context accounts for non-human organisms adapted to a pre-Anthropocene climatic context.
Also you're overlooking e.g. ocean acidification.
There are people against a/c? That’s where I would draw the line on freedom of speech - to be against air conditioning is a thoughtcrime if anything is!
yes a significant portion of the Enviro side are all about degrowth and are fundamentally anti-market. The hair-shirt faction.
The nice thing about air pollution as a topic is that the costs and benefits are local, unlike global warming where the costs are local and the benefits global.
I live in California and most people here understand that an extra $1.50 for gas is a price worth paying if we don't have to live with smog alerts. But it's becoming increasingly clear that paying an extra $3.00 for gas so that people in the global south have a more stable climate isn't worth it.
the "global south" (stupid term even stupider than its predeccessors) may benefit in some places others not
And equally the 'global north' the same
Overall the Human Globe has the major food and economic collapse risk.
And further for future economic growth, greater energy efficiency of electrificatio is a growth factor - being fundamentally thermodynamically more efficient in conversion.
If I convince all 14M people in Los Angeles to drive their cars into the Salton Sea will it make any noticeable difference to that trajectory? Probably not. Will it make a difference in air pollution? Absolutely.
Well... sure
This has precisely zero relevance to climate nor EV adoption nor decarbonisation, but hey have fun in weird hypotheticals
Because CO2 is climate change (along w methane) - non-carbon is not particulalry any real issue any more
Pollution is not the actual issue - although environmentalists lens it that way.
Electrification is energy efficiency and energy efficiency is competiteness.
Tell that to the 50,000 plus people that die in the US each year from air pollution.
Why would I do that? It has fuck all to do with the subject of decarbonisation as such (that 50k people die, asserted - one has to benchmark against - out of 340 million people this is to be benchmarked against other deaths, as like deaths from cars hitting pedestrain etc etc.) Ratios and risk.
Now if you want to continue the failed Everything Bagelism, can't stop you but pollution is not the key item for EV
Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree, but imo you're ignoring both the science and math on this.
As I said above, the costs of air pollution are well studied and not very controversial compared to climate costs. The costs include loss of QALYs, healthcare costs, and economic losses.
The big challenges with convincing the public to pay for climate externalities are 1) many of the costs will not be borne by voters and 2) the models estimating those costs are necessarily long term and highly probabilistic
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but if you can justify a $7500 EV tax credit by claiming all it does is refund EV drivers for not polluting the air and not contributing to climate change, isn't that a straightforward message and a win? Seems like more of a big tent thing than an everything bagel thing.
I am ignoring none of the science nor the math - my literal job is investments in climate stuff.
Pollution is a seperate issue, it is not the primary of electrification although for some developing country geographies, China, India not trivial given utterly shit baseline, but much improvement could be hand on ICE basis.
However the greeny Left has an enviro-pollution lens and that's how you look at shit.
Have at it, I care about decarbonisation.
Non-CO2 emissions are, to a first approximation, a solved problem in the US. Not perfectly, but the situation is so much better than 50 years ago that it’s a much less compelling issue, and further reductions are starting to run into diminishing returns and rising costs.
It's solved in terms of maybe being an order of magnitude lower than it used to be, but the actual dollar costs of these emissions are still crazy high.
Metrics like cost of lost QALYs, healthcare costs, and cost of productivity loss put the cost of auto emissions very high as I said above. Estimates are about 50k people die each year from non-carbon pollution from ICE cars. With power sector and industrial emissions, that goes up to 200k per year.
Maybe you're right that no one cares about this anymore, but given how flat the climate message has fallen on half the voters, it seems worth a try to add this to the messaging. Asthma alone affects 20-30 million Americans, including 5 million children and I bet a bunch of those folks voted for Trump and would love to get fewer "stay indoors, air quality is bad" warnings.
I’m not sure the hypothetical war argument would be more appealing to people than the climate one. A lot of people aren’t too happy about barely noticeable financial sacrifices supporting Ukraine’s actual war where it’s clearly the innocent victim, would they support actual sacrifices for a completely hypothetical war? Climate is at least something that impacts people now, as we saw with the heat wave and Texas floods.
Also the key barrier to EV adoption in the US right now is the tariffs against Chinese EVs. The climate frame is an argument for removing those tariffs, the war frame is not.
The floods in Texas had nothing to do with climate change. It’s called flash flood alley because they have them all the time.
It's possible climate change turned a 100-year flood into a 20-year flood, but it's hard to tell from one data point.
The river apparently crested higher in the flood in the 80s that killed 10 people.
Thanks for the extra information.
While it is never possible to "prove" that any particular extreme weather event was caused by climate change, climate change does make extreme weather events more likely in general.
The extent to which it does depends, of course, on the amount of greenhouse gasses in the air, which increases each year.
"In Texas, higher temperatures have already translated into more intense rainfall. In a 2024 report, Nielsen-Gammon found that “extreme one-day precipitation” had increased by 5% to 15% since the late 20th century. By 2036, he expected an additional increase of about 10% in extreme rainfall intensity."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/texas-cutting-edge-weather-forecasts-hit-limits-trump-budget-cuts-loom-rcna217532
"A world warming due to fossil fuel pollution is tipping the scales toward more heavy rainfall events like this. Hourly rainfall rates have intensified in nearly 90% of large US cities since 1970, a recent study found."
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/12/weather/san-antonio-flooding-texas-climate
Texas could see the light on climate change and vote to end all fossil fuel burning - but it would scarcely move the needle on CO2 emissions worldwide.
It would make a bigger difference than you personally choosing to cast a vote or not in your local congressional election. (Texas is about 1/200,000 of the world population, so surely a higher proportion of emissions. Congressional elections regularly have more than 200,000 voters, and additional votes make zero difference unless they tip the balance, unlike emissions decisions, which each contribute to the outcome.)
“Climate is at least something that impacts people now, as we saw with the heat wave and Texas floods”
Suppose that’s true. The Democrats can’t do anything about it.
As people become more well-off, their engagement with politics seems to become more about an expression of their values than of material concerns (e.g. none of the people here talking about Medicaid are actually on Medicaid).
So if politics is about value expression, then the reason to want a big tent is not for direct material concerns but to express the value of pragmatism and rationality. But it's not about, you know, getting Medicaid.
Not every issue is purely expressive. ACA reforms were good for people with employer health insurance too. And most of the abundance agenda is about material concerns.
Medicaid is just a particular stinker of an issue. For the 15 years that I've been politically aware, elites have been trying to help poor people in Mississippi, and in return Mississippi has been telling the elites to F off and stop trying to help. So now here we are all touching the stove together.
Mississippi? Hell, Medicaid expansion can't pass in Wisconsin.
Even if we give up on material politics, and we shouldn’t, any shift to values politics should be to create a values coalition that includes noncollege people, both for simple electoral reasons and because education polarization is a threat to the Republic.
Don’t think that would look like “rationality and pragmatism”.
True, but there's overlap between pragmatism and "live and let live", which is resonant with most non-college voters.
“Live and let live” means gender affirming care for minors and “press 1 for English” and a lot of other things some non-college voters hate.
Live and let live does not mean the community must ignore child abuse when committed by parents.
That's a non-sequitur since gender affirming care for minors isn't child abuse.
In your opinion.
I think "live and let live" is a compromise you can sell, but you have to actually believe it.
Yes, some people will hate it. It's not a panacea and there will always be busybodies, but I think it can prevail.
Yep, it's amazing to me that "let families and their doctors decide" is such a radical concept.
Though I can't recall the last time I had to "press 1 for English." Is that still a thing?
I don't think we would have gotten the Tennessee law (which I disagree with) if there hadn't been an influential movement to cut "families" out of "let families and their doctors decide".
I've got two close friends that have been performing gender-affirming surgeries, including for minors, for more than 𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴. Until a few years ago, they had to deal with disapproval and sometimes even hostility, but were not worried about formal opposition. People that didn't like it weren't influential enough or motivated enough to try to outlaw it.
Once you cut families out [edit: as some activists propose], "let their doctors decide" is a dodge. My friends are conscientious and rigorous, but not everyone is.
How are families cut out of the decision? Were they kidnapping the kids and bundling them off to clinics? I mean, don't these kids live at home?
Educational polarization is a threat mainly because non-college Americans out number college-educated Americans 2:1.
I don't know that the explanation is as much about material prosperity as the discourse machine. Social media is one obvious aspect of this where highly active political types reinforce and hype each other up around expressive clout building stances. But the regular media is also less broad ideologically, but more broad geographically, every left of center highly engaged type reads the NYT, from Seattle to St Louis.
The engagers are not, however, representative of swing voting not engaged types who swung to Trump largely on material concerns.
I feel like I'm insane sometimes, why is it fair to assume that policy positions taken by the Democrats have any meaning whatsoever to the Average American Voter, consuming a steady diet of right wing propaganda on your platform of choice: every single social media platform, legacy news, etc? Seriously.
The American voting public's beliefs about Democrats (and therefore voting intentions) have nothing to do with anything democrats actually do, and everything to do with what the incredibly strong right wing messaging pipelines tell them - all of which are owned and co-opted by either foreign interference propping up the right wing, or just plain old right wing ownership (or a fun combo of both!)
In a rational world, Matt's arguments make sense. We left that world behind a while ago, and I doubt we'll ever return.
If you can't see this, I worry for you. There is no disaster that isn't successfully spun as "liberals fault" to the vast majority of American voters. The propaganda pipeline is far far stronger than actual meaningful democrat policy.
"right wing propaganda on your platform of choice: every single social media platform, legacy news, etc"
what evidence leads you believe this?
i agree that people are exposed to right-wing arguments, some of which are dishonest, on every major platform. but people are also exposed to left-wing arguments, some of which are dishonest, on most major platforms (i.e., everything but the RW media ecosystem, to which there's no real parallel). i take your point to mean that there's at least a decisive right-wing slant across the media and i don't know that that's true without an extremely broad definition of right-wing
the NYT and WP, for instance, both primarily print left-leaning editorials; the occasional right-leaning op-ed just gets a lot more attention, precisely because it is unusual, and perhaps because of a sense that those platforms "belong to" the left like Fox belongs to the right
i understand that Tltwitter, specifically, has moved right since the musk takeover, and occasionally i browse reddit which if anything seems far more left-wing these days. but i don't really use social media much; what evidence makes you believe social media is predominantly rw propaganda?
"The American voting public's beliefs about Democrats ... have nothing to do with anything democrats actually do, and everything to do with what the incredibly strong right wing messaging pipelines tell them"
if this were true the democratic party would be polling around 0%. but the democrats are currently ahead in the polls for 2026 (https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/generic-congressional-vote); and, of course, kamala very nearly won the presidency less than a year ago and control of the HoR was decided by three races with a margins less than 1.1%.
i agree that voter perceptions of the parties are filtered through what they see in the media or hear from others, and those filters often reduce the usefulness of position-taking. but there's not *no* relationship to actual policy. some of the major rw attack lines include transgender issues, immigration, and "DEI", all of which were supported by Biden.
some of these attacks are dishonest and exaggerated, and most of them obscured important nuance, but they are fundamentally rooted in the policies of the most recent Democratic administration. only the most fringe Republicans go around saying things like "democrats are pedophiles" or "democrats want to ban computers", even though those would be extremely potent attacks if people believed them. so i think major RW propaganda clearly faces some sort of factual constraints. in that case, changing the facts can change how effective that propaganda is
i assume you're exaggerating on this point and don't believe there's truly zero relationship between democratic policy and voters beliefs, but in that case i don't really know exactly what it is you do believe
NYT and Wapo have far less reach than Fox. I was in Texas recently and there was just Fox News playing in the background of nearly every restaurant we went to. It’s a huge difference from blue areas where restaurants don’t normally even play TV and if they do it’s usually sports and almost never politics.
about the same # of people say CNN or MSNBC is their main source of political news as Fox
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/31/americans-top-sources-of-political-news-ahead-of-the-2024-election/
This is right, Republicans seethe with frustration they have no "Indigo blob" where people doing the high-brow reporting are all Democrats with +2 SD lib social views. Democrats seethe with frustration they have no mass social base like Republicans with an explicitly partisan mass media ecosystem full of cultural in-group joking and jostling. Everyone sees the grass is greener on the other side.
The Fox Excuse-Fallacy...
Right-wing messaging very often uses the crazy things the Left says and does.
You can't wish away the Left. Matt's whole tactic of trying to browbeat progressives into moderation is going to backfire. It just makes people angry and dig in their heels. You don't need to convert them, you just need to redirect their anger at a useful target.
Right, the wrench in this whole theory is the fact that people with more political engagement vote Dem and it’s the people with low engagement, who don’t even know which party is pro-choice and which is pro-life, that put Trump in office. How much can changing positions really matter when the swing voters don’t even know your positions?
kamala only won 52% of highly engaged voters. there's potentially lots of room for improvement there!
politically engaged voters tend not to be very persuadable but this is in part because they already know what each party's positions are, and those positions are relatively stable. but when there are dramatic changes in the positions the parties take there is also dramatic realignment in voting patterns (e.g., the Southern Strategy or 2016-present)
Democrats need better messaging and more outreach to disengaged voters. Send Buttigieg on every bro podcast that will have him! The Joe Rogan experience with Pete Buttigieg!
You may be right or you may be wrong, I've seen this theory of "conservative media spin means Democrats can never win" before. If you're wrong, Matt's plan may work. If you're right, it's all hopeless and Matt's plan has no downside.
Do people actually think Schumer did, "the right thing over the government shutdown"? Sure seems like giving the R's room to get there ducks in a row hasn't played out very favorably. Seems like it would been nice if a few more chickens were coming home to roost instead of most of the pain getting pushed off to 2028 and later.
Matt's argument AIUI was essentially that by cutting off funding, DOGE would have a legitimate legal justification for their cuts, which could complicate lawsuits and maybe make them more durable
Democrats owning a government shutdown would have gone badly for them at the time, as they were seen by their most passionate supporters as feckless and doing nothing about DOGE firing countless government employee. But embracing a shutdown means mechanically accelerating the furloughing of government employees. So it would have given their most news-engaged supporters nothing. It would have confirmed, like the Biden scandal, that Democrats do not always walk the walk of their campaign marketing as the "no chaos/the buck stops here/court" party to highly educated swing voters.
Now that Musk is out and the Trump admin has been rehiring some of the fires, this is forgotten, but at the time this decision would have given Schumer virtually no leverage and all risk. Republicans quite explicitly dared him to make this error, and he held back. When Democrats most likely take back the House due to a higher turnout coalition in non-presidential races, this will be a different story.
In two years, there will be actual budget stakes to leverage with a House majority and an incumbent White House that largely represents government more than a hostile fire-and-furlough takeover of government. But Schumer's call, (in my view as someone who isn't a Democrat), was the correct decision for his cause to not take the GOP bait, and Yglesias is right about this one.
I don’t think it’s clear what the best option was - both were bad.
The problem with shutting down the government is that is a tactic, not a goal. What goal would that tactic serve? What would it actually accomplish? Democrats could never agree and that just highlights the problem.
It's the most pushback Matt's ever gotten on an article and I don't think his take aged well at all.
Hard disagree. Was the right call at the time - literally there was nothing the Democrats wanted that they were gonna get by shutting down the govt. Fighting just to fight without a politically achievable goal is wasting political capital.
The fact that the majority party continues to do things that the minority party does not like doesn't mean it was the wrong call at the time.
Giving the Rs a free pass on funding the government is the reason they were able to hold their shit together long enough to pass the OBBBA. If the Dems had kept the pressure on the cracks in their coalition they may well have had to settle for much less.
I think you are underestimating Trump's ability to keep his party in line.
But Wallace, don't you see, I don't care if we're the minority, we want "fighters"!
(720 degree eye roll)
They could have fought for something small like the last minute DC cuts and gotten something out of it. But in the grand scheme of things wouldn't make too much of a difference.
It seems to me that if all the arm twisting of the R budget hawk types had happened 3 months ago with them getting nothing for upping the debt limit it sure would have made it a lot harder to get them on board with the OBBBA.
Absolutely, 100%.
Matt the people are clamoring for a NGO Borg Breakdown post. You talk about The Groups and write whole posts about how they warp democratic politics. But there’s never any specificity. You should name the groups, the people running them, and (to the extent one can know) the donor complex that supports them, and explain the incentives for why Democratic politicians are so in hock.
“[P]arty leadership needs to make it clear that the legislative agenda will consist of policies that frontline members who need to run tough races are enthusiastic about running on.”
In practice, would this process be visible to me, a midwestern schmo with internet access? What would those things be? Like, beyond Schatz doing tweets, what would Dem leadership do that I might end up reading about in nyt that would demonstrate their seriousness about the big tent project?
Something like "Minority Leader Chuck Schumer publicly condemned NOW for their statements about Senator Edwards" as a headline.
And how would party leaders protect incumbents who take such votes from primary challenges?
I asked this question in the mailbag but I think is true, one of the notable elements about the organized left has been Bernie Sander's hostility to the establishment since 2016. I have seen several interviews with Zohran where he takes a much more conciliatory approach, and even acknowledges NYC politics might not extrapolate to other places, while bragging about the universal appeal of his politics. AOC has tried but she is not as talented as Zohran to thread this line and usher in the change. Ezra Klein called his politics "pluralistic leftism" as opposed to "populist". In the long run, if he de facto becomes the leader of the left and changes leftist attitude towards mainstream pols giving them breathing room to moderate without sustaining leftist ire, would it be the best thing to come out of all of this?
Ezra’s policies are popular up to a point.
Reduce red tape for permitting and allow people to build in cities, popular.
Eliminate all local control of zoning, including outside of cities, and turbo-charge solar farms on agricultural and forest land, REALLY not popular.
Sit down and figure out the acreage you need for industrial solar farms if data center growth continues as expected. It’s a LOT. You already have backlash, and it’s growing fast. I like home solar and am not anti-solar in general, but the scale required is not politically feasible.
Eliminate all rural zoning and you have summer camps in flood plains, to give one timely example.
Abundance is helpful but with caveats.
I agree but how is that relevant to the point I’m making that Zohran seems less inclined to do Bernie style “We will overthrow the corrupt disgusting Dem establishment” and seems more conciliatory to mainstream Dems. He doesn’t punch center is what I’m trying to say, which might be helpful in giving breathing room for mainstream Dems.
Not punching center is great, but my point is, does the current center have a sellable case yet for persuadable voters?
Moderate on immigration with low IQ economic populism and fetch a high quality center left candidate with Zohran level charisma
“Low IQ economic populism” is not a policy. You need actual policies that make sense to the people you’re trying to appeal to.
But Greedflation was the popular framing of what happened in the Biden years on the left so government run zero margin grocery stores are a totally sensible answer because the prices went up because marked uptick in greed in 2022. (I hope the sarcasm is evident here).
I think you are overrating the level of engagement and intelligence of certain swing voters. The types right now obsessed with Epstein Files used to be Obama voters. Dems need to stop being woke cringe and not screw up the entire economy. I really really doubt Elisa Slotkin with her War Plan will bring these people back into the Dem coalition. You need low IQ Dems willing to do gutter politics to win these people back or someone with Zohran level charisma, in addition to moderation on issues.
"it down and figure out the acreage you need for industrial solar farms if data center growth continues as expected. It’s a LOT"
Yes, but there is huge amounts of room in the desert southwest that nobody really cares about.
Also that summer camp was build in 1926. zoning wouldn't have fixed that. And zoning isn't really about safety anyway, it's about preventing neighborhood change.
Zoning affects new and upgraded/ renovated buildings for existing businesses. Not just new businesses. So, for example, new cabins might have to be built further up the hill.
Much rural zoning IS about safety and livability. Spacing of lots with private well and septic keeps the water table safe in rural and exurban areas. Large animal confinement facilities are restricted, same reason. Shooting ranges, private or commercial, have to be a certain distance from residences. Building on floodplains is typically restricted.
If you like water free of e coli and not to be hit by stray bullets and not to be washed downstream, zoning can be pretty helpful.
I don't know.
Another Slow Borer in this comment section made a good point when they said that Matt Y is too focused on policy, that the median undecided disengaged voters votes not on policy but on "vibes." Are we barking up the wrong tree here? How much mileage can we get, electorally, by simply moderating on policy and not focusing on outreach?
I'm not saying policy is unimportant and we should proudly run on trans athletes in women's sports and on banning internal combustion engines, just, I am saying that it irks me when Matt Y treats public opinion as a fact of nature, like a flood or a hurricane - you can't change it or stop it, you can only get out of the way. No. Public opinion is malleable; it has changed before; it can change again.
This requires good spokespeople who are comfortable talking in the language of the median undecided swing voter, so, basically, the polar opposite of me.
I mean, after the 2012 election Republicans had this whole postmortem on how "we're bleeding support from people of color, we need to change and move with the times, we should be more progressive on social issues, like more welcoming to immigrants." It sounded sensible and practical, right? Except then the Republicans were like, "Nah, fuck that" and they backed Donald Trump, who ran on pure lies and grievance and appealing to people's worst selves.
And he won.
I am absolutely NOT saying that Democrats should turn to the Dark Side and become the left-wing version of the Trump cult; I am saying that sometimes the sensible, reasonable plan is not what ends up working. Thoughts?
Also! Matt Y keeps mentioning "The Groups." Guess what, in a country where the First Amendment still applies, you won't be able to get Teh Groupz to shut up by fiat. You can try to *persuade* them; Senator Schumer can meet with some representatives of Teh Groupz privately and tell them, "You're making it harder for us to win the Senate next year, knock it off," but how likely are they to listen to him? The more extreme they are, the more likely they are to dismiss Schumer as a contemptible centrist sellout.
What shall it profit the Democratic Party to be all "we are a Big Tent on policy" when it can all be undone, in the eyes of the Median Undecided Swing Voter, but a couple lefty activists Xeeting* "Free, free Palestine" or "No one is illegal on stolen land"?
*Or Bleeting, or whatever the heck it's called when people post on Bluesky.
Let us remember who Matt Y fundamentally is:
1. He supported the Iraq War
2. He did not oppose Biden before it was too late
3. He supported Clinton over Sanders even when Sanders was not woke.
4. He would have voted for Cuomo
His blog is literally called Slow-Boring because his theory of change is one of going with the flow and only making tiny adjustments to where ever the flow is taking us. He does not think the flow itself should be fought.
If the flow is taking us into a techno feudalist kleptocracy, there is nothing we can or should do, we should just make small adjustments to slightly improve the lives of those of us living in said techno feudalist kleptocracy because raising taxes is hard.
> He would have voted for Cuomo
He pretty famously said he would vote for Eric Adams over Cuomo or Mamdani.
Eric Adams was not in the Dem primary so how could he have voted for Adams?
Adams, Cuomo, and Mamdani are all in the general election. Matt can’t vote in either the primary or the general election anyway, so him saying who he “would” vote for is inherently counterfactual anyway.
Fair enough, there is no need to nitpick. The biggest difference I have with the DLC Dems like Matt Y is that they do not think gratuitous corruption is a deal breaker because the median voter is too low info and hard scrabble to notice/care. For me corruption is a red line as it degrades society like a cancer even if the median voter is too ignorant to notice.
So his vote for Adams over Cuomo does not refute my main thesis about his theory of politics.
I don't think he supported Clinton in 16
I could be wrong but I remember he belatedly came around to Sanders in 2020 in a "the sky is not going to fall" kind of way when it was looking like Sanders was going to win before South Carolina. He did not sound to me like a 2016 Sanders supporter.
He supported Martin O'Malley
Sure, but we know that's a cop-out. I would have also chosen a middle-aged non-threatening Irish last name guy if I were chairman of the smoke filled room but that was not on the cards.
What I remember from 2016 was Vox was hitting Sanders "technocratically" even as Sanders was connecting on the ground and trying to fight the corruption in the Democratic party. I suppose its a matter of differing priorities.
Liberal and socialist are not the same thing. Bernie is the latter.
Yeah it’s bleak. The right also benefits from a number of propaganda outlets with no equivalent on the left.
Ok, but again, this isn't a law of nature. Can Democrats either build some outlets to rival the Republican ones, or infiltrate the Republican ones, like, by sending some well-spoken Democrats to speak on the manosphere podcasts?
Anyone who thinks Joe Rogan is right wing needs to get their brain examined.
If Ro Khanna can go on Theo Von's podcast and Bernie can go on Joe Rogan's podcast there's no excuse for other Democrats not to go. You don't even need to be well spoken, all you need to do is speak like a normal human being.
Yes Dems should be doing those things. That our electorate voted (narrowly) for Trump is still inexcusable in my view
viscerally I sympathize entirely, but rationally it is absolutely crucial that we refrain from declaring anyone who once voted maga anathema and unforgivable. *Let people change.* If we can’t bring ourselves to let people outside the tent in, they’ll entrench where they are and not bother trying. Result: we continue losing.
I fully agree
I don’t see any Trump voter coming to you for forgiveness even if they regret their vote.
No obviously not.
Rogan endorsed Trump. If you are willing to endorse Trump, you are right wing in my book.
You need a new book.
No, I don't. If you endorse the right-wing candidate, how are you not right wing? It's not like Rogan was contractually obligated to endorse anyone! I didn't expect him to love Kamala, but he could have refrained from endorsing. He could have publicly announced that he's voting for a third party candidate or abstaining from voting. He chose to endorse the Tangerine Turd. End of story.
Definitely. But the problem is we don’t have a particularly well educated or attuned electorate and that opens the door to all sorts of bad actors as we’ve seen.
The founders were acutely aware of this risk and tried to constraint it but ultimately in our system even the constitution doesn’t protect against the whims of the electorate (see SCOTUS bending over backward for Trump)
The propaganda is only possible because the GOP owns the culture. They own the Churches, Foot ball, Boxing, UFC, NASCAR and online hustle culture.
The problem once again is that post DLC Dem is either a careerist lawyer type who cannot connect to voters culturally and is completely clueless about what is happening on the ground or an Ilhan Omar type identarian who only gets elected because they represent a geographically concentrated minority out-group.
The party is fundamentally broken. It needs to be dismantled and reconstrued from scratch and what would be a better time to do that than after losing to Trump?
Idk about that. Dispute football. Some churches (definitely not mine). Boxing, UFC and NASCAR are niches, not by themselves sufficient to ‘own’ the culture. We are after all talking about an extremely narrow ~1% loss. Depressing it is even that close of course.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘dismantle and reconstruct’ the party?
We need large scale primaries to diversify the party beyond the "lawyer and boring Reagan-consensus technocrat" mindset and deliberately move towards a culturally moderate coded but economically populist party.
Culturally left wing + economically DLC-technocrat is a toxic dead end (this what we have now)
Culturally fascist + economically far-right is already taken by Trump/GOP.
Culturally moderate + economically left-technocrat is open.
We need to completely change the face of the party by actively recruiting more veterans, blue collar candidates, farmers and service sector workers.
Ok sure. Recruit more blue collar and moderate candidates sounds a lot more modest & reasonable than ‘dismantle and reconstruct’ the party
Well the party is the people it elects. Obviously there can be only two major parties in our system and one of them will be called "The Democrats" which is actually a private corporation for some legal reason.
I want to replace every Adam Schiff (my useless Senator) with a Ruben Gallego basically.
" economically populist "/"economically left-technocrat"
These two are not the same. You're just contradicting yourself in the same comment by throwing terms around.
"economically far-right is already taken by Trump/GOP"
What Trump is doing with tariffs is economic populism that the left is known for and has absolutely nothing to do with market based economics.
It's not a contradiction at all. To reach the median voter you need to code as a populist. (See WelcomeFest favorite MGP).
But you need to govern as a left-technocrat to actually solve problems rather than just do upward redistribution as the right-technocrats and neoliberals prefer.
Campaign like Mamdani, govern like Brad Lander is not a contradiction.
Trump is a populist coded right wing authoritarian. Statements like "Tariffs is economic populism that the left is known for" are complete red herrings when we all know that Trumps tariff use is all about his own personal power and corruption and not a coherent left coded economic theory.
I maintain Trump didn't win the general election in 2016 (or 2024 for that matter) because Trump was so great, but because Dems nominated back candidates, and swung WAY to far to the left.
Think about this, Obama of 2008 would be a racist, sexist homophobe to today's Democratic party.
If Republicans had nominated someone like Nikki Haley, I think Harris would have lost by a LOT more.
I don't have time for a long comment, but I'll paraphrase what I said before: Anytime someone says "welp voters didn't *like* Trump, they voted for him because Kamala was so bad" it makes me think "I didn't *like* the bowl of dog excrement, but I chose to eat it because the only alternative was a bowl of plain oatmeal, and that was just too boring and bland." Like, dude, yes, plain oatmeal is bland, but also, you chose to eat a bowl of goddamn dog excrement.
I'd be more sympathetic to this point of view had it been Biden vs. Trump. I could then see more voters saying "Biden is senile and not up to the job, I hate Trump, who is an asshole, but at least he's more mentally functional." But Trump vs. Harris? Nope.
“Obama of 2008 would be a racist, sexist homophobe to today's Democratic party.”
Citation needed.
A candidate saying, ten years after Obergefell, that we shouldn’t have same-sex marriage, would seem pretty bigoted to most republicans as well as democrats - but Obama didn’t do that, he said it years before Obergefell.
Is there anything else he did in 2008 that seems racist or sexist to you?
Obama's position in 2008 was no same sex marriage. If a politician took that position now, he would be lambasted. IE, the party has swung left.
Obama of 2008 also took pretty strong stances against illegal immigration, and as president deported a LOT of people. Again in certain quarters that would make you a racist (the insinuation being the only reason you don't want illegal immigration is because you are a racist).
Same would likely be said regarding Obama's positions regarding crime and education in 2008.
Let's ignore the same-sex marriage one, because that is the difference between advocating a change in policy and advocating no change in policy. The party has not swung left here - actual policy has swung left, and the majority of people in both parties at both times are in favor of no change in policy.
I want to see actual positions Obama took on illegal immigration, crime, or education that would be out of the ordinary for Democrats in 2024 or 2025. My impression is that all of his stated policies from then would be pretty standard now, and vice versa, except that there's a small minority of people in the party who more vocally advocate some radical views (in each direction!) on these issues today.
In 2024, it was also a case of running against a failed incumbent party. I don't think policies that Trump or Harris campaigned on really determined the outcome of the election.
yes, I think what people really cared about were the last 4 years of the Biden/Harris administration
Once again Matt's central thesis is based on his own Twitter account because it's the only thing happening in politics. I think the kids call this main character syndrome.
I agree, Matt seems to put himself with in regular contact with left-wing loonies but seemingly never encounters the crazy people on the right. It reads like parody whenever Matt describes how Trump has moderated the right, and then I log into a gaming forum where they're all talking about Jews using DEI to extinguish the white race.
Having just spent two weeks touring the Midwest, absolutely. I think Matt’s seriously underrating how common and vituperative a lot of right wing media and culture is, and how little it’s based on policy.
what is this in reference to
Did you read the article?
because he had a conversation with a sitting us senator about a matter of public interest and wanted to write about it?
Glad you now understand what it was in reference to.
extraordinary
As the power of the US Supreme Court has grown, so has the power imbalance between the Senate and the House of Representatives in a way that I don't think gets enough attention.
The Supreme Court was not intended to have this much power, and indeed it didn't have this much power for most of American history. In the beginning of the republic, justices resigned from the Supreme Court very quickly because the job was difficult (justices had to "ride circuit") and boring. For generations thereafter, Supreme Court appointments were often patronage-based or just geographic balancing. In the Antebellum period, the only time the SCOTUS declared a law unconstitutional was Dred Scott.
Now, the SCOTUS is a de facto superlegislature, with the final say on the constitutionality of all legislation, federal and state, and since it's impossible to pass a constitutional amendment, the SCOTUS's constitutional decisions are de facto constitutional text. Given the vagueness of ordinary legislature and Congress's inability to pass clarifying legislation, the SCOTUS often has a determinative role in statute, and even its unpopular statutory decisions have a permanence which they shouldn't have and didn't originally have
Since the Supreme Court is an extension of the presidency and Senate, the electoral college and Senate malapportionment have a consequence that they weren't meant to have. Four sitting justices, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, were confirmed by Senators who actually represented a minority of the country. Since the Supreme Court can overrule the House of Representatives, it means that the Senate can de facto overrule the House of Representatives in a way that the Founders never intended. Since the Senate is affected by severe malapportionment, it's a form of minority rule.
Thus, as the Supreme Court has grown in power, so has the Senate, vis-a-vis the House.
Anyway, Americans who follow international politics recognize that Canada, the UK, and most continental European countries have unbalanced bicameralism, where one chamber is much more powerful than the other. However, rarely do we apply that to ourselves, even though the Senate filibuster and monopoly on confirming judges give it negative and positive powers which the House lacks.
Agree, it’s a mess. Completely politically disempowers the biggest and most productive states.
When the court plays constitutional Calvinball there’s no check.
I'm surprised there isn't more punditry about how inconsequential the House is except in budget bills which pass through reconciliation, and how this is inconsistent with the intent of the Founding, US history, and peer democracies.
The House passes legislation, but the bills die in the Senate. The House has no role in confirmations, either executive branch or judicial, so its ability to check the executive is limited, and judiciary non-existent.
Functionally, the House is to posture. Except in budgeting, the work of policy change is done by the executive-judicial dyarchy, over which the "People's House" has no power.