5. The interesting debates about abortion are almost tangential to the political discourse.
The majority consensus in every democratic country I can think of is that abortion should be available effectively on demand for an early abortion and available with a good reason for a later abortion.
Exactly when the dividing line between "early" and "late" should be can be anywhere from 12 to 24 weeks - countries with an early line tend to have a more relaxed view of what constitutes a "good reason" or (e.g. Norway) have two dividing lines, so early abortions are on demand, mid abortions need one of a long, generously interpreted list of reasons and late abortions need one of a short, tightly judged list. The other big factor is who is judging whether the presented reason is good enough; one major reason that many "pro-choice" organisations don't accept this sort of framework in the US is that they (not unreasonably) fear that the panel or court that determines whether a reason is sufficient can be stuffed with abortion opponents, meaning that no-one or almost no-one will get access to an abortion after the point that on-demand ceases.
There are some interesting policy design questions about how to create an abortion panel in a way that it can't be stuffed with people who will turn it into a rubber-stamp approval or rubber-stamp rejection process. Note that a politically-neutral civil service, medical profession and courts are routine in European countries, so they can be tapped for this; that's not true in the US, which makes this a real policy question.
Remember that almost no-one has a late abortion if they could have had an early one. That means that in almost every case, something has changed since early in the pregnancy; almost always late abortions are of pregnancies that were wanted early on (the main exception is people who couldn't afford an abortion until later on, which is also a public policy issue). When the change is a medical one, very few people who are OK with any abortions have a problem - if a woman discovers she has cancer, then few would require her to carry to term before she can start chemo (chemo is teratogenic). When it's a discovery that the foetus has no chance of living or will be born into a persistent vegetative state, few have many problems. When it's a discovery of a survivable disability (Down's, spina bifida, etc), more people are uncomfortable with a late abortion. When it's a change in economic circumstances (e.g. she loses her job, her husband loses his job, dies, or leaves her), even more people disapprove.
But there's plenty to debate when you get down into these kinds of details. It's just that this is mostly irrelevant to the actual legislative and political processes, where there just aren't debates about exactly what constitutes a threat to the mother's life, or exactly how disabled does the foetus need to be to permit an abortion. Even in the UK, where some now-easily-correctable disabilities are still included on the list that permits a late abortion (they weren't easily correctable in 1967 and the list hasn't been revised since), there's essentially zero political pressure to do anything about this other than from hardcore right-to-life groups - which are groups that can never win a majority because they aren't trusted not to be smuggling in some wider ban.
This is all true in terms of public opinion, but the GOP has completely destroyed any benefit of the doubt here. When faced with coming up with "good faith protections", they've either failed, and forced women to get to the edge of sepsis to have a second trimester abortion or give birth to a nonviable fetus. Or they did what Florida did, lie that they wouldn't go further, and then restrict abortion to 6 weeks.
Youngkin tried very hard to make this appeal to popular opinion. However, polling in many jurisdictions went from showing voters ok with vaguely defined restrictions on 2nd trimester abortions to opposing most of them, including in Virginia. I think last night's results clearly validated that shift. Voters don't trust Republicans to come up with a good-faith, popular alternative to the status quo. The outcome you talk about is broadly popular , but there is absolutely no trust there, and people broadly prefer the pre-Roe status quo.
Yeah, no-one trusts Republicans to do this and Democrats don't want to.
Note that the "late abortions" policy I'm talking about includes _third_ trimester abortions in many European countries. Norway's three stages are not exactly trimesters (the breakpoints are at 12 and 18 weeks). Britain (well, England, Wales and Scotland) defines an early abortion (on demand, de facto) as up to 24 weeks - it's not uncommon for Europeans who have applied for a "late" abortion in their own country and been denied to travel to England for an "early" abortion here (a private abortion).
I think people are in favour of restrictions in general terms but (because they don't spend lots of time thinking about the practicalities) when it comes to the specifics, the restrictions that they would actually favour are bans on abortions that basically never happen. The real arguments aren't over the medical cases; the median voter will accept just about any medical argument. It's the social/economic cases, where someone (the mother or the father, usually) loses a big chunk of their income. From the most sympathetic ("my husband has cancer and I want to care for him until he recovers and have a child after") to the least ("my husband went to prison"), these are hard cases and a lot of people get really conflicted about them.
The one that there is a solid majority against everywhere is "I changed my mind". No-one who favours any restrictions at all is OK with that as a reason to have a late abortion. The whole point of the deadline for early abortions is to make you make your mind up.
Personally: I'm not bothered; I'd happily allow abortions up to viability, and define viability as being the point that the foetus would survive without medical assistance outside the womb, which is much later than most people's version of viability, because I'd be saying "can it live without an incubator or a ventilator?".
Regarding the social/economic case: I would think that only makes sense for a first trimester abortion. Once a wanted pregnancy is further along, it seems it would be more similar to the situation where the child is already born--economic setbacks can happen at any time, people rarely put their kids up for adoption when they occur--they find a way to deal with it, get help from family and/or government assistance and carry on.
That is probably true but that also begs the question of why we would need to create a legal limit. It is going to be incredibly rare when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy that she wanted for the first trimester for social and economic issues for the same reasons that giving up a child in those circumstances are rare. And those rare cases may be ones where the situation are unique enough that people might be inclined to grant an exception. (i.e. the relationship with the father was new at the time of conception by the mother has since experience domestic violence and stalking from him and fears that sharing a child with him will result in her having an 18 year connection with him that will put her and the child at grave risk of violence; family.) I am not a Libertarian, but I think it is a mistake to think that we have to create a law to stop everything we think that no decent, reasonable person would be likely to do. We could just assume than that even without the rule most people won't do it and that those who do will likely be disturbed people who would do it anyway or decent and reasonable people who are facing unique circumstances that we can't anticipate. When I look to the abortion rates in Europe where there is generally easier and free access to abortions, I am mostly struck by how much lower they are than in the United States. It suggests to me that folks in the US are likely having a lot more abortions than they would like to have because of lack of access to sex ed and birth control and weaker social safety nets for poor families and single mothers. If folks really wanted to reduce abortion rates they could work on those issues and hope to see numbers naturally fall rather than figuring rules to prevent them when that doesn't seem to make that big a difference in rates overall but could capture individual women in hellish cricumstances. I would note that when people do want to give up their live children because of social and economic issues we generally let them do so because we realize that the alternative is potentially leave kids in abusive and neglectful situations with parents who don't or can't properly care for them.
This really undersells the differences between the US and Europe. In Europe, abortions are generally very easy to access. There’re more local providers and they’re often free, which means basically everyone who wants one electively can get one during the first trimester. In the US, Republicans have pushed to make first trimester abortions difficult to obtain. Even before Dobbs, abortion clinics had been closing in the South and it’s not covered by Medicaid. A European style abortion regime would require Republicans to stop using any means necessary, like abortion clinic hallway size rules, to limit action to first trimester abortions.
Yes, that's a really important point that I missed: people in the US often have later abortions because they couldn't afford or couldn't get to the clinic any sooner.
I wonder how hard it would be for the federal government to include abortion in Medicaid and in the PPACA minimum coverage for insurance for residents of states where abortion is legal at (say) the eight week point.
It would be impossible. Federal funding for abortion is a third rail for many, particularly from red states.
Also, aren't a huge number of early abortions in Europe done with medication, without much consultation? If we wanted to make early abortion easy, we could. But "we" don't.
Re your second paragraph: really really hard. Actually, let me correct that: really really really really hard.
Government funded abortions are the brightest of red lines for Republicans. Even if the Democrats got rid of the filibuster and somehow passed legislation to that effect, the next time the Republicans got control out would go that funding.
It drove me crazy for years to hear mainstream pro-life pundits lament (usually with little pushback if any) that American abortion laws during Roe were so extreme, even socialist Europe was stricter, and all pro-lifers want is reasonable limits. Really brazen lying, or brazen ignorance, or both.
But it's symptomatic of why they have the problems they do now: All they cared about was the ban, not any of the enabling conditions in Europe that make the ban politically sustainable.
The fact that the 5th circuit exists is where unfortunately your plan falls apart for me. Because we essentially have this panel you talk about already, it’s called the courts. And given the make up of that Court seems likely that anyone living under the 5th circuit would find there would be a de facto abortion ban after six weeks and if they had their way a de facto ban outright.
So count me among those voters who is very against restrictions because I know what the judges the other side puts on the bench are like. Matt sort of alluded to this in his last bullet point that full abortion ban is part of the GOP platform. It’s very clearly not a fringe position in the party.
Yeah, I'm with you in practice as for US policy. I do wonder if a state could pass something on these lines, but there's clearly no way to have a national policy on abortion. The only thing to hold the line on is that US citizens and residents have the absolute right to travel to another state for an abortion. States do not have jurisdiction over acts performed by their residents and citizens in other states and they don't have the right to stop their residents and citizens from travelling to another state to do something that is illegal at home.
The scenario that I think Colin is specifically referring to is a 5th Circuit panel upholding the ruling of a rogue anti-abortion district judge that tries to place some sort of nationwide injunction against abortion drugs. I'll give my thoughts on that in a direct reply to Colin.
I think that if that happened, SCOTUS would likely grant cert, and I could see them overturning it. Roberts as usual wants to try to save the GOP from deeply unpopular results, and I could see Kavanaugh joining that. And I could also see Gorsuch in particular stressing that abortion policy is a matter for the state level, and the state level only.
You are in part correct; one case I was definitely thinking of is the Mifepristone case.
But I should emphasize it's way beyond that with the 5th circuit. The one you're referring to is probably the most famous for a variety of reasons, but there are some other truly bonkers rulings, beyond just abortion by the way. If me a non-lawyer can say with pretty good certainty "that is some truly deranged reasoning" than something is up.
My point isn't necessarily to say this will stand once it gets to SCOTUS. But more what I think are flaws in the "lets have a panel" decide approach. The type of people likely to be on these panels in places like the deep south are not going to be right of center moderates on this issue.
in re the reasons for late-term abortions: I had also thought that most late-term abortions were pregnancies that were wanted and then something changed. I am not sure the data supports that though.
For example, this paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1363/4521013 describes five categories of women getting abortions after 20 weeks: Raising children alone, Depressed or using illicit substances, Conflict with male partner or domestic violence, Trouble deciding and access problems, Young and nulliparous. The discussion is pretty qualitative, but most of the women in their study seem to have gotten a late abortion either because they recognized the pregnancy late or because they had access problems.
If someone has better sources on this I would be very interested to see them! It is certainly true that they are rare and therefore not that easy to study.
I know I've been working on data from Europe rather than the US because the data is much higher quality here - in many countries the panels produce annual reports on why abortions were requested and why they were approved/rejected.
But, of course, one reason for the difference is that access problems are much rarer in European countries with universal healthcare!
Sorry, I was assuming ESVM’s comment was the context. I think it’s important, when looking at a dataset on reasons for “late abortions” in a jurisdiction where “late” starts at 20 weeks, to make distinctions between early-late and late-late. It’s far easier to see things like access issues and ignorance and so on being meaningful drivers at 20 weeks than at 30.
20 weeks isn't third trimester. I do think third trimester abortions are mostly for fetal anomalies (and elective abortions at that stage are also very hard to get, they are legally restricted even in most blue states and cost a lot of money).
This might be true about third-trimester abortions, but I've found it hard to find data that backs it up.
In this video, Susan Robinson estimates that ~20% of her patients have a fetal indication, and that many or perhaps most either sincerely didn't know they were pregnant or were in denial about being pregnant (often teenagers): https://youtu.be/DSUj3xVBjpA?si=PmNXCj_Pd0VzGFz5&t=303
But her sample may be biased, since I think she's one of the few doctors in the whole country who performs third-trimester abortions without a medical or fetal indication. And she seems to be talking about her "later abortion" patients in general, not only third trimester.
Yeah the idea that abortion is uninteresting to debate is a weird one from Matt. "Embryos are full human persons/no they're not" is a pretty uninteresting topic, I agree, but that's a shallow view of the issues underlying abortion opinion. Abortion law and sentiment isn't just about what rights a fetus has. It's about what we owe (or don't) to those who need help, what requirements we are willing to put on peoples' bodies for the sake of others, what kinds of families we view as good, the incredibly murky nature of pregnancy in which "life of the mother" means almost nothing, the role of the state in healthcare, the limits of law in deterring drug-related activity, modern approaches to parenting, and everything in between.
All of these are things are pretty core progressive policy questions! Just because right-wingers think the only relevant question is the fetus' moral status doesn't mean we have to agree.
America just doesn't really have room for nuance and shades of grey. Everything is framed as us vs them, and in the case of abortion, heaven vs hell. I agree very much with what you are saying. But I can't see such nuance working nationally. Maybe it needs to be like marijuana - a few states try it out, and then it spreads.
But there's enough policy meat for Matt to write a column about policy design if he wanted to: the problem is that there's no meaningful relationship between that and the political process.
If Matt tried to design a policy that imposed any restrictions on second trimester abortions, he’d get massive blowback from the left. Yet if his policy didn’t tightly restrict second trimester abortions, it would do little good politically. American support for elective abortions is real, but only if they happen before the fetus is much bigger than a raspberry. I’m totally comfortable with the median voters view in this issue!
The two women I know who had late-term abortions both had fetuses with lethal abnormalities. In one case, the fetus's brain never formed. It would have died shortly after birth. It really irks me that people seem to think some woman just changed her mind at 25 weeks or something.
There is one extremely large difference between a late-term fetus and a newborn that often seems to get discounted when there are no women in the conversation.
Absolutely you can, and I don't think I was saying otherwise.
The point that I was making is that the complexities of late-term fetuses and the medical complications that lead to most of the small number of late-term abortions (and I'm talking third trimester here, not second) are really not relevant to a political debate that is concentrated on one side trying to use any restriction as an opportunity to maximise the number of women who are denied an abortion and the other side trying to ensure that early abortions are widely available. If any regulation is (rightly) suspect of being a TRAP law, or of being weaponised as a TRAP law by a future GOP Governor, then the only political options are going to be a full ban or near-total deregulation.
The large number of people, probably a plurality, certainly including the median voter in almost every state, who have no real issue with an early abortion (of a fetus smaller than a raspberry) and do have a problem with a 39-week abortion are largely unable to gain traction within the policy side of what is going on. No-one is trying to design regulations that will make early abortion easier and late abortion harder and there's just no political space for saying that.
Matt is very much an "art of the possible" guy, and I think he has (rightly) intuited that there's no possible way within the current political context to achieve anything with the sort of nuanced regulation that we've been talking about in this subthread.
I live in the completely different political context of the UK; there absolutely is political space to get somewhere here, and that's one reason why I do care much more about policy design.
I think Biden is also paying a price for his Secret Presidency low key style of governing. It's mostly been effective at getting stuff done.
But I think people, especially younger low engagement types, really do expect the President to be a TV/internet star and govern through dramatic speeches, commanding press conferences and such.
The Coumo buzz has been memory holed, because he was actually terrible, but it was a thing. And one thing I have seen pointed at for Beshear was his performance doing Covid and tornado press conferences.
Sooner rather than later Biden probably needs to get out on camera in a sustained way with a persona he can sell. If he can't do that...
I certainly voted for him in part because I wanted less crazy shit, and crazy shit does grab headlines and increase visibility. However, I'm sure Biden could figure out a way to be somewhat more visible without doing crazy shit.
And to the extent Biden is visible it is generally for his most left leaning acts and hiding his more centrist ones. Examples of this would be oil production, transitory inflation, appointments such as Lina Khan, etc. It's almost like he hides the more moderate positions and highlights the more extreme ones.
I think this hurts him with a lot of people who thought they were voting for a moderate. If he spent the same energy focusing on his more moderate actions, he would have more internal conflict but might have a higher approval rating with moderates. He would also likely govern in a more moderate fashion.
I wish the far-left would act in a manner consistent with their stated concerns around a possible Trump election, instead of using Trump as tool to push governance further to the left. I suspect Biden will still win, despite recent polling, but it is definitely possible that he won't.
"Sooner rather than later Biden probably needs to get out on camera in a sustained way"
Yes. We call that a "political campaign." The thing that the vast majority of voters will start paying attention to in, oh, six or seven months from now.
"But I think people, especially younger low engagement types, really do expect the President to be a TV/internet star and govern through dramatic speeches, commanding press conferences and such."
I agree but they are a tiny part of the elctorate (both because they are a small demographic and because younger, low engagement types, by definition, don't vote much.
The big presidential elections with high turnout are decided by a bunch of normies who really only want to think about politics every four years. Most of them vote party line, but most of the swing voters among them really value some sense of normalcy/boringness.
But the election is won by a small number of marginal voters in swing states who are low-information and basically voting for who they'd rather have a beer with. Biden only won by 50k votes in a few key states. That tiny part of the electorate that you describe is also who actually decides the winner (in 6 states, that is)
I think "the difference is only 50k" and "the election is decided by these specific 50k people" are two vastly different statements, and I disagree quite a lot with the second one.
The marginal voter in 2024 who swings the election will almost certainly be a younger, low-engagement, low-information voter in 1 of 6 swing states. I mean, anyone who doesn't have defined partisan affiliations at this point is probably a low-information voter. There are very, very few highly informed independents
The open question is whether getting Biden in front of the cameras more often would just make his age an even more salient characteristic. I mean, he does look and act 80, so perhaps fewer opportunities to remind people of that would be better.
The problem is that there are plenty of TikToks and Fox News propaganda supercuts that make Biden look old and senile, but not much countervailing content that makes him look like Jed Bartlet. So his "senility" is made salient anyway through bullshit.
Really great note, Matt. You sound positively giddy! Which is awesome.
A few quick thoughts...
"Democrats now dominate among the most civically minded, most conscientious voters." Woot! We should celebrate this as an enormous victory. But we should also strive to increase the proportion of the population who are civically minded conscientious voters! High turnout is good on the merits: it underpins the legitimacy of the undertaking.
"In the abstract, I think highly engaged people tend to underrate winning." Hell no! I have been walking around with a bounce in my step, waving my hands in the air, with a smile a mile wide all day.
"Everyone should look very hard at Andy Beshear 2028." And Gretchen Whitmer 2028, and Josh Shapiro 2028, and Amy Klobuchar 2028, and JB Pritzker 2028, and Raphael Warnock 2028....The list goes on. The Democratic Party's 'bench' is a veritable embarrassment of riches. We just need to buckle down and grind out the 2024 contest to build the bridge through to them.
Beshear 2028 could be awesome. But only if he shows he has national chops. Dem governor in a red state is nice but by itself does nothing for you. Granted, the way Steve Bullock took the party by storm and easily rolled his way to the nomination in 2020 is counter evidence.
It's actually funny (the bad kind of funny) that Bullock went and lost the 2020 Montana Senate race by 10 points. This was just 4 years after he won their Governor's race by 1.5 points.
I suppose I understand why Warnock makes it onto these lists on paper, but I have to say that from what I’ve seen from him...underwhelmed me. Maybe some Georgians can chime in with their pov, but while I’m sure he is a decent Senator, I haven’t gotten the strongest chief executive vibes from him compared to a few of the others listed.
Is there any evidence that winning a tough state-level race makes you a more attractive presidential candidate? I'd honestly like to know. Pre-grouchy Nate Silver might have useful things to say about that.
I could absolutely see Warnock as a Chief Executive. He has run several disciplined and successful campaigns in a state and a political environment that is marginally hostile to him. He is an exemplary communicator. He is a gifted retail politician as well as being an electric public speaker. He has a real understanding for the nitty gritty of crafting implementable policy and has a keen sense for making tactical and strategic alliances. The Ebenezer Baptist Church is a large organization and he serves in what is effectively an executive role there.
My great preference would actually be for Senator Warnock to remain in the senate keeping Georgia Blue for many years and focusing on being an historically great legislator. But who am I to stand in the way of anyone's dreams of the presidency.
Biden's probably *not* the type to try to hang on if it's getting to that point. My guess is that if it's at a point where he simply can't do the job any more, he would resign.
Related, the concerns about Biden's age are really concerns about Kamala Harris. The worst-case outcomes of having an 80-year-old President aren't actually problems because he's not President any more at that point.
That's often not how things work. There are many elderly people who feel that they are still extremely competent and capable. But observers can clearly see they are not. Nor is this linear. Many people have good days and bad days, or do well in the morning, but not great at night.
A real question is if Biden feels that he is still very capable, but those around him observe degradation in his faculties. Or if he's doing okay, but during a period of high stress, suddenly starts doing worse in the middle of a crisis.
That is one possible outcome. But I have to say, my father is 85, still mentally agile, and as strong as an ox. Part of the reason that he is aging so well is living a well considered, active, outdoors focused and largely stress free life in Vermont. He has been blessed with good medical care as well. Joe Biden's life is probably considerably more stressful than my father's, but outside of that, Biden has lived a life where the outcome set does tend to skew more towards the outcome my dad is living than the outcome you describe above. Biden also is the beneficiary of perhaps the best medical care in the world. I am not overly concerned about Joe Biden's age (though I am terrified by the way that the opposition is weaponizing his age).
Well, I hope he is able to live a longer and healthier life too, but actuarial realities are actuarial realities. And of course there is always the risk of a serious health episode that results in his resigning during the second term.
I think you're right that she would probably face challengers, but one wonders! The timing could also make a difference. If she became POTUS very early on (say in 2025) and she's not a complete disaster, maybe she'd be harder to dislodge than if she took over in the summer of '27 and the '28 election was already looming.
At any rate, I guess we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. He's got to make it through this term first.
Maybe that's because "reliable voters that will always vote for you and your side" is...NOT civically minded conscientious voters! Partisans and zealots make democracy difficult and function worse than it could if everyone was more reasonable and accommodating to the "other" side's reasonable demands - and you need conscientious people to articulate and agree that those demands are reasonable! If people actually only voted for the candidate that would most improve things overall, rather than promise to immiserate the "other" side most spectacularly, I think most people would call that a win.
Many of the worst excesses of the left in the past decade has been the result of lacking a credible "loyal opposition" of reasonable conservatives to work with and quell progressive's worst impulses. But it's hard to work with people who have ideological blinders that are fundamentally at odds with Reality (unfortunately, this statement applies to both the Right and the Left).
Indeed - very little worth having comes free or easy.
In terms of the voters voting with me...Well, I would hope that I was always on the side of the civically minded and conscientious voters. Were I not, the problem would lie with me not them!
That won’t come until enough days after the election that he’s had a chance to write it. (He didn’t want to start writing that take if Beshear went down.)
A lot of long articles make me go dude just give us the bullet points then I get it and am like this ain’t no article! But yes I think beshear article good idea bc telling people to be more pro-manchin is a tough sell bc he annoys everyone so beshear analysis will prob be a bit more palatable.
You can edit, at least if you use the web, by clicking on the ellipsis in the lower right corner of your comment. It's pretty silly that Substack makes you do this instead of just having it as a displayed option next to Like/Reply/Share.
Re #9, I think some of the negative voter sentiment about the economy (despite good fundamentals) is people cranky about no longer getting/having the extra money we gave them during COVID. The direct stimmy payments, enhanced UI, child tax credit, etc all ended and we got inflation at the same time. You can argue about how many points of the inflation that last COVID package caused, but I think the combination of higher prices paired with the loss of extra inflow hit a lot of low-to-mid families. They liked getting extra for doing nothing, and Joe Biden is who they're gonna blame, fair or not.
I also have a pet theory that some of the negativity is that we've valorized victimhood somewhat and people are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction even if their lives are more convenient and comfortable than they have ever been. There are real problems, of course, especially in the housing market. But I have started to wonder if we will ever get back to a place where people are willing to admit that things are pretty good. Or that America is already pretty great. 😎
The trick to voter sentiment about the economy is that actually Biden's economy has been pretty great for people at the bottom end of the income scale, because persistently low unemployment and worker shortages greatly help their bargaining power; McDonald's where I live is advertising $17/hour and you can tell that fast food restaurants are having to scrape deeper into the bottom of the barrel, so it's easier for people with felony convictions, etc. to get hired. This also means in addition to general staffing issues, it's even harder to staff, say, the overnight shift, so the McDonald's and Wal-Mart closest to me now close at 11 PM and it's presumably because they can't staff those hours (or it's not "worth it" to staff them at those hours; the McDonald's closer to the university campus in my town is still open 24 hours, but the one surrounded by neighborhoods of families with children isn't.)
It's the first time since probably before Reagan that a strong economy hasn't disproportionately accrued benefits to affluent college-educated people, and those people are pissed off. But if you're on the left, and especially if you've made concern for the working class into a personality, you can't come out and SAY this. So they pretend that they're worse off.
And notably, the people who have actually benefited from the current economy are the least likely to vote and the least likely to have a big voice in the discourse. You know who does, though? Media and tech workers, two segments of the economy where there clearly has been a decline.
Gosh darn it, if America can't keep it's McDonalds open past 11pm then the socialists really have won!
Great points, and I've seen this backed up elsewhere. If the post-COVID recovery is helping to reduce some of the wealth inequality on the low end, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in another national election. It does seem like the amorphous middle class has the most presence in elections/electoral speeches, so it may be a rough year for Biden. But I think it's a positive change nonetheless.
Hmmm. I kind of disagree that the labor supply/wage inflation situation has only benefited lower wage workers. Being a "laptop class" IT worker, my targeted group of specialized devs and ops specialists got an almost unheard of, for the company I work for, off-year raise because the company started bleeding a lot of talent to higher offers (also offering fully remote work) coming from many directions. And this wasn't just a localized experience with this company, "The Great Resignation" saw a lot of mid-to-higher wage workers bid up their value by taking offers and forcing existing companies to raise their salaries to keep their existing talent (or offer the amenties/benefits, including guaranteed remote work).
I do think the post-COVID labor market benefited pretty much all levels of workers, although definitely agree that in particular lower wage/lower skilled workers got a BIG boost as well, but this was one of those times when a tighter labor supply really benefited workers up and down the ladder - which is great! What's baffling is why so many of these same workers aren't seeing that as the gain that it was : /
Of course now we see many marquee employers walking back the remote working options, but with appears to be limited success/power in enforcing it. It's still overall an employee's market, which again I don't get why so many are so down on the economy. This has literally not happened for decades!
Are affluent college-educated people who claim to have concern for the working class really the ones who are mad at Biden and saying the economy sucks?
I think it’s much more likely to be the heavily Republican small business owner types, who often aren’t college educated and don’t really have any concern for the working class.
Yeah, the small business owners are mad but they're irrelevant here because they were never voting Biden regardless. The loudest complainers on Twitter seem to be affluent college-ed types.
Also, before people say "Well, of course lefty Kevin Drum would write that!"—I'll point out he's just regurgitating Gallup results. It really does appear that sour sentiment about the economy is overwhelmingly a Republican phenomenon these days. Our two political tribes no longer agree on what color the sky is.
That's a fair observation re Republicans and their insta-polarization, but in this Sept poll from Suffolk, 34% of Democrats said the economy is getting worse. 76% of indie/other also said that. We're talking about a pretty large chunk of non-GOP folks who hold this negative sentiment.
Asymmetric polarization strikes again. The voters of the party out of power always rate the economy worse when their party is not president but the phenomenon appears much more pronounced when a democrat is president; at least since 2008.
Yes ^^. Democrats, at least, as of the Trump term, were still willing to give Trump more favorable ratings on his economic performance, even if they overall rated him poorly. Republican voters have not given that benefit of the doubt since Clinton. IOW, Republican voters will rate the economic performance much more on partisan lines than Democratic voters, which results in this uneven (UNFAIR) situation for Democratic POTUS's who can deliver a booming economy but will never get credit for it from at least 48% of the electorate. Republican POTUS's can at least get a grudging tick from less partisan Democrats, let alone a near guaranteed 90%+ Republican built in thumbs up all around that gives them anywhere from a 10-20% built in advantage on this polling question.
People's income, including ARP payments, generally kept up with inflation in gross terms.
My unproven guess is that people were just really shocked to see prices for everything suddenly surge. Most of them had never seen such a thing in their lifetime and it was scary whether or not they could objectively afford it.
Assuming inflation stays roughly at 4% or below for the next year, I think they'll get used to the new normal and it won't bother them very much come Election Day.
I just think a lot of people are seeing through the "good fundamentals".
Bonuses last year - for nearly everyone I've talked to - were below target range. This year looks worse. Any recent stock option package looks unrealistically underwater. If you're in an industry that touches real estate in any capacity you're f@cked (i.e., 50% declines to target comp. range). If you're in M&A -- deal volume has also dried up because sellers are holding to pre-ZIRP valuation ranges. If you're a manager, you've been working layoff plans continually since Q4 2022. I was just re-working our budget and our monthly grocery spend is up ~ 40% vs. 2021. Some of this is shifting from going out to cooking more at home - but even that feels like a downgrade because the driver is restaurant prices are up so much. This staples level inflation is hitting our hourly employees even harder since pay raises haven't kept up.
I'm literally trying to think of anyone I know who's having a good time economically right now ... there's a distressed RE asset guy who's never seen better deal flow, Cook County pushed another huge property tax hike so a lawyer who fights those is ripping, a friend just left big CPG to run marketing for a start-up ... feels few and far between.
My buddy who now runs the parts department at his dealership because the old dude retired and they more than doubled his pay and gave their hourly guys all 15% last year and this year both.
My neighbors who work in a restaurant (back of house) and a hardware store and now make a combined $100k for the first time in their 40’s.
My tenants, construction worker and nurse’s assistant, who got such big bumps in pay that they were finally able to move out of their parents’ places and in together.
Fuck the whiny-ass PMC people with their “in this house we believe” signs and desperate contortion to convince themselves the working classes are worse off instead of them finally clawing some of their own back from folks like you and I.
That's great for all of them. Our hourly technicians total comp. is up >50% vs. 2019 baselines and that feels good, that's changed their lives. My point here is just that people keep questioning / seem confused why Trump is running ahead of Biden and this tale of two economies where the PMC is getting squeezed seems to be a part of it. Marc thinks this will all stabilize by the election - hope he's right. Just thinking about the waves of layoffs coming ... I'm less sure.
If the majority of the PMC people were honest in their bitching I’d be fine with it, it’s the profound mendacity that puts me off.
Though in fairness my comp was up 10% in nominal terms last year, will be up about another 10% this year, and next year with a full year at my current package will have me up 15% more.
Then back to small raises for a while, but my wife’s new job will roughly double her income next year and we have another rental finishing up construction so we’ll go from spending $75k this year to making $15k next year on that.
I had to look up mendacity. That's a great word. I think I'm seeing something different though. It seems real. So many layoffs. The commercial real estate brokers / developers are looking at > 50% drops in total comp. Next year looks worse. Etc.
Tech is bleeding some people, office-focused commercial real estate is imploding.
My software firm is hiring, every engineering and construction firm I’m familiar with (and the sectoral data) are going gangbusters and desperate for people, manufacturing is gangbusters, most service fields are gangbusters.
"Bonuses last year - for nearly everyone I've talked to - were below target range. This year looks worse"
This is true but also really short memory thinking. If you were in tech, or finance, or a lot of other industries, you've seen incredible wage growth from 2012 - 2022. Like, more than 10% a year in many of those industries. And 2020 - 2022 were boom years. A lot of people in tech saw ridiculous 30-50% wage growth in those years (much more if you count stock equity compensation). And regarding layoffs -- with the huge, ill-advised hiring booms that were going on, there was a ton of migration from other industries to tech, and the people being laid off now are largely those groups. Which is terrible for them, no doubt, but you see this in a lot of markets (e.g. a huge number of people became real estate agents from 2015-2022, because of the boom, and many of them are now gone, whereas the lifer real estate agents are still around).
So it seems disingenuous to believe that "mah boom won't go on forever" is the same as "the economy is in decline". I think if a lot of these people were being honest with themselves, they would recognize this.
Yeah, I wonder if there isn't a useful distinction to be drawn between "ZIRP Boom Tech" (which is what "tech" shorthand usually means) and "We Sell A Product At Profit-Making Prices And Have Done So For Many Years" tech.
Knock on wood, those of us in the latter camp did mostly fine over the last decade and we're still doing mostly fine today.
Which one is Amazon? They seem like the latter to me, but definitely way overhired in the "the new business model of the [andemic will last forever!" hysteria, and then of course laid a lot of people off when it turned out that pandemics can, in fact, end.
Amazon seems to be its own special little bean, not fitting neatly in either category. Focused for many years on explosive growth over profits, but *mostly* never fell victim to the more Googley "We have more money than we know what to do with, we should just point the money cannon in all directions and hire everyone".
I don't disagree with any of this. All great points. It's been a really good 10 year run for a lot of people. I'm just trying point out - seemly unsuccessfully here - that when poll after poll come back that people are dissatisfied with the direction of the economy ... Biden's position / message better not be to discount it and point to some aggregate "fundamentals". He needs to address it. There are a number of industries imploding right now. I can't seem to fact check this but I bet 2023 will have the highest number of layoffs since 2009 and maybe more. I posted down thread, but there's a list of companies that have announced layoffs this year and I had to stop scrolling because it kept going. Even if you're honest with yourself that you've had a good run, if your company is announcing layoffs -- it's just really hard to feel secure and have a strong outlook. I certainly don't.
People view the economy through their household finances. Probably 40% of our company is on the corp. bonus plan. Everyone took home less income this year vs. the prior years and next year's outlook looks worse. Our company is hardly unique and we're just some small industrial company. Feels weird to handwave declining household income - coupled with declining purchasing power - by pointing to the macro fundamentals.
IDK then. Base + bonus is the standard comp. plan for public companies. Bigger picture ... There's no way "real wages are up" and we're getting polling that indicates 75% of the US thinks the economy is trending in the wrong direction. That's the point I'm making. There's a clear disconnect with the "fundamentals".
I don't think I would put it that way. I would describe it as: everyone hated when wages were low and stuff was cheap. Now wages are high and stuff is expensive...and they hate it even more.
I also think there's a disconnect between "my personal economic experience" and "what I'm hearing about the economy". Lots and lots of polling and analysis demonstrates this disconnect as to where voters will rate their personal economic situation as "decent" or "good", but then go on to rate the economy overall as "poor". And it's odd because the typical voter "rating" of the economy *is* their personal economic experience ("voting based on your wallet"), but the polling seems to show that there's a sense of precariousness, that while "my" individual situation might be decent *now*, and sure paying a few bucks more here and there for various grocery items based on the prices pre-2021 might not be ideal, but it's not breaking my bank or meaningfully changing my spending habits, but I'm hearing a LOT about inflation and potential recession threats through various media sources that I consume, so it might mean that "my" economic experience is atypical, and could radically change at any point, and therefore, the overall economic rating suffers. In addition, the higher interest rates might be inhibiting future plans (moving out of a rental into a home, etc), so while "status quo" seems OK, the conditions might be limiting for my personal future.
But honestly, I think the media hammering about inflation, and the very sort of personalized reporting it's largely chosen to portray the situation under (lots of "man at the gas pump griping about gas prices", without a whole lot of even surface level analysis about the causes of inflation might be driving that "my economy is good but everyone else's appears to suck so mine might start sucking real soon" that is driving down the polling (and Biden's approvals in this matter). In this sense, I think the "MSM", including local and nightly news, has done a real disservice in informing voters about the nature of inflation, let alone the seeming insistence on framing it as a "political concern", as in "Inflation is hurting Biden, polls say", which carries that message (and blame) forward. If voters were better informed about inflation - say, like when egg prices temporarily spiked due to avian flu - and absent a "horse race" context, would they be so eager to blame Biden for the price spike in eggs?
You don't mention crime here, but there were a few interesting results in that space.
1) Democrats nominated left-wingers for Allegheny County executive and DA; they nearly lost the first race and lost the second. (The incumbent DA, a Democrat, lost to the primary to criminal justice reformer then just kept running as a Republican.) This while the Democratic judicial candidate was winning the county by 25 points. Sara Innamorato, the new executive, had won a state legislative seat as a DSA member, but broke with it and renounced socialism as Republicans warned that she and the DA candidate would turn the area into San Francisco.
2) Rs picked up a few city and county races with anti-crime, anti-homeless camp messaging. But they lost where this stuff just wasn't as much of an issue. They flopped hard in Indianapolis, where the Dem mayor had hired a ton of new cops - people just didn't buy that he was a police defunder, while he trashed the GOP nominee for being a Trump supporter.
3) The "defund" stuff also seems to have petered out in legislative races, because no Democrat in a competitive seat is dumb enough to say "defund the police." It really does look like people have separated municipal/DA etc races, where the winners can change policy, with legislative races, where to prove that a Democrat will cut police funding you need to stretch and say "he's endorsed by defund the police activists" (which is always going to be true because of the progressive groups that endorsed "defund" during the 10 minutes when it was trending).
The key Virginia race, in Loudoun County, had a Dem prosecutor running against a wealthy Republican who kept insisting that she would let criminals run free. Like, an ad where a guy broke into a house and thanked Russet Perry (the Dem) for making crime legal. At the same time, the Republican was campaigning with the county sheriff who got re-elected *because crime is down.* You just can't fake this stuff after a point.
In Seattle the first day numbers for our City Council races indicated a hard turn to the Right after many, many cycles of moving ever more Left. A Seattle Right isn't the same as a National Right - Our political spectrum is more like Canada than the US. But the folks ahead are way more "law and order" and "let's see what arresting a lot of homeless people and drug addicts does?" than any candidates that have been successful in past years. We all vote by mail in Seattle and it typically takes about 5 days for all the votes to get counted and during that period there has been historically an 8% to 12% shift Left as more progressive votes seem to vote later. That may flip a few close seats here so we get a fairly balanced council. In my district the more progressive candidate is only down by 400 votes so almost any shift left is going mean he wins. (It made for a weird election night party vibe. "We are only down by 400 votes so we are probably, almost certainly going to win" is a weird thing to toast to) But as of today, the results look pretty shocking and it seems possible he may end up the only real progressive on a council that previously had numerous self declared socialists and where he was previously viewed as very middle of the road.
Hard right? Really?? They’re just normal liberals. I guess relative to Kshama Sawant they are much more right but 99.9 percent of the population is much more right of that lunatic
Living in the Pacific Northwest shifts your view of politics. If you don't think China's Cultural Revolution was a big win for humanity you are basically right wing.
Sawant wasn't advocating Maoism. Pretending that the Democratic Socialists running in local races in the Pacific Northwest are communists let alone Mao is bad faith and unhelpful. If people don't like their ideas they should debate them on the merits not pretend they are something they are not. She was to the left of probably 90% of Seattle voters. She would be left of 99% of voters in the Country. (She would probably be left of about 70% of voters in Vancouver, BC or Copenhagen) But she was apparently wasn't that far to the left of the voters in her district though because she won every election she was in. I wasn't a Sawant fan. I thought she was self-aggrandizing and a poor communicator. I was frequently frustrated when she would manage to badly hurt the causes we agreed upon. The decision to call a previously uncontroversial business head tax an "Amazon Tax" and get Jeff Bezos' panties in a knot and willing to pour money into fighting it being a great example. I don't think that there is a reason folks need to run as Democratic Socialists in a city where there are already folks identifying as Democrats who are just as progressive on every issues. But no one was running as a Communist in this general election.
I am sorry I offended you. My intention was a tongue in cheek jock about Pacific Northwest politics. My larger point was that right-wing in the Pacific northwest would be a more akin to being moderately liberal elsewhere. No offense or attempts to pretend Sawant is a Maoist was intended.
Fair enough. But FOX News has folks thinking that Seattle is now a anarchist pinko hellscape run by Maoists. In that context, tongue in cheek characterizations can confirm misinformation whether that is the author's intent or not. I recently got back from a vacation at resort in Mexico with my parents. Folks from all the the US who were staying there were asking me in all sincerity if we were okay given what was happening in Seattle and how soon we planned to move whenever we told them where we were from. It was pretty surreal. Those folks clearing believe the city is run by Maoist and is on fire.
I acknowledged that the political spectrum in Seattle isn't a good match to the rest of the country. It is more similar to Canada or Scandinavia. In my precinct of 296 voters only five voted for the Republican Candidate for Governor and only three for Trump. We don't have a "hard right" in the sense that we do at the National level but that doesn't mean there isn't important daylight between candidates. In Seattle the current divides are around whether we should impose more progressive taxation or is there just fat to be cut; should we continue focusing on housing and expanded treatment services to address homeless encampment and drug addiction or should we shift to using police power and jails; should the police reform continue to be push in the face of a police union that opposes all changes or should we trust the police do whatever they think is best so they can start responding to anything, and should we support increasing density in the City by making it easier to build low-income and market housing or should we continue to prioritize neighbor input and neighborhood character even if that means more expensive and slower development. For a City dealing with a serious crisis of budget shortfalls, exploding numbers of homeless and ODs, a police force that is currently not responding at all to many 911 calls about violence, and housing prices that continue to skyrocket, those are actually pretty important questions for folks day to day lives. The voters for the last several election cycles have been firm is wanting the first option to all of those questions. This year that seems to overwhelmingly prefer the second.
Also many of the candidates were hardly part of some left wing fringe. Andrew Lewis is losing quite badly in the 7th District. He is someone who has been referred to by our local press as "someone who gives the strong impression of having lost his virginity on a yacht" and "Seattle's straight Pete Buttigieg." He is a former assistant city attorney. He is a progressive centrist not a Democratic Socialist. He just pissed off folks in Magnolia by telling them that in order to keep homeless people from camping in the area, the City would need to provide somewhere else for them to sleep and so it would be helpful if they wouldn't fight every attempt to put a tiny house village of sheds folks could sleep in the neighborhood short term or long term supportive housing in their neighborhood.
As an interesting update. The votes did seem to swing a bit left in the second day count but not as much as folks expected. (the closest race narrowed from a 400 vote margin to a 200 vote margin.) It turns out that is because someone sent envelopes full of crushed white powder that appears to be fent in the mail to the King County Elections office and the offices of several other county election offices in the Washington causing building evacuations and slowing the vote count. Election work animus and election denialism is not common in King County at all. Fascinating to see how even an incredibly small faction of a community having those feelings can stick a wrench in the works of democracy. In this case no one got hurt and it just put the count back by a day but still not a good sign for how smooth the elections might run in 2024.
Also, in NYC, a Democrat won a majority-Asian city council district that had gone hard to the right in recent years by running on a strongly pro-public safety platform. The crime issues had really been hurting Democrats with Asian New Yorkers in recent elections.
Mayor McClean, seems like a sane progressive. As does most of the city council. McClean did make some mistakes with the Police Force thing. Hopefully she learned her lessons there.
The only thing City wise I worry about is the relocation of the shelter to State Street (if they ever find the funding). I can see that going pear shaped.
The nice thing is with a pro housing city council, the development of the old ITD site should be marginally better.
I'll be curious about the citywide salience of the Interfaith Sanctuary move--obviously it's very high in that neighborhood, but I wonder if it'll be more of a meh outside of it.
And I think the ITD site will be amazing regardless of who's in power, but there's certainly more potential for it to be even more amazing with laws that allow them to build more. I really hope that turns into Boise's next great mixed use neighborhood.
I think the City Wide salience will be higher given State Streets status as a main transit hub from Eagle / Star etc. The current location isn’t a main thoroughfare, but everyone drives on State eventually.
My biggest worry is that I really wanted State Street developed. I love the plans for Collister and the new development at the golf course further up. And all of this tied in to the ITD with bus routes. But…. The most devastating thing to drive down public transit useage is safety perception. If homelessness and drug useage becomes associated with State Street, then forget it. ITD might happen, but nothing west of Veterans Park will.
And the argument was always… homeless shelters don’t have to drive down development, but it’s weird how the impending move from River Street has spurred a lot more development plans for that area.
I think State Street is way too long of a corridor for this one development to have that much of an impact, but we shall see. Collister I agree could be impacted, but the artist formerly known as Plantation should be fine. And for better or worse, our overlords in the state legislature are very hostile to public funding and building infrastructure for mass transit, so most people traversing State are going to be doing so by car.
You probably have a point. I’m just pissed because Collister is the closest nexus to myself. But honestly, I’m more likely to take Hill Road up to Glenwood or over to Veterans Park before driving on State. Any problems aren’t gonna hit my neighborhood. The people who own property between State Street and the Greenbelt though will probably suffer.
This isn’t based on much rigorous historical analysis, but I feel like people are underrating the extent to which not running your incumbent president is really politically risky. The incumbent advantage in presidential races has historically been pretty significant. In recent history, we’ve repeatedly seen presidents (particularly Democrats) have a period of unpopularity at this point of the cycle and go on to win anyway.
If the party abandons the incumbent president, they are basically saying to voters, “Yeah guys, we really effed this one up, maybe consider the other guys.”
Maybe this dynamic I’m describing doesn’t hold as well today, but I totally understand why the party institutions weren’t thrilled about taking a chance on Gretchen Whitmer, untested on the national stage, when they can run the guy who beat Trump last time.
I said this on another thread, but I think someone influential in normies circles (Anderson Cooper or something) recently stated as fact that Biden *said* this, because that's the only explanation I have for why it's coming up. Biden never said this, and never even really implied it. He declared his candidacy for 2024 almost a year ago at this point. It was barely in doubt he'd run again.
While not specifically saying he would only serve one term, Biden did say he was bridge candidate to make way for younger generations. Like it or not, that implies only serving one term.
That's a weird take, I didn't see any evidence he indicated he wouldn't do his full two terms. I think that might have been projection from the more leftists side of the democrats who saying fine we'll vote for this moderate this time because that's what it takes to beat Trump, but we're not doing this again next time.
My memory is that he made a couple of vague statements in the 2020 campaign that kinda sorta maybe suggested that he might not run for reelection if he won.
Yes, it strikes me that not reelecting your own candidate is a repudiation of either that person as a leader or their, meaning your, policies and achievements. Either of which is essentially saying sorry, we made a mistake, you shouldn't have voted for this guy last time.
Beyond, "he's four years older than he was" and "we're scared to death he might not beat Trump again" what actual argument could the democrats make to say Biden should not continue as President. I mean, if you don't think he should be President in 2025 why do you want him to be President in 2024, shouldn't he just resign now?
Age genuinely is a reason not to run in the indefinite future but nevertheless not resign in the present. The trouble is that "not seeking another four years because you're too old despite having successfully won the presidency four years ago" isn't really A Thing.
Harding keeled over before we could find out if he would do it. Polk did hold to that commitment, and as it would have it, he keeled over three months after leaving office.
social conservatives in my groupchats are flipping out. we'll see. but i think abortion is a third rail the party is going to take a while to let go of...
You could go for the UK Conservative solution: run pro-life Republicans in safe districts, pro-choice ones in competitive ones and then you never actually pass anything in any vaguely competitive state because the pro-choice Republicans work with the Democrats to block it.
That’s what the Republicans used to do too. I remember when Pennsylvania had a pro-choice Republican senator (Arlen Specter) and a pro-life Democrat (Bob Casey, still around).
Unfortunately for the Repubicans, anti-abortion attitudes are pervasive amongst Republican primary voters so I can't see the party doing the tactically smart thing such as recommended here. Basically Republican primary voters are hopelessly out of touch with the general electorate and seem unware of this or simply don't care. I can't see them being smart like the Labour party in the UK was and do a 180 degree turn after an electoral drubbing of an extremist like Corbhan. They've stuck with Trump after he lost and most of the pygmies who stood against him are just as extreme.
To the extent that Trump is smart about policy positions, it will be interesting to see what he does in the general election. He could afford to be "moderate" on abortion because he is cruising to the nomination (and he has the "three Justices" trump card).
Next year, against Biden, will he go for the median voter on abortion or will he go for a base mobilization strategy and hit abortion restrictions hard?
(Trick question: neither, because talking about policy is boring when he could instead be talking about himself and how evil Biden's DoJ is.)
My wife and I watched the Vivek interview last night where he talked about abortion in Ohio. He used the example of “if a man kicked a woman in the stomach and she miscarried we would consider that murder!”.
My wife was so pissed off. She noted that Vivek is an “asshole” and was tone deaf to the fact that whether a man in political office tells her she can’t get an abortion or a man abuses her and forces her to miscarry, both men are taking away her bodily autonomy. She was stunned that Vivek thought his line was a big “gotcha”. He was so smug about it too.
Also, he is going to bleach the teeth right out of his head.
I see why it’s tone deaf. At the same time it’s a shocking bit of legal incoherence I wasn’t aware of. It’s insane to me that a fetus is considered a person, period. I wasn’t aware that this is already the case in some is law and I find it a very worrying loophole that might be used by conservative jurists in future to outlaw abortion.
Well, that issue is kind of a "big 'gotcha'" -- that's why pro-choice groups have historically had at most an ambivalent attitude toward standard fetal homicide laws and have been working to amend them to make them more "woman-centered" where the focus is on the increased risk of injury/death to the mother and not the fetus: https://newrepublic.com/article/113258/ariel-castro-pro-choice-answer-violence-against-pregnant-women
It really isn't that much of a gotcha, though. People's moral intuitions change radically based on whether someone has a claim to the future companionship and affection of an organism. Someone who kills your dog in a non-self-defense context would be uniformly condemned as a vile monster (and subject to legal sanctions, albeit ones that I expect many including we would consider to be offensively lax.). But (speaking purely as a descriptive matter) there's nothing like the same moral sanction for people who kill deer or livestock. "A human cares about this organism's continued existence and companionship" genuinely is a touchstone that totally alters the moral intuitions and (to a degree) legal framework applicable to the restrictions on killing it. A miscarriage of a fetus scheduled to be aborted tomorrow is a dramatically smaller moral harm than one of one that isn't.
Trump is a piece of shit but also a charismatic guy, people often don’t want to admit that but i think Vivek shows us how just having the piece of shit part doesn’t win u elections he has no chance. I watched a couple debates in 2016 election cycle and was like woah trump really wiped the floor with his opponents and it worried me a little. Must admit I still told my brother and wife who were super worried he would win they were completely crazy and will always be a reminder to myself that I really do not know what I am talking about.
I remember during a debate when Ted Cruz lambasted Trump's "New York values", and Trump absolutely laid into him and destroyed him. I hated Trump and still do, but it was great to see.
It's not all messaging problems in politics; it's often policy and partisans want to blame messaging. But one messaging problem for the GOP is the lack of gravitas in the party. If you want to discuss a heavy moral issue that you believe demands close scrutiny, you need a different style than Vivek's. It's totally possible for a conservative politician to argue a regime of late term abortion access means a quiet normalizing of outright infanticide and this demands a certain equilibrium. Indeed, someone near the top of this comment section explicitly said a newborn who cannot breathe without a ventilator is grounds for termination. But it's impossible to do that while also running the Trump show against fuddy duddy PC liberals.
Yesterday’s election for New York City Council had 8% turnout among registered voters. Incumbents won 48 out of 51 seats, and only one district had less than 10 percentage points between the winner and the challenger.
Would be great to explore the lack of turnout and competition in these sort of local elections.
Republicans can't win in the vast majority of City Council districts. It's often hard to distinguish candidates in primaries, particularly low-salience primaries for a local legislative seat in an off year. And the policy stakes are unclear because the overwhelming predominance of Democrats means that individual races are unlikely to shift the median City Council vote around much. NYC needs a local party system but that seems hard to achieve, especially with its current electoral system.
I think our top-two system with nonpartisan races has helped. We basically do have two incredibly weak "parties" for local elections, so nothing is a done deal
I’m far more sanguine about a Biden candidacy in 2024. I underestimated the extent to which voters really thought he’d only serve a single term (which I think is what the ‘he’s too old’ thing really gets at: people expected him to not run, he hinted he might, and now he’s not). I also underestimated how voters would react to inflation.
Neither of these things are Biden’s ‘fault’ per se but politics is never about things that are entirely within your control. Biden is President right now largely because he was the right ‘Old White Dude’ for Obama in 2008. There was nothing electorally useful Biden provided beyond his grey hair and his persona. He turned that into being the most electable candidate in 2020 and the presidency and that’s huge! Had he ran in 2016 the world would be a LOT better off.
But he didn’t and he ran in 2020 instead and now voters want someone who isn’t old, who didn’t preside over inflation, and perhaps Biden would be better off not running. I still think many Democrats underrate the odds a vicious primary hurts them, but the people pointing out Biden’s weakness aren’t wrong.
> now voters want someone who isn’t old, who didn’t preside over inflation, and perhaps Biden would be better off not running...the people pointing out Biden’s weakness aren’t wrong.<
They may be right. They may be wrong. But they're definitely irrelevant: it's too late to organize a serious presidential campaign.
I wonder when folks will finally stop talking about getting a different nominee. Maybe three or four weeks after Super Tuesday?
I think you’re right about it being too late. I think the perfect time to announce he would not run for a second term would have been right after the Inflation Reduction Act passed- a great capstone for his career. But it seems we are going to roll the dice...
There's no way not to roll the dice. We don't have a crystal ball and so ANY situation (go with Biden, have a competitive, vituperative campaign between Whitmer/Shapiro/Harris, choose a seemingly solid nominee only to have things come to light in October, be dragged down by Biden's numbers, foolishly throw away the advantages of incumbency) is a gamble.
Overall I hope you’re right but a couple of things... I’ve heard the “if only Biden had run in 2016” thing a lot but I don’t buy it. I think it’s clear that Hillary still would have run and would have trounced him in the primary. There was no way he was going to beat “I’m with her” and the first woman president thing, especially with a policy message not that different from her’s, unlike Sanders.
Secondly- I’m having a hard time shaking the feeling that we are back in 2013, when Obama tried to gently suggest that Ruth Bader Ginsberg should retire when he had the Senate and could nominate and confirm a liberal successor, and she told him to pound sand. Certainly if Trump wins in 2024 it’s going to feel that way.
There’s a weird possibility that Clinton and Biden split their vote, and Sanders hitting his ceiling of 40% in a bunch of states ends up winning the primary.
The people who think that Sanders could've held up in the face of a truly vicious campaign against him are delusional. Clinton treated with him kids gloves and still beat him handily. Trump and the republicans would not have done so and would have beat him even more easily.
“ But I think it’s also in part because abortion rights is an almost uniquely uninteresting topic to debate — it’s what most people think versus a religious doctrine”
This is elucidated me actually exclaim “what?!” when I read it. I’m really not one to say you can’t opine on a topic regarding race if you aren’t black or gender if you aren’t a woman. But this is one of those cases where having a woman opine on this topic may have been the right call here
Because I’m sorry, how in the world is this not at the very least a health care issue. It’s been a core (and correct) part of the pro choice argument for decades that this is a medically necessary procedure and restricting or banning it’s use unnecessarily puts women’s health and life in danger. It’s been a core part of the expanding access to health care for decades
It’s also an essential core part of western philosophy for hundreds years; that an individual has fundamental control of what happens to their bodies. It only became a modern issue because only until modern times did enough people believe this core concept apply equally to men and women and unfortunately very clearly there enough people in America who don’t feel that way (the most strain of Christianity most against abortion is the strain that also most emphasized a woman is supposed to be subservient to her husband or man generally after all. You think that’s a mistake?).
This is like arguing the only reason people care about criminal justice reform is due to race and that it doesn’t really matter other than this one issue. Like yes it’s definitely part of it but it also clearly goes so far beyond that.
I think you're arguing past Matt here, or maybe you really do buy into the framing that conservatives oppose abortion because they just don't like women having bodily autonomy (or as you call it, health care).
I (and I believe Matt) reject that framing because there's a much simpler explanation, and one they'll straight up tell you they believe: it's a religious conviction. You can say it's "health care" all you want, it doesn't really move the needle for the 30ish-% of people who believe it's morally wrong and want to ban it outright.
It's clearly mostly religious, but it's also clear that it isn't simply a religious belief about ensoulment. Every study of pro-lifers back to Kristin Luker in the 1980's shows they are the dissenters from the sexual revolution, the people who still think God wants women to remain chaste and pure and think that legal abortion backstops what they see as immoral sexual activity by unmarried people and a sinful attempt to break the connection between sex and procreation.
That all IS religious but in no way is limited to souls.
I was raised evangelical and I think you're both right. It is (1) a religious conviction AND it is (2) a desire to punish "sinful" women for having sex. It just depends on what type of religious conservative you are. If you are very religious it is 75% #1 and 25% #2. If you are a marginally religious redhat it is 25% #1 and 75% #2.
His claim isn’t that there aren’t good arguments - it’s that the good arguments are all so completely familiar that there’s very little left to say. That’s why it’s uninteresting to debate, even though there’s a lot of disagreement.
Whereas with trans issues, the newness of the public discussion of it, and the subtlety of different views about what gender is and isn’t, mean that it’s very easy for someone to say something that a random person on the street will never have heard before, that will make them think.
And even on that point I'll say that's nonsense. Public opinion around 2nd trimester abortions have shifted notably. The exact logistics of regulations and restrictions is a very thorny issue with lots to talk about. Even reporting about how these restrictions have or haven't reduced abortion and changed women's choice sets. There's a lot to talk about, now that the debate has gone from being abstract to concrete. Polling and voting behavior has all changed to reflect this, in ways that are far more malleable than I would've thought two years ago.
I think Matt doesn't have a ton to say about this, because he's more interested in covering other stuff. That's all well and good, but I think he keeps understating the importance of the debate right now.
I don't think he's saying it's un*important*. He's saying it's un*interesting*, even though it's actually much more important and valuable to talk about than trans issues right now.
Matt's point is that while one side believes it to be a healthcare issue, the other side doesn't. If you can successfully frame the issue as only being about the adult woman's healthcare and not about a baby's right to be alive, then you've already won and there's nothing left to debate. Your argument is as unpersuasive to evangelicals as their argument is to you. I'm not advocating we give up on trying to persuade people, I'm simply acknowledging Matt's point that people don't like to debate this for good reason.
Biden's age isn't hurting him any more or less than Obama's race hurt him, any more than Hillary Clinton's gender hurt her. Rather, those things tend to wedge open and amplify whatever more generic political imperfections they have.
Biden's chief problem is that he was elected to make the bad things go away, to make the fear go away, to make the feeling of instability go away. And he hasn't, not really.
Great economy aside, great industrial-policy legislation aside, great crime record aside (read Matt's other posts on this, I implore all you young disagreeable dudes reading this!), Biden's America feels like a weirdly unstable equilibrium that could topple for no reason at any moment.
There are many reasons for that, inflation chief among them, Putin's war also, but the bottom line is that people still feel afraid, distrustful, and waiting for some kinda bullshit to happen.
(And given Trump's explicitly-stated plan to venge-purge the US government and install an autocracy, hard to blame them. Even if that is kind of, maddeningly, a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
So people feel the need to blame that on something, and they pick Biden's age. If they felt completely safe and prosperous and stable and 100% Back To Where Things Were, Joe Biden could be 95 years old and no one--NO ONE--would give a shit.
(Nate Silver disagrees, I'm sure, but he's a little bitter at life right now.)
Difference is that Hillary wasn’t becoming more “womanly” and Obama wasn’t becoming more black everyday. Biden is getting older everyday. Liability isn’t fixed but growing
Kind of an aside, but it was really interesting watching the returns coming in for Issue 1 (abortion) and Issue 2 (marijuana).
The initial tranche of early votes were not nearly as strongly pro-marijuana as they were pro-choice, creating a brief bit of panic among Issue 2 supporters. If both races narrowed at the same rate, then Issue 2 was going to be very tight.
But that’s not at all what happened. Issue 1 predictably tightened, but Issue 2 did not, and actually ended up half a point *ahead of* Issue 1. It’s just so jarring watching races that aren’t as geographically-correlated or as front-loaded in the early vote that I forgot an election night trajectory like this was possible.
Also proud to see counties deep in SE (Appalachian) Ohio with above-water support of marijuana. Interesting to think that West Virginia is probably closer to legal weed than is Indiana.
The hillbilly/redneck divide is real and important! 😅
Plenty of reactionary white guys LOVE their weed. They may hate women, but they LOVE their weed. Gone are the days when legal weed was a 100% liberal issue.
The Democratic party has popular ideas that win decisively even in “red” states like Ohio. It has unpopular leaders that poll poorly in swing states Democrats need to win. Keep the ideas, switch the leaders should not be a hot take. It is common sense.
The problem isn’t only Biden and Harris. It’s that our entire leadership class has grown so risk averse that no senator or governor is challenging our obviously too old, historically unpopular president. That Biden is disliked when unemployment is under 4% and inflation has declined by half shows the depth of his unpopularity. He is so old that achievements that would make a generic President popular don’t help him. Please find someone else.
As bad as Democrats are at this Republicans are even worse. I suppose the reason is that smart ambitious people see politics as a dead end and run companies instead?
No, the issue is you can vote for an abortion or Medicaid referendum, without voting for the same politican who is supported by The Other, where the Other is immigrants, feminists, BLM protestors, Muslims, college students, or whomever you dislike.
I’m pretty sure they are. See the Dave Weigel post on here. The “defund” rhetoric has almost entirely petered out. And crime has been dropping most places so it’s harder to run on the issue if you are GOP. Outside of inflation (and that’s on Jerome Powell at this point), it’s GOP best issue. But at a certain point, objective reality starts to bite even if it’s only moving the needle a few percentage points
Of course the depressingly hilarious exception is Long Island because of course a rich place with objectively low crime rates should have big shifts to the right based on “hey you hear. My buddy’s cousin who’s friend rides the subway says it’s never been worse”. Oh and NY Democratic Party is terrible. I actually think bad candidates and bad strategy is way overemphasized in post election moratoriums. But in NY I’m increasingly believing it’s a factor.
5. The interesting debates about abortion are almost tangential to the political discourse.
The majority consensus in every democratic country I can think of is that abortion should be available effectively on demand for an early abortion and available with a good reason for a later abortion.
Exactly when the dividing line between "early" and "late" should be can be anywhere from 12 to 24 weeks - countries with an early line tend to have a more relaxed view of what constitutes a "good reason" or (e.g. Norway) have two dividing lines, so early abortions are on demand, mid abortions need one of a long, generously interpreted list of reasons and late abortions need one of a short, tightly judged list. The other big factor is who is judging whether the presented reason is good enough; one major reason that many "pro-choice" organisations don't accept this sort of framework in the US is that they (not unreasonably) fear that the panel or court that determines whether a reason is sufficient can be stuffed with abortion opponents, meaning that no-one or almost no-one will get access to an abortion after the point that on-demand ceases.
There are some interesting policy design questions about how to create an abortion panel in a way that it can't be stuffed with people who will turn it into a rubber-stamp approval or rubber-stamp rejection process. Note that a politically-neutral civil service, medical profession and courts are routine in European countries, so they can be tapped for this; that's not true in the US, which makes this a real policy question.
Remember that almost no-one has a late abortion if they could have had an early one. That means that in almost every case, something has changed since early in the pregnancy; almost always late abortions are of pregnancies that were wanted early on (the main exception is people who couldn't afford an abortion until later on, which is also a public policy issue). When the change is a medical one, very few people who are OK with any abortions have a problem - if a woman discovers she has cancer, then few would require her to carry to term before she can start chemo (chemo is teratogenic). When it's a discovery that the foetus has no chance of living or will be born into a persistent vegetative state, few have many problems. When it's a discovery of a survivable disability (Down's, spina bifida, etc), more people are uncomfortable with a late abortion. When it's a change in economic circumstances (e.g. she loses her job, her husband loses his job, dies, or leaves her), even more people disapprove.
But there's plenty to debate when you get down into these kinds of details. It's just that this is mostly irrelevant to the actual legislative and political processes, where there just aren't debates about exactly what constitutes a threat to the mother's life, or exactly how disabled does the foetus need to be to permit an abortion. Even in the UK, where some now-easily-correctable disabilities are still included on the list that permits a late abortion (they weren't easily correctable in 1967 and the list hasn't been revised since), there's essentially zero political pressure to do anything about this other than from hardcore right-to-life groups - which are groups that can never win a majority because they aren't trusted not to be smuggling in some wider ban.
This is all true in terms of public opinion, but the GOP has completely destroyed any benefit of the doubt here. When faced with coming up with "good faith protections", they've either failed, and forced women to get to the edge of sepsis to have a second trimester abortion or give birth to a nonviable fetus. Or they did what Florida did, lie that they wouldn't go further, and then restrict abortion to 6 weeks.
Youngkin tried very hard to make this appeal to popular opinion. However, polling in many jurisdictions went from showing voters ok with vaguely defined restrictions on 2nd trimester abortions to opposing most of them, including in Virginia. I think last night's results clearly validated that shift. Voters don't trust Republicans to come up with a good-faith, popular alternative to the status quo. The outcome you talk about is broadly popular , but there is absolutely no trust there, and people broadly prefer the pre-Roe status quo.
Yeah, no-one trusts Republicans to do this and Democrats don't want to.
Note that the "late abortions" policy I'm talking about includes _third_ trimester abortions in many European countries. Norway's three stages are not exactly trimesters (the breakpoints are at 12 and 18 weeks). Britain (well, England, Wales and Scotland) defines an early abortion (on demand, de facto) as up to 24 weeks - it's not uncommon for Europeans who have applied for a "late" abortion in their own country and been denied to travel to England for an "early" abortion here (a private abortion).
I think people are in favour of restrictions in general terms but (because they don't spend lots of time thinking about the practicalities) when it comes to the specifics, the restrictions that they would actually favour are bans on abortions that basically never happen. The real arguments aren't over the medical cases; the median voter will accept just about any medical argument. It's the social/economic cases, where someone (the mother or the father, usually) loses a big chunk of their income. From the most sympathetic ("my husband has cancer and I want to care for him until he recovers and have a child after") to the least ("my husband went to prison"), these are hard cases and a lot of people get really conflicted about them.
The one that there is a solid majority against everywhere is "I changed my mind". No-one who favours any restrictions at all is OK with that as a reason to have a late abortion. The whole point of the deadline for early abortions is to make you make your mind up.
Personally: I'm not bothered; I'd happily allow abortions up to viability, and define viability as being the point that the foetus would survive without medical assistance outside the womb, which is much later than most people's version of viability, because I'd be saying "can it live without an incubator or a ventilator?".
Regarding the social/economic case: I would think that only makes sense for a first trimester abortion. Once a wanted pregnancy is further along, it seems it would be more similar to the situation where the child is already born--economic setbacks can happen at any time, people rarely put their kids up for adoption when they occur--they find a way to deal with it, get help from family and/or government assistance and carry on.
That is probably true but that also begs the question of why we would need to create a legal limit. It is going to be incredibly rare when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy that she wanted for the first trimester for social and economic issues for the same reasons that giving up a child in those circumstances are rare. And those rare cases may be ones where the situation are unique enough that people might be inclined to grant an exception. (i.e. the relationship with the father was new at the time of conception by the mother has since experience domestic violence and stalking from him and fears that sharing a child with him will result in her having an 18 year connection with him that will put her and the child at grave risk of violence; family.) I am not a Libertarian, but I think it is a mistake to think that we have to create a law to stop everything we think that no decent, reasonable person would be likely to do. We could just assume than that even without the rule most people won't do it and that those who do will likely be disturbed people who would do it anyway or decent and reasonable people who are facing unique circumstances that we can't anticipate. When I look to the abortion rates in Europe where there is generally easier and free access to abortions, I am mostly struck by how much lower they are than in the United States. It suggests to me that folks in the US are likely having a lot more abortions than they would like to have because of lack of access to sex ed and birth control and weaker social safety nets for poor families and single mothers. If folks really wanted to reduce abortion rates they could work on those issues and hope to see numbers naturally fall rather than figuring rules to prevent them when that doesn't seem to make that big a difference in rates overall but could capture individual women in hellish cricumstances. I would note that when people do want to give up their live children because of social and economic issues we generally let them do so because we realize that the alternative is potentially leave kids in abusive and neglectful situations with parents who don't or can't properly care for them.
This really undersells the differences between the US and Europe. In Europe, abortions are generally very easy to access. There’re more local providers and they’re often free, which means basically everyone who wants one electively can get one during the first trimester. In the US, Republicans have pushed to make first trimester abortions difficult to obtain. Even before Dobbs, abortion clinics had been closing in the South and it’s not covered by Medicaid. A European style abortion regime would require Republicans to stop using any means necessary, like abortion clinic hallway size rules, to limit action to first trimester abortions.
Yes, that's a really important point that I missed: people in the US often have later abortions because they couldn't afford or couldn't get to the clinic any sooner.
I wonder how hard it would be for the federal government to include abortion in Medicaid and in the PPACA minimum coverage for insurance for residents of states where abortion is legal at (say) the eight week point.
It would be impossible. Federal funding for abortion is a third rail for many, particularly from red states.
Also, aren't a huge number of early abortions in Europe done with medication, without much consultation? If we wanted to make early abortion easy, we could. But "we" don't.
Re your second paragraph: really really hard. Actually, let me correct that: really really really really hard.
Government funded abortions are the brightest of red lines for Republicans. Even if the Democrats got rid of the filibuster and somehow passed legislation to that effect, the next time the Republicans got control out would go that funding.
It drove me crazy for years to hear mainstream pro-life pundits lament (usually with little pushback if any) that American abortion laws during Roe were so extreme, even socialist Europe was stricter, and all pro-lifers want is reasonable limits. Really brazen lying, or brazen ignorance, or both.
But it's symptomatic of why they have the problems they do now: All they cared about was the ban, not any of the enabling conditions in Europe that make the ban politically sustainable.
The fact that the 5th circuit exists is where unfortunately your plan falls apart for me. Because we essentially have this panel you talk about already, it’s called the courts. And given the make up of that Court seems likely that anyone living under the 5th circuit would find there would be a de facto abortion ban after six weeks and if they had their way a de facto ban outright.
So count me among those voters who is very against restrictions because I know what the judges the other side puts on the bench are like. Matt sort of alluded to this in his last bullet point that full abortion ban is part of the GOP platform. It’s very clearly not a fringe position in the party.
Yeah, I'm with you in practice as for US policy. I do wonder if a state could pass something on these lines, but there's clearly no way to have a national policy on abortion. The only thing to hold the line on is that US citizens and residents have the absolute right to travel to another state for an abortion. States do not have jurisdiction over acts performed by their residents and citizens in other states and they don't have the right to stop their residents and citizens from travelling to another state to do something that is illegal at home.
The scenario that I think Colin is specifically referring to is a 5th Circuit panel upholding the ruling of a rogue anti-abortion district judge that tries to place some sort of nationwide injunction against abortion drugs. I'll give my thoughts on that in a direct reply to Colin.
I think that if that happened, SCOTUS would likely grant cert, and I could see them overturning it. Roberts as usual wants to try to save the GOP from deeply unpopular results, and I could see Kavanaugh joining that. And I could also see Gorsuch in particular stressing that abortion policy is a matter for the state level, and the state level only.
You are in part correct; one case I was definitely thinking of is the Mifepristone case.
But I should emphasize it's way beyond that with the 5th circuit. The one you're referring to is probably the most famous for a variety of reasons, but there are some other truly bonkers rulings, beyond just abortion by the way. If me a non-lawyer can say with pretty good certainty "that is some truly deranged reasoning" than something is up.
To circle back, another 5th circuit ruling. Remember this James Ho insanity https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/19/abortion-pill-ruling-environment-00111843
My point isn't necessarily to say this will stand once it gets to SCOTUS. But more what I think are flaws in the "lets have a panel" decide approach. The type of people likely to be on these panels in places like the deep south are not going to be right of center moderates on this issue.
Right, I wasn't trying to limit it to just that one case.
in re the reasons for late-term abortions: I had also thought that most late-term abortions were pregnancies that were wanted and then something changed. I am not sure the data supports that though.
For example, this paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1363/4521013 describes five categories of women getting abortions after 20 weeks: Raising children alone, Depressed or using illicit substances, Conflict with male partner or domestic violence, Trouble deciding and access problems, Young and nulliparous. The discussion is pretty qualitative, but most of the women in their study seem to have gotten a late abortion either because they recognized the pregnancy late or because they had access problems.
If someone has better sources on this I would be very interested to see them! It is certainly true that they are rare and therefore not that easy to study.
I know I've been working on data from Europe rather than the US because the data is much higher quality here - in many countries the panels produce annual reports on why abortions were requested and why they were approved/rejected.
But, of course, one reason for the difference is that access problems are much rarer in European countries with universal healthcare!
Interesting, yes, I would not be surprised if there were many more late abortions for access reasons in the US than in Europe.
20 weeks is third trimester now?
Measuring pregnancy in weeks always makes my (likely ignorant male) brain malfunction.
Sorry, I was assuming ESVM’s comment was the context. I think it’s important, when looking at a dataset on reasons for “late abortions” in a jurisdiction where “late” starts at 20 weeks, to make distinctions between early-late and late-late. It’s far easier to see things like access issues and ignorance and so on being meaningful drivers at 20 weeks than at 30.
20 weeks isn't third trimester. I do think third trimester abortions are mostly for fetal anomalies (and elective abortions at that stage are also very hard to get, they are legally restricted even in most blue states and cost a lot of money).
This might be true about third-trimester abortions, but I've found it hard to find data that backs it up.
In this video, Susan Robinson estimates that ~20% of her patients have a fetal indication, and that many or perhaps most either sincerely didn't know they were pregnant or were in denial about being pregnant (often teenagers): https://youtu.be/DSUj3xVBjpA?si=PmNXCj_Pd0VzGFz5&t=303
But her sample may be biased, since I think she's one of the few doctors in the whole country who performs third-trimester abortions without a medical or fetal indication. And she seems to be talking about her "later abortion" patients in general, not only third trimester.
Yeah the idea that abortion is uninteresting to debate is a weird one from Matt. "Embryos are full human persons/no they're not" is a pretty uninteresting topic, I agree, but that's a shallow view of the issues underlying abortion opinion. Abortion law and sentiment isn't just about what rights a fetus has. It's about what we owe (or don't) to those who need help, what requirements we are willing to put on peoples' bodies for the sake of others, what kinds of families we view as good, the incredibly murky nature of pregnancy in which "life of the mother" means almost nothing, the role of the state in healthcare, the limits of law in deterring drug-related activity, modern approaches to parenting, and everything in between.
All of these are things are pretty core progressive policy questions! Just because right-wingers think the only relevant question is the fetus' moral status doesn't mean we have to agree.
America just doesn't really have room for nuance and shades of grey. Everything is framed as us vs them, and in the case of abortion, heaven vs hell. I agree very much with what you are saying. But I can't see such nuance working nationally. Maybe it needs to be like marijuana - a few states try it out, and then it spreads.
Sure: I agree with that.
But there's enough policy meat for Matt to write a column about policy design if he wanted to: the problem is that there's no meaningful relationship between that and the political process.
If Matt tried to design a policy that imposed any restrictions on second trimester abortions, he’d get massive blowback from the left. Yet if his policy didn’t tightly restrict second trimester abortions, it would do little good politically. American support for elective abortions is real, but only if they happen before the fetus is much bigger than a raspberry. I’m totally comfortable with the median voters view in this issue!
"he’d get massive blowback from the left"
Only if they're subscribers to SB and see it. Seem to be fewer and fewer of those.
I think it’s not going to take place nationally, but at the state level, which is already happening.
The two women I know who had late-term abortions both had fetuses with lethal abnormalities. In one case, the fetus's brain never formed. It would have died shortly after birth. It really irks me that people seem to think some woman just changed her mind at 25 weeks or something.
That is a great overview of the dynamics, thanks!
There is one extremely large difference between a late-term fetus and a newborn that often seems to get discounted when there are no women in the conversation.
I mean… to abort a late-term fetus still requires one to birth it.
I think it’s fairly reasonable for the state to claim a compelling interest in whether it’s birthed alive or dead at that point,
I actually agree, but strongly object to Sam's insinuation that drawing the distinction at all is an ITT failure.
To be clear, she did not actually say that.
Absolutely you can, and I don't think I was saying otherwise.
The point that I was making is that the complexities of late-term fetuses and the medical complications that lead to most of the small number of late-term abortions (and I'm talking third trimester here, not second) are really not relevant to a political debate that is concentrated on one side trying to use any restriction as an opportunity to maximise the number of women who are denied an abortion and the other side trying to ensure that early abortions are widely available. If any regulation is (rightly) suspect of being a TRAP law, or of being weaponised as a TRAP law by a future GOP Governor, then the only political options are going to be a full ban or near-total deregulation.
The large number of people, probably a plurality, certainly including the median voter in almost every state, who have no real issue with an early abortion (of a fetus smaller than a raspberry) and do have a problem with a 39-week abortion are largely unable to gain traction within the policy side of what is going on. No-one is trying to design regulations that will make early abortion easier and late abortion harder and there's just no political space for saying that.
Matt is very much an "art of the possible" guy, and I think he has (rightly) intuited that there's no possible way within the current political context to achieve anything with the sort of nuanced regulation that we've been talking about in this subthread.
I live in the completely different political context of the UK; there absolutely is political space to get somewhere here, and that's one reason why I do care much more about policy design.
I think Biden is also paying a price for his Secret Presidency low key style of governing. It's mostly been effective at getting stuff done.
But I think people, especially younger low engagement types, really do expect the President to be a TV/internet star and govern through dramatic speeches, commanding press conferences and such.
The Coumo buzz has been memory holed, because he was actually terrible, but it was a thing. And one thing I have seen pointed at for Beshear was his performance doing Covid and tornado press conferences.
Sooner rather than later Biden probably needs to get out on camera in a sustained way with a persona he can sell. If he can't do that...
"If you are not on TV you are not governing." - Matt Gaetz
Didn't we elect this Biden guy because we wanted a break from the nightmare that is a tv star president? I guess voters have short memories though.
I certainly voted for him in part because I wanted less crazy shit, and crazy shit does grab headlines and increase visibility. However, I'm sure Biden could figure out a way to be somewhat more visible without doing crazy shit.
And to the extent Biden is visible it is generally for his most left leaning acts and hiding his more centrist ones. Examples of this would be oil production, transitory inflation, appointments such as Lina Khan, etc. It's almost like he hides the more moderate positions and highlights the more extreme ones.
I think this hurts him with a lot of people who thought they were voting for a moderate. If he spent the same energy focusing on his more moderate actions, he would have more internal conflict but might have a higher approval rating with moderates. He would also likely govern in a more moderate fashion.
I wish the far-left would act in a manner consistent with their stated concerns around a possible Trump election, instead of using Trump as tool to push governance further to the left. I suspect Biden will still win, despite recent polling, but it is definitely possible that he won't.
"Sooner rather than later Biden probably needs to get out on camera in a sustained way"
Yes. We call that a "political campaign." The thing that the vast majority of voters will start paying attention to in, oh, six or seven months from now.
He needs to engage sooner rather than wait for Labor Day 2024, I think. If he doesn't prove up to it, we should know that.
"But I think people, especially younger low engagement types, really do expect the President to be a TV/internet star and govern through dramatic speeches, commanding press conferences and such."
I agree but they are a tiny part of the elctorate (both because they are a small demographic and because younger, low engagement types, by definition, don't vote much.
The big presidential elections with high turnout are decided by a bunch of normies who really only want to think about politics every four years. Most of them vote party line, but most of the swing voters among them really value some sense of normalcy/boringness.
True. But at a certain point you need everyone to know that you’re the reason things are boring.
But the election is won by a small number of marginal voters in swing states who are low-information and basically voting for who they'd rather have a beer with. Biden only won by 50k votes in a few key states. That tiny part of the electorate that you describe is also who actually decides the winner (in 6 states, that is)
I think "the difference is only 50k" and "the election is decided by these specific 50k people" are two vastly different statements, and I disagree quite a lot with the second one.
The marginal voter in 2024 who swings the election will almost certainly be a younger, low-engagement, low-information voter in 1 of 6 swing states. I mean, anyone who doesn't have defined partisan affiliations at this point is probably a low-information voter. There are very, very few highly informed independents
The open question is whether getting Biden in front of the cameras more often would just make his age an even more salient characteristic. I mean, he does look and act 80, so perhaps fewer opportunities to remind people of that would be better.
The problem is that there are plenty of TikToks and Fox News propaganda supercuts that make Biden look old and senile, but not much countervailing content that makes him look like Jed Bartlet. So his "senility" is made salient anyway through bullshit.
Really great note, Matt. You sound positively giddy! Which is awesome.
A few quick thoughts...
"Democrats now dominate among the most civically minded, most conscientious voters." Woot! We should celebrate this as an enormous victory. But we should also strive to increase the proportion of the population who are civically minded conscientious voters! High turnout is good on the merits: it underpins the legitimacy of the undertaking.
"In the abstract, I think highly engaged people tend to underrate winning." Hell no! I have been walking around with a bounce in my step, waving my hands in the air, with a smile a mile wide all day.
"Everyone should look very hard at Andy Beshear 2028." And Gretchen Whitmer 2028, and Josh Shapiro 2028, and Amy Klobuchar 2028, and JB Pritzker 2028, and Raphael Warnock 2028....The list goes on. The Democratic Party's 'bench' is a veritable embarrassment of riches. We just need to buckle down and grind out the 2024 contest to build the bridge through to them.
Beshear 2028 could be awesome. But only if he shows he has national chops. Dem governor in a red state is nice but by itself does nothing for you. Granted, the way Steve Bullock took the party by storm and easily rolled his way to the nomination in 2020 is counter evidence.
It's actually funny (the bad kind of funny) that Bullock went and lost the 2020 Montana Senate race by 10 points. This was just 4 years after he won their Governor's race by 1.5 points.
I suppose I understand why Warnock makes it onto these lists on paper, but I have to say that from what I’ve seen from him...underwhelmed me. Maybe some Georgians can chime in with their pov, but while I’m sure he is a decent Senator, I haven’t gotten the strongest chief executive vibes from him compared to a few of the others listed.
Is there any evidence that winning a tough state-level race makes you a more attractive presidential candidate? I'd honestly like to know. Pre-grouchy Nate Silver might have useful things to say about that.
I could absolutely see Warnock as a Chief Executive. He has run several disciplined and successful campaigns in a state and a political environment that is marginally hostile to him. He is an exemplary communicator. He is a gifted retail politician as well as being an electric public speaker. He has a real understanding for the nitty gritty of crafting implementable policy and has a keen sense for making tactical and strategic alliances. The Ebenezer Baptist Church is a large organization and he serves in what is effectively an executive role there.
My great preference would actually be for Senator Warnock to remain in the senate keeping Georgia Blue for many years and focusing on being an historically great legislator. But who am I to stand in the way of anyone's dreams of the presidency.
I only voted for him because of the alternative. Don't hate him, but he's definitely to the left of me.
Unless Biden dies in his second term and we have President Harris and all those better options are afraid to challenge her in 2028.
I for one am going to hope that the President doesn't die until he is long out of office.
But were he to die I am reasonably confident that she would face multiple challengers in 2028.
There are things worse than death - a continual slow decline that ends with the difficult decision to invoke the 25th amendment.
Biden's probably *not* the type to try to hang on if it's getting to that point. My guess is that if it's at a point where he simply can't do the job any more, he would resign.
Related, the concerns about Biden's age are really concerns about Kamala Harris. The worst-case outcomes of having an 80-year-old President aren't actually problems because he's not President any more at that point.
That's often not how things work. There are many elderly people who feel that they are still extremely competent and capable. But observers can clearly see they are not. Nor is this linear. Many people have good days and bad days, or do well in the morning, but not great at night.
A real question is if Biden feels that he is still very capable, but those around him observe degradation in his faculties. Or if he's doing okay, but during a period of high stress, suddenly starts doing worse in the middle of a crisis.
That is one possible outcome. But I have to say, my father is 85, still mentally agile, and as strong as an ox. Part of the reason that he is aging so well is living a well considered, active, outdoors focused and largely stress free life in Vermont. He has been blessed with good medical care as well. Joe Biden's life is probably considerably more stressful than my father's, but outside of that, Biden has lived a life where the outcome set does tend to skew more towards the outcome my dad is living than the outcome you describe above. Biden also is the beneficiary of perhaps the best medical care in the world. I am not overly concerned about Joe Biden's age (though I am terrified by the way that the opposition is weaponizing his age).
Well, I hope he is able to live a longer and healthier life too, but actuarial realities are actuarial realities. And of course there is always the risk of a serious health episode that results in his resigning during the second term.
I think you're right that she would probably face challengers, but one wonders! The timing could also make a difference. If she became POTUS very early on (say in 2025) and she's not a complete disaster, maybe she'd be harder to dislodge than if she took over in the summer of '27 and the '28 election was already looming.
At any rate, I guess we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. He's got to make it through this term first.
Why?
"But we should also strive to increase the proportion of the population who are civically minded conscientious voters!"
Agreed, but easier said that done--and even more difficult when it comes to producing reliable voters that will always vote for you & your side.
Maybe that's because "reliable voters that will always vote for you and your side" is...NOT civically minded conscientious voters! Partisans and zealots make democracy difficult and function worse than it could if everyone was more reasonable and accommodating to the "other" side's reasonable demands - and you need conscientious people to articulate and agree that those demands are reasonable! If people actually only voted for the candidate that would most improve things overall, rather than promise to immiserate the "other" side most spectacularly, I think most people would call that a win.
Many of the worst excesses of the left in the past decade has been the result of lacking a credible "loyal opposition" of reasonable conservatives to work with and quell progressive's worst impulses. But it's hard to work with people who have ideological blinders that are fundamentally at odds with Reality (unfortunately, this statement applies to both the Right and the Left).
Indeed - very little worth having comes free or easy.
In terms of the voters voting with me...Well, I would hope that I was always on the side of the civically minded and conscientious voters. Were I not, the problem would lie with me not them!
Free college tuition?
Not Pritzker: he’s an underperformer and everyone else you listed is an overperformer.
By what metrics, please?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Illinois
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Illinois_gubernatorial_election
Great article but I find these billeted points not fun to read and would rather a deep dive into Andy beshear or the polling stats or whatever.
That won’t come until enough days after the election that he’s had a chance to write it. (He didn’t want to start writing that take if Beshear went down.)
A lot of long articles make me go dude just give us the bullet points then I get it and am like this ain’t no article! But yes I think beshear article good idea bc telling people to be more pro-manchin is a tough sell bc he annoys everyone so beshear analysis will prob be a bit more palatable.
¿Por qué no los dos? I too wouldn't mind an article with the main focus being on Andy Beshear.
Sorry bulleted not billeted
That's good because I was worried about a Third Amendment violation.
You can edit, at least if you use the web, by clicking on the ellipsis in the lower right corner of your comment. It's pretty silly that Substack makes you do this instead of just having it as a displayed option next to Like/Reply/Share.
Re #9, I think some of the negative voter sentiment about the economy (despite good fundamentals) is people cranky about no longer getting/having the extra money we gave them during COVID. The direct stimmy payments, enhanced UI, child tax credit, etc all ended and we got inflation at the same time. You can argue about how many points of the inflation that last COVID package caused, but I think the combination of higher prices paired with the loss of extra inflow hit a lot of low-to-mid families. They liked getting extra for doing nothing, and Joe Biden is who they're gonna blame, fair or not.
I also have a pet theory that some of the negativity is that we've valorized victimhood somewhat and people are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction even if their lives are more convenient and comfortable than they have ever been. There are real problems, of course, especially in the housing market. But I have started to wonder if we will ever get back to a place where people are willing to admit that things are pretty good. Or that America is already pretty great. 😎
The trick to voter sentiment about the economy is that actually Biden's economy has been pretty great for people at the bottom end of the income scale, because persistently low unemployment and worker shortages greatly help their bargaining power; McDonald's where I live is advertising $17/hour and you can tell that fast food restaurants are having to scrape deeper into the bottom of the barrel, so it's easier for people with felony convictions, etc. to get hired. This also means in addition to general staffing issues, it's even harder to staff, say, the overnight shift, so the McDonald's and Wal-Mart closest to me now close at 11 PM and it's presumably because they can't staff those hours (or it's not "worth it" to staff them at those hours; the McDonald's closer to the university campus in my town is still open 24 hours, but the one surrounded by neighborhoods of families with children isn't.)
It's the first time since probably before Reagan that a strong economy hasn't disproportionately accrued benefits to affluent college-educated people, and those people are pissed off. But if you're on the left, and especially if you've made concern for the working class into a personality, you can't come out and SAY this. So they pretend that they're worse off.
And notably, the people who have actually benefited from the current economy are the least likely to vote and the least likely to have a big voice in the discourse. You know who does, though? Media and tech workers, two segments of the economy where there clearly has been a decline.
Exactly.
Gosh darn it, if America can't keep it's McDonalds open past 11pm then the socialists really have won!
Great points, and I've seen this backed up elsewhere. If the post-COVID recovery is helping to reduce some of the wealth inequality on the low end, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in another national election. It does seem like the amorphous middle class has the most presence in elections/electoral speeches, so it may be a rough year for Biden. But I think it's a positive change nonetheless.
Hmmm. I kind of disagree that the labor supply/wage inflation situation has only benefited lower wage workers. Being a "laptop class" IT worker, my targeted group of specialized devs and ops specialists got an almost unheard of, for the company I work for, off-year raise because the company started bleeding a lot of talent to higher offers (also offering fully remote work) coming from many directions. And this wasn't just a localized experience with this company, "The Great Resignation" saw a lot of mid-to-higher wage workers bid up their value by taking offers and forcing existing companies to raise their salaries to keep their existing talent (or offer the amenties/benefits, including guaranteed remote work).
I do think the post-COVID labor market benefited pretty much all levels of workers, although definitely agree that in particular lower wage/lower skilled workers got a BIG boost as well, but this was one of those times when a tighter labor supply really benefited workers up and down the ladder - which is great! What's baffling is why so many of these same workers aren't seeing that as the gain that it was : /
Of course now we see many marquee employers walking back the remote working options, but with appears to be limited success/power in enforcing it. It's still overall an employee's market, which again I don't get why so many are so down on the economy. This has literally not happened for decades!
Are affluent college-educated people who claim to have concern for the working class really the ones who are mad at Biden and saying the economy sucks?
I think it’s much more likely to be the heavily Republican small business owner types, who often aren’t college educated and don’t really have any concern for the working class.
Yeah, the small business owners are mad but they're irrelevant here because they were never voting Biden regardless. The loudest complainers on Twitter seem to be affluent college-ed types.
>I also have a pet theory that some of the negativity is that we've valorized victimhood somewhat<
Or, maybe it's mainly Fox News:
https://jabberwocking.com/economic-gloom-is-all-about-republicans/#:~:text=Republican%20optimism%20about%20the%20economy,else%20happening%20in%20the%20world.
Also, before people say "Well, of course lefty Kevin Drum would write that!"—I'll point out he's just regurgitating Gallup results. It really does appear that sour sentiment about the economy is overwhelmingly a Republican phenomenon these days. Our two political tribes no longer agree on what color the sky is.
That's a fair observation re Republicans and their insta-polarization, but in this Sept poll from Suffolk, 34% of Democrats said the economy is getting worse. 76% of indie/other also said that. We're talking about a pretty large chunk of non-GOP folks who hold this negative sentiment.
https://www.suffolk.edu/academics/research-at-suffolk/political-research-center/polls/issues-polls
Asymmetric polarization strikes again. The voters of the party out of power always rate the economy worse when their party is not president but the phenomenon appears much more pronounced when a democrat is president; at least since 2008.
Yes ^^. Democrats, at least, as of the Trump term, were still willing to give Trump more favorable ratings on his economic performance, even if they overall rated him poorly. Republican voters have not given that benefit of the doubt since Clinton. IOW, Republican voters will rate the economic performance much more on partisan lines than Democratic voters, which results in this uneven (UNFAIR) situation for Democratic POTUS's who can deliver a booming economy but will never get credit for it from at least 48% of the electorate. Republican POTUS's can at least get a grudging tick from less partisan Democrats, let alone a near guaranteed 90%+ Republican built in thumbs up all around that gives them anywhere from a 10-20% built in advantage on this polling question.
People's income, including ARP payments, generally kept up with inflation in gross terms.
My unproven guess is that people were just really shocked to see prices for everything suddenly surge. Most of them had never seen such a thing in their lifetime and it was scary whether or not they could objectively afford it.
Assuming inflation stays roughly at 4% or below for the next year, I think they'll get used to the new normal and it won't bother them very much come Election Day.
I just think a lot of people are seeing through the "good fundamentals".
Bonuses last year - for nearly everyone I've talked to - were below target range. This year looks worse. Any recent stock option package looks unrealistically underwater. If you're in an industry that touches real estate in any capacity you're f@cked (i.e., 50% declines to target comp. range). If you're in M&A -- deal volume has also dried up because sellers are holding to pre-ZIRP valuation ranges. If you're a manager, you've been working layoff plans continually since Q4 2022. I was just re-working our budget and our monthly grocery spend is up ~ 40% vs. 2021. Some of this is shifting from going out to cooking more at home - but even that feels like a downgrade because the driver is restaurant prices are up so much. This staples level inflation is hitting our hourly employees even harder since pay raises haven't kept up.
I'm literally trying to think of anyone I know who's having a good time economically right now ... there's a distressed RE asset guy who's never seen better deal flow, Cook County pushed another huge property tax hike so a lawyer who fights those is ripping, a friend just left big CPG to run marketing for a start-up ... feels few and far between.
I stopped reading after “bonus.”
You know who doesn’t get a bonus?
My buddy who now runs the parts department at his dealership because the old dude retired and they more than doubled his pay and gave their hourly guys all 15% last year and this year both.
My neighbors who work in a restaurant (back of house) and a hardware store and now make a combined $100k for the first time in their 40’s.
My tenants, construction worker and nurse’s assistant, who got such big bumps in pay that they were finally able to move out of their parents’ places and in together.
Fuck the whiny-ass PMC people with their “in this house we believe” signs and desperate contortion to convince themselves the working classes are worse off instead of them finally clawing some of their own back from folks like you and I.
That's great for all of them. Our hourly technicians total comp. is up >50% vs. 2019 baselines and that feels good, that's changed their lives. My point here is just that people keep questioning / seem confused why Trump is running ahead of Biden and this tale of two economies where the PMC is getting squeezed seems to be a part of it. Marc thinks this will all stabilize by the election - hope he's right. Just thinking about the waves of layoffs coming ... I'm less sure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/us/politics/biden-trump-2024-poll.html
EDIT: Even our entry level employees are on a bonus plan - I also don't get why this is such a big deal.
If the majority of the PMC people were honest in their bitching I’d be fine with it, it’s the profound mendacity that puts me off.
Though in fairness my comp was up 10% in nominal terms last year, will be up about another 10% this year, and next year with a full year at my current package will have me up 15% more.
Then back to small raises for a while, but my wife’s new job will roughly double her income next year and we have another rental finishing up construction so we’ll go from spending $75k this year to making $15k next year on that.
I had to look up mendacity. That's a great word. I think I'm seeing something different though. It seems real. So many layoffs. The commercial real estate brokers / developers are looking at > 50% drops in total comp. Next year looks worse. Etc.
What layoffs?
Tech is bleeding some people, office-focused commercial real estate is imploding.
My software firm is hiring, every engineering and construction firm I’m familiar with (and the sectoral data) are going gangbusters and desperate for people, manufacturing is gangbusters, most service fields are gangbusters.
Is Chicago just imploding on its own?
"Bonuses last year - for nearly everyone I've talked to - were below target range. This year looks worse"
This is true but also really short memory thinking. If you were in tech, or finance, or a lot of other industries, you've seen incredible wage growth from 2012 - 2022. Like, more than 10% a year in many of those industries. And 2020 - 2022 were boom years. A lot of people in tech saw ridiculous 30-50% wage growth in those years (much more if you count stock equity compensation). And regarding layoffs -- with the huge, ill-advised hiring booms that were going on, there was a ton of migration from other industries to tech, and the people being laid off now are largely those groups. Which is terrible for them, no doubt, but you see this in a lot of markets (e.g. a huge number of people became real estate agents from 2015-2022, because of the boom, and many of them are now gone, whereas the lifer real estate agents are still around).
So it seems disingenuous to believe that "mah boom won't go on forever" is the same as "the economy is in decline". I think if a lot of these people were being honest with themselves, they would recognize this.
Yeah, I wonder if there isn't a useful distinction to be drawn between "ZIRP Boom Tech" (which is what "tech" shorthand usually means) and "We Sell A Product At Profit-Making Prices And Have Done So For Many Years" tech.
Knock on wood, those of us in the latter camp did mostly fine over the last decade and we're still doing mostly fine today.
Which one is Amazon? They seem like the latter to me, but definitely way overhired in the "the new business model of the [andemic will last forever!" hysteria, and then of course laid a lot of people off when it turned out that pandemics can, in fact, end.
Amazon seems to be its own special little bean, not fitting neatly in either category. Focused for many years on explosive growth over profits, but *mostly* never fell victim to the more Googley "We have more money than we know what to do with, we should just point the money cannon in all directions and hire everyone".
I don't disagree with any of this. All great points. It's been a really good 10 year run for a lot of people. I'm just trying point out - seemly unsuccessfully here - that when poll after poll come back that people are dissatisfied with the direction of the economy ... Biden's position / message better not be to discount it and point to some aggregate "fundamentals". He needs to address it. There are a number of industries imploding right now. I can't seem to fact check this but I bet 2023 will have the highest number of layoffs since 2009 and maybe more. I posted down thread, but there's a list of companies that have announced layoffs this year and I had to stop scrolling because it kept going. Even if you're honest with yourself that you've had a good run, if your company is announcing layoffs -- it's just really hard to feel secure and have a strong outlook. I certainly don't.
The economy is not fundamentally good and we know that because bonuses are smaller and there are fewer M&A deals?
Was this meant as a joke?
People view the economy through their household finances. Probably 40% of our company is on the corp. bonus plan. Everyone took home less income this year vs. the prior years and next year's outlook looks worse. Our company is hardly unique and we're just some small industrial company. Feels weird to handwave declining household income - coupled with declining purchasing power - by pointing to the macro fundamentals.
Real wages are up, better than inflation, and especially for the lower half of the population.
I don't know anyone on a corporation bonus plan.
IDK then. Base + bonus is the standard comp. plan for public companies. Bigger picture ... There's no way "real wages are up" and we're getting polling that indicates 75% of the US thinks the economy is trending in the wrong direction. That's the point I'm making. There's a clear disconnect with the "fundamentals".
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
I don't think I would put it that way. I would describe it as: everyone hated when wages were low and stuff was cheap. Now wages are high and stuff is expensive...and they hate it even more.
I also think there's a disconnect between "my personal economic experience" and "what I'm hearing about the economy". Lots and lots of polling and analysis demonstrates this disconnect as to where voters will rate their personal economic situation as "decent" or "good", but then go on to rate the economy overall as "poor". And it's odd because the typical voter "rating" of the economy *is* their personal economic experience ("voting based on your wallet"), but the polling seems to show that there's a sense of precariousness, that while "my" individual situation might be decent *now*, and sure paying a few bucks more here and there for various grocery items based on the prices pre-2021 might not be ideal, but it's not breaking my bank or meaningfully changing my spending habits, but I'm hearing a LOT about inflation and potential recession threats through various media sources that I consume, so it might mean that "my" economic experience is atypical, and could radically change at any point, and therefore, the overall economic rating suffers. In addition, the higher interest rates might be inhibiting future plans (moving out of a rental into a home, etc), so while "status quo" seems OK, the conditions might be limiting for my personal future.
But honestly, I think the media hammering about inflation, and the very sort of personalized reporting it's largely chosen to portray the situation under (lots of "man at the gas pump griping about gas prices", without a whole lot of even surface level analysis about the causes of inflation might be driving that "my economy is good but everyone else's appears to suck so mine might start sucking real soon" that is driving down the polling (and Biden's approvals in this matter). In this sense, I think the "MSM", including local and nightly news, has done a real disservice in informing voters about the nature of inflation, let alone the seeming insistence on framing it as a "political concern", as in "Inflation is hurting Biden, polls say", which carries that message (and blame) forward. If voters were better informed about inflation - say, like when egg prices temporarily spiked due to avian flu - and absent a "horse race" context, would they be so eager to blame Biden for the price spike in eggs?
You don't mention crime here, but there were a few interesting results in that space.
1) Democrats nominated left-wingers for Allegheny County executive and DA; they nearly lost the first race and lost the second. (The incumbent DA, a Democrat, lost to the primary to criminal justice reformer then just kept running as a Republican.) This while the Democratic judicial candidate was winning the county by 25 points. Sara Innamorato, the new executive, had won a state legislative seat as a DSA member, but broke with it and renounced socialism as Republicans warned that she and the DA candidate would turn the area into San Francisco.
2) Rs picked up a few city and county races with anti-crime, anti-homeless camp messaging. But they lost where this stuff just wasn't as much of an issue. They flopped hard in Indianapolis, where the Dem mayor had hired a ton of new cops - people just didn't buy that he was a police defunder, while he trashed the GOP nominee for being a Trump supporter.
3) The "defund" stuff also seems to have petered out in legislative races, because no Democrat in a competitive seat is dumb enough to say "defund the police." It really does look like people have separated municipal/DA etc races, where the winners can change policy, with legislative races, where to prove that a Democrat will cut police funding you need to stretch and say "he's endorsed by defund the police activists" (which is always going to be true because of the progressive groups that endorsed "defund" during the 10 minutes when it was trending).
The key Virginia race, in Loudoun County, had a Dem prosecutor running against a wealthy Republican who kept insisting that she would let criminals run free. Like, an ad where a guy broke into a house and thanked Russet Perry (the Dem) for making crime legal. At the same time, the Republican was campaigning with the county sheriff who got re-elected *because crime is down.* You just can't fake this stuff after a point.
Always like seeing your appearances here! Good stuff.
In Seattle the first day numbers for our City Council races indicated a hard turn to the Right after many, many cycles of moving ever more Left. A Seattle Right isn't the same as a National Right - Our political spectrum is more like Canada than the US. But the folks ahead are way more "law and order" and "let's see what arresting a lot of homeless people and drug addicts does?" than any candidates that have been successful in past years. We all vote by mail in Seattle and it typically takes about 5 days for all the votes to get counted and during that period there has been historically an 8% to 12% shift Left as more progressive votes seem to vote later. That may flip a few close seats here so we get a fairly balanced council. In my district the more progressive candidate is only down by 400 votes so almost any shift left is going mean he wins. (It made for a weird election night party vibe. "We are only down by 400 votes so we are probably, almost certainly going to win" is a weird thing to toast to) But as of today, the results look pretty shocking and it seems possible he may end up the only real progressive on a council that previously had numerous self declared socialists and where he was previously viewed as very middle of the road.
Hard right? Really?? They’re just normal liberals. I guess relative to Kshama Sawant they are much more right but 99.9 percent of the population is much more right of that lunatic
Living in the Pacific Northwest shifts your view of politics. If you don't think China's Cultural Revolution was a big win for humanity you are basically right wing.
Sawant wasn't advocating Maoism. Pretending that the Democratic Socialists running in local races in the Pacific Northwest are communists let alone Mao is bad faith and unhelpful. If people don't like their ideas they should debate them on the merits not pretend they are something they are not. She was to the left of probably 90% of Seattle voters. She would be left of 99% of voters in the Country. (She would probably be left of about 70% of voters in Vancouver, BC or Copenhagen) But she was apparently wasn't that far to the left of the voters in her district though because she won every election she was in. I wasn't a Sawant fan. I thought she was self-aggrandizing and a poor communicator. I was frequently frustrated when she would manage to badly hurt the causes we agreed upon. The decision to call a previously uncontroversial business head tax an "Amazon Tax" and get Jeff Bezos' panties in a knot and willing to pour money into fighting it being a great example. I don't think that there is a reason folks need to run as Democratic Socialists in a city where there are already folks identifying as Democrats who are just as progressive on every issues. But no one was running as a Communist in this general election.
I am sorry I offended you. My intention was a tongue in cheek jock about Pacific Northwest politics. My larger point was that right-wing in the Pacific northwest would be a more akin to being moderately liberal elsewhere. No offense or attempts to pretend Sawant is a Maoist was intended.
Fair enough. But FOX News has folks thinking that Seattle is now a anarchist pinko hellscape run by Maoists. In that context, tongue in cheek characterizations can confirm misinformation whether that is the author's intent or not. I recently got back from a vacation at resort in Mexico with my parents. Folks from all the the US who were staying there were asking me in all sincerity if we were okay given what was happening in Seattle and how soon we planned to move whenever we told them where we were from. It was pretty surreal. Those folks clearing believe the city is run by Maoist and is on fire.
I acknowledged that the political spectrum in Seattle isn't a good match to the rest of the country. It is more similar to Canada or Scandinavia. In my precinct of 296 voters only five voted for the Republican Candidate for Governor and only three for Trump. We don't have a "hard right" in the sense that we do at the National level but that doesn't mean there isn't important daylight between candidates. In Seattle the current divides are around whether we should impose more progressive taxation or is there just fat to be cut; should we continue focusing on housing and expanded treatment services to address homeless encampment and drug addiction or should we shift to using police power and jails; should the police reform continue to be push in the face of a police union that opposes all changes or should we trust the police do whatever they think is best so they can start responding to anything, and should we support increasing density in the City by making it easier to build low-income and market housing or should we continue to prioritize neighbor input and neighborhood character even if that means more expensive and slower development. For a City dealing with a serious crisis of budget shortfalls, exploding numbers of homeless and ODs, a police force that is currently not responding at all to many 911 calls about violence, and housing prices that continue to skyrocket, those are actually pretty important questions for folks day to day lives. The voters for the last several election cycles have been firm is wanting the first option to all of those questions. This year that seems to overwhelmingly prefer the second.
Also many of the candidates were hardly part of some left wing fringe. Andrew Lewis is losing quite badly in the 7th District. He is someone who has been referred to by our local press as "someone who gives the strong impression of having lost his virginity on a yacht" and "Seattle's straight Pete Buttigieg." He is a former assistant city attorney. He is a progressive centrist not a Democratic Socialist. He just pissed off folks in Magnolia by telling them that in order to keep homeless people from camping in the area, the City would need to provide somewhere else for them to sleep and so it would be helpful if they wouldn't fight every attempt to put a tiny house village of sheds folks could sleep in the neighborhood short term or long term supportive housing in their neighborhood.
As an interesting update. The votes did seem to swing a bit left in the second day count but not as much as folks expected. (the closest race narrowed from a 400 vote margin to a 200 vote margin.) It turns out that is because someone sent envelopes full of crushed white powder that appears to be fent in the mail to the King County Elections office and the offices of several other county election offices in the Washington causing building evacuations and slowing the vote count. Election work animus and election denialism is not common in King County at all. Fascinating to see how even an incredibly small faction of a community having those feelings can stick a wrench in the works of democracy. In this case no one got hurt and it just put the count back by a day but still not a good sign for how smooth the elections might run in 2024.
Also, in NYC, a Democrat won a majority-Asian city council district that had gone hard to the right in recent years by running on a strongly pro-public safety platform. The crime issues had really been hurting Democrats with Asian New Yorkers in recent elections.
https://elections-daily.com/2023/11/08/2023-new-york-city-council-election-recap/
Boise has record turnout to reelect its Democratic moderately progressive pro-housing mayor.
Boise, the Mecca for Slow Borers everywhere!
And all of the pro-housing councilor candidates won, as well. It's awesome that this city really gets it when it comes to this issue.
Mayor McClean, seems like a sane progressive. As does most of the city council. McClean did make some mistakes with the Police Force thing. Hopefully she learned her lessons there.
The only thing City wise I worry about is the relocation of the shelter to State Street (if they ever find the funding). I can see that going pear shaped.
The nice thing is with a pro housing city council, the development of the old ITD site should be marginally better.
I'll be curious about the citywide salience of the Interfaith Sanctuary move--obviously it's very high in that neighborhood, but I wonder if it'll be more of a meh outside of it.
And I think the ITD site will be amazing regardless of who's in power, but there's certainly more potential for it to be even more amazing with laws that allow them to build more. I really hope that turns into Boise's next great mixed use neighborhood.
But the whole subject ties in nicely with Matt’s post the other day about the difference between homelessness and homelessness. We will see.
I think the City Wide salience will be higher given State Streets status as a main transit hub from Eagle / Star etc. The current location isn’t a main thoroughfare, but everyone drives on State eventually.
My biggest worry is that I really wanted State Street developed. I love the plans for Collister and the new development at the golf course further up. And all of this tied in to the ITD with bus routes. But…. The most devastating thing to drive down public transit useage is safety perception. If homelessness and drug useage becomes associated with State Street, then forget it. ITD might happen, but nothing west of Veterans Park will.
And the argument was always… homeless shelters don’t have to drive down development, but it’s weird how the impending move from River Street has spurred a lot more development plans for that area.
I think State Street is way too long of a corridor for this one development to have that much of an impact, but we shall see. Collister I agree could be impacted, but the artist formerly known as Plantation should be fine. And for better or worse, our overlords in the state legislature are very hostile to public funding and building infrastructure for mass transit, so most people traversing State are going to be doing so by car.
You probably have a point. I’m just pissed because Collister is the closest nexus to myself. But honestly, I’m more likely to take Hill Road up to Glenwood or over to Veterans Park before driving on State. Any problems aren’t gonna hit my neighborhood. The people who own property between State Street and the Greenbelt though will probably suffer.
I saw this [1] the other day and was impressed by how much housing Boise built and how much rents decreased. Perhaps the two are related somehow.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-06/renters-get-a-bit-of-relief-from-surge-in-apartment-construction
On behalf of all the Californians who will be flocking to buy up the expanding housing supply in Boise, thank you!
Oh, you’re welcome. With more housing now we can have slightly less rich Californians afford to move to Boise.
Here's hoping the next wave of Californians heading to Idaho come from Washington.
This isn’t based on much rigorous historical analysis, but I feel like people are underrating the extent to which not running your incumbent president is really politically risky. The incumbent advantage in presidential races has historically been pretty significant. In recent history, we’ve repeatedly seen presidents (particularly Democrats) have a period of unpopularity at this point of the cycle and go on to win anyway.
If the party abandons the incumbent president, they are basically saying to voters, “Yeah guys, we really effed this one up, maybe consider the other guys.”
Maybe this dynamic I’m describing doesn’t hold as well today, but I totally understand why the party institutions weren’t thrilled about taking a chance on Gretchen Whitmer, untested on the national stage, when they can run the guy who beat Trump last time.
Another commenter speculated that normies expected Biden was not going to run for reelection. If that’s true, maybe that really changes things.
I said this on another thread, but I think someone influential in normies circles (Anderson Cooper or something) recently stated as fact that Biden *said* this, because that's the only explanation I have for why it's coming up. Biden never said this, and never even really implied it. He declared his candidacy for 2024 almost a year ago at this point. It was barely in doubt he'd run again.
This is a good run down of why normies might be thinking that.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/09/biden-reelection-transition-president/675395/
While not specifically saying he would only serve one term, Biden did say he was bridge candidate to make way for younger generations. Like it or not, that implies only serving one term.
That's a weird take, I didn't see any evidence he indicated he wouldn't do his full two terms. I think that might have been projection from the more leftists side of the democrats who saying fine we'll vote for this moderate this time because that's what it takes to beat Trump, but we're not doing this again next time.
My memory is that he made a couple of vague statements in the 2020 campaign that kinda sorta maybe suggested that he might not run for reelection if he won.
This is my (admittedly vague) recollection too--that the idea was in the water supply but hazy and noncomittal.
Yes, it strikes me that not reelecting your own candidate is a repudiation of either that person as a leader or their, meaning your, policies and achievements. Either of which is essentially saying sorry, we made a mistake, you shouldn't have voted for this guy last time.
Beyond, "he's four years older than he was" and "we're scared to death he might not beat Trump again" what actual argument could the democrats make to say Biden should not continue as President. I mean, if you don't think he should be President in 2025 why do you want him to be President in 2024, shouldn't he just resign now?
Age genuinely is a reason not to run in the indefinite future but nevertheless not resign in the present. The trouble is that "not seeking another four years because you're too old despite having successfully won the presidency four years ago" isn't really A Thing.
I think Warren G Harding took one term and then decided not to run again. I think Polk did as well, so there’s plenty of recent precedent.
Harding keeled over before we could find out if he would do it. Polk did hold to that commitment, and as it would have it, he keeled over three months after leaving office.
Very true but Bidens age is really going to test that theory. And if the economy takes a turn, running an incumbent brings you no benefit at all.
social conservatives in my groupchats are flipping out. we'll see. but i think abortion is a third rail the party is going to take a while to let go of...
You could go for the UK Conservative solution: run pro-life Republicans in safe districts, pro-choice ones in competitive ones and then you never actually pass anything in any vaguely competitive state because the pro-choice Republicans work with the Democrats to block it.
That’s what the Republicans used to do too. I remember when Pennsylvania had a pro-choice Republican senator (Arlen Specter) and a pro-life Democrat (Bob Casey, still around).
Unfortunately for the Repubicans, anti-abortion attitudes are pervasive amongst Republican primary voters so I can't see the party doing the tactically smart thing such as recommended here. Basically Republican primary voters are hopelessly out of touch with the general electorate and seem unware of this or simply don't care. I can't see them being smart like the Labour party in the UK was and do a 180 degree turn after an electoral drubbing of an extremist like Corbhan. They've stuck with Trump after he lost and most of the pygmies who stood against him are just as extreme.
Trump is the most electable main Republican, and the most pragmatic on abortion.
To the extent that Trump is smart about policy positions, it will be interesting to see what he does in the general election. He could afford to be "moderate" on abortion because he is cruising to the nomination (and he has the "three Justices" trump card).
Next year, against Biden, will he go for the median voter on abortion or will he go for a base mobilization strategy and hit abortion restrictions hard?
(Trick question: neither, because talking about policy is boring when he could instead be talking about himself and how evil Biden's DoJ is.)
My wife and I watched the Vivek interview last night where he talked about abortion in Ohio. He used the example of “if a man kicked a woman in the stomach and she miscarried we would consider that murder!”.
My wife was so pissed off. She noted that Vivek is an “asshole” and was tone deaf to the fact that whether a man in political office tells her she can’t get an abortion or a man abuses her and forces her to miscarry, both men are taking away her bodily autonomy. She was stunned that Vivek thought his line was a big “gotcha”. He was so smug about it too.
Also, he is going to bleach the teeth right out of his head.
I see why it’s tone deaf. At the same time it’s a shocking bit of legal incoherence I wasn’t aware of. It’s insane to me that a fetus is considered a person, period. I wasn’t aware that this is already the case in some is law and I find it a very worrying loophole that might be used by conservative jurists in future to outlaw abortion.
Well, that issue is kind of a "big 'gotcha'" -- that's why pro-choice groups have historically had at most an ambivalent attitude toward standard fetal homicide laws and have been working to amend them to make them more "woman-centered" where the focus is on the increased risk of injury/death to the mother and not the fetus: https://newrepublic.com/article/113258/ariel-castro-pro-choice-answer-violence-against-pregnant-women
It really isn't that much of a gotcha, though. People's moral intuitions change radically based on whether someone has a claim to the future companionship and affection of an organism. Someone who kills your dog in a non-self-defense context would be uniformly condemned as a vile monster (and subject to legal sanctions, albeit ones that I expect many including we would consider to be offensively lax.). But (speaking purely as a descriptive matter) there's nothing like the same moral sanction for people who kill deer or livestock. "A human cares about this organism's continued existence and companionship" genuinely is a touchstone that totally alters the moral intuitions and (to a degree) legal framework applicable to the restrictions on killing it. A miscarriage of a fetus scheduled to be aborted tomorrow is a dramatically smaller moral harm than one of one that isn't.
You can take your own dog to the pound and have it euthanized but you probably oughtn't do it to somebody else's.
It’s philosophically interesting but it doesn’t move votes, so in that sense it’s not a gotcha.
Trump is a piece of shit but also a charismatic guy, people often don’t want to admit that but i think Vivek shows us how just having the piece of shit part doesn’t win u elections he has no chance. I watched a couple debates in 2016 election cycle and was like woah trump really wiped the floor with his opponents and it worried me a little. Must admit I still told my brother and wife who were super worried he would win they were completely crazy and will always be a reminder to myself that I really do not know what I am talking about.
I remember during a debate when Ted Cruz lambasted Trump's "New York values", and Trump absolutely laid into him and destroyed him. I hated Trump and still do, but it was great to see.
Got a link to this? Would love to rewatch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM6qRl3dSME
Yeah, we all need those moments to bring us back down to Earth.
It's not all messaging problems in politics; it's often policy and partisans want to blame messaging. But one messaging problem for the GOP is the lack of gravitas in the party. If you want to discuss a heavy moral issue that you believe demands close scrutiny, you need a different style than Vivek's. It's totally possible for a conservative politician to argue a regime of late term abortion access means a quiet normalizing of outright infanticide and this demands a certain equilibrium. Indeed, someone near the top of this comment section explicitly said a newborn who cannot breathe without a ventilator is grounds for termination. But it's impossible to do that while also running the Trump show against fuddy duddy PC liberals.
Yesterday’s election for New York City Council had 8% turnout among registered voters. Incumbents won 48 out of 51 seats, and only one district had less than 10 percentage points between the winner and the challenger.
Would be great to explore the lack of turnout and competition in these sort of local elections.
Republicans can't win in the vast majority of City Council districts. It's often hard to distinguish candidates in primaries, particularly low-salience primaries for a local legislative seat in an off year. And the policy stakes are unclear because the overwhelming predominance of Democrats means that individual races are unlikely to shift the median City Council vote around much. NYC needs a local party system but that seems hard to achieve, especially with its current electoral system.
Seattle is expected to have 45% which is was disappointed by but now looks damn good in contrast
I think our top-two system with nonpartisan races has helped. We basically do have two incredibly weak "parties" for local elections, so nothing is a done deal
I’m far more sanguine about a Biden candidacy in 2024. I underestimated the extent to which voters really thought he’d only serve a single term (which I think is what the ‘he’s too old’ thing really gets at: people expected him to not run, he hinted he might, and now he’s not). I also underestimated how voters would react to inflation.
Neither of these things are Biden’s ‘fault’ per se but politics is never about things that are entirely within your control. Biden is President right now largely because he was the right ‘Old White Dude’ for Obama in 2008. There was nothing electorally useful Biden provided beyond his grey hair and his persona. He turned that into being the most electable candidate in 2020 and the presidency and that’s huge! Had he ran in 2016 the world would be a LOT better off.
But he didn’t and he ran in 2020 instead and now voters want someone who isn’t old, who didn’t preside over inflation, and perhaps Biden would be better off not running. I still think many Democrats underrate the odds a vicious primary hurts them, but the people pointing out Biden’s weakness aren’t wrong.
> now voters want someone who isn’t old, who didn’t preside over inflation, and perhaps Biden would be better off not running...the people pointing out Biden’s weakness aren’t wrong.<
They may be right. They may be wrong. But they're definitely irrelevant: it's too late to organize a serious presidential campaign.
I wonder when folks will finally stop talking about getting a different nominee. Maybe three or four weeks after Super Tuesday?
Sadly, Biden vs. Trump is such a turnoff for political journalists that they will still be focusing on crap far longer than one might imagine.
I think you’re right about it being too late. I think the perfect time to announce he would not run for a second term would have been right after the Inflation Reduction Act passed- a great capstone for his career. But it seems we are going to roll the dice...
>But it seems we are going to roll the dice...<
There's no way not to roll the dice. We don't have a crystal ball and so ANY situation (go with Biden, have a competitive, vituperative campaign between Whitmer/Shapiro/Harris, choose a seemingly solid nominee only to have things come to light in October, be dragged down by Biden's numbers, foolishly throw away the advantages of incumbency) is a gamble.
Overall I hope you’re right but a couple of things... I’ve heard the “if only Biden had run in 2016” thing a lot but I don’t buy it. I think it’s clear that Hillary still would have run and would have trounced him in the primary. There was no way he was going to beat “I’m with her” and the first woman president thing, especially with a policy message not that different from her’s, unlike Sanders.
Secondly- I’m having a hard time shaking the feeling that we are back in 2013, when Obama tried to gently suggest that Ruth Bader Ginsberg should retire when he had the Senate and could nominate and confirm a liberal successor, and she told him to pound sand. Certainly if Trump wins in 2024 it’s going to feel that way.
There’s a weird possibility that Clinton and Biden split their vote, and Sanders hitting his ceiling of 40% in a bunch of states ends up winning the primary.
Sanders loses to Trump. Once Republicans start running ads about Sanders' support for the Sandinistas and Soviet Union, it would be over for him.
The people who think that Sanders could've held up in the face of a truly vicious campaign against him are delusional. Clinton treated with him kids gloves and still beat him handily. Trump and the republicans would not have done so and would have beat him even more easily.
We'll see how important Biden's age is when the choice is Biden vs. Trump come next November.
I think Biden's big mistake is when he said, "Don't compare me to the Almighty." The Almighty is *really* old and makes Biden look like a young pup.
“ But I think it’s also in part because abortion rights is an almost uniquely uninteresting topic to debate — it’s what most people think versus a religious doctrine”
This is elucidated me actually exclaim “what?!” when I read it. I’m really not one to say you can’t opine on a topic regarding race if you aren’t black or gender if you aren’t a woman. But this is one of those cases where having a woman opine on this topic may have been the right call here
Because I’m sorry, how in the world is this not at the very least a health care issue. It’s been a core (and correct) part of the pro choice argument for decades that this is a medically necessary procedure and restricting or banning it’s use unnecessarily puts women’s health and life in danger. It’s been a core part of the expanding access to health care for decades
It’s also an essential core part of western philosophy for hundreds years; that an individual has fundamental control of what happens to their bodies. It only became a modern issue because only until modern times did enough people believe this core concept apply equally to men and women and unfortunately very clearly there enough people in America who don’t feel that way (the most strain of Christianity most against abortion is the strain that also most emphasized a woman is supposed to be subservient to her husband or man generally after all. You think that’s a mistake?).
This is like arguing the only reason people care about criminal justice reform is due to race and that it doesn’t really matter other than this one issue. Like yes it’s definitely part of it but it also clearly goes so far beyond that.
I think you're arguing past Matt here, or maybe you really do buy into the framing that conservatives oppose abortion because they just don't like women having bodily autonomy (or as you call it, health care).
I (and I believe Matt) reject that framing because there's a much simpler explanation, and one they'll straight up tell you they believe: it's a religious conviction. You can say it's "health care" all you want, it doesn't really move the needle for the 30ish-% of people who believe it's morally wrong and want to ban it outright.
It's clearly mostly religious, but it's also clear that it isn't simply a religious belief about ensoulment. Every study of pro-lifers back to Kristin Luker in the 1980's shows they are the dissenters from the sexual revolution, the people who still think God wants women to remain chaste and pure and think that legal abortion backstops what they see as immoral sexual activity by unmarried people and a sinful attempt to break the connection between sex and procreation.
That all IS religious but in no way is limited to souls.
I was raised evangelical and I think you're both right. It is (1) a religious conviction AND it is (2) a desire to punish "sinful" women for having sex. It just depends on what type of religious conservative you are. If you are very religious it is 75% #1 and 25% #2. If you are a marginally religious redhat it is 25% #1 and 75% #2.
His claim isn’t that there aren’t good arguments - it’s that the good arguments are all so completely familiar that there’s very little left to say. That’s why it’s uninteresting to debate, even though there’s a lot of disagreement.
Whereas with trans issues, the newness of the public discussion of it, and the subtlety of different views about what gender is and isn’t, mean that it’s very easy for someone to say something that a random person on the street will never have heard before, that will make them think.
And even on that point I'll say that's nonsense. Public opinion around 2nd trimester abortions have shifted notably. The exact logistics of regulations and restrictions is a very thorny issue with lots to talk about. Even reporting about how these restrictions have or haven't reduced abortion and changed women's choice sets. There's a lot to talk about, now that the debate has gone from being abstract to concrete. Polling and voting behavior has all changed to reflect this, in ways that are far more malleable than I would've thought two years ago.
I think Matt doesn't have a ton to say about this, because he's more interested in covering other stuff. That's all well and good, but I think he keeps understating the importance of the debate right now.
I don't think he's saying it's un*important*. He's saying it's un*interesting*, even though it's actually much more important and valuable to talk about than trans issues right now.
Disagree. Example: eugenics movement.
Matt's point is that while one side believes it to be a healthcare issue, the other side doesn't. If you can successfully frame the issue as only being about the adult woman's healthcare and not about a baby's right to be alive, then you've already won and there's nothing left to debate. Your argument is as unpersuasive to evangelicals as their argument is to you. I'm not advocating we give up on trying to persuade people, I'm simply acknowledging Matt's point that people don't like to debate this for good reason.
This is a much better way of phrasing what I was trying to say
I'm eager to see how journalists spin last night's results as bad for Biden and the Democrats.
Yes, it's a tough challenge but these are smart people and I know they're up to it.
Challenge met!
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/the-special-elections-tell-us-nothing-about-2024.html
I'm impressed.
Unpopular opinion, especially among this crowd:
Biden's age isn't hurting him any more or less than Obama's race hurt him, any more than Hillary Clinton's gender hurt her. Rather, those things tend to wedge open and amplify whatever more generic political imperfections they have.
Biden's chief problem is that he was elected to make the bad things go away, to make the fear go away, to make the feeling of instability go away. And he hasn't, not really.
Great economy aside, great industrial-policy legislation aside, great crime record aside (read Matt's other posts on this, I implore all you young disagreeable dudes reading this!), Biden's America feels like a weirdly unstable equilibrium that could topple for no reason at any moment.
There are many reasons for that, inflation chief among them, Putin's war also, but the bottom line is that people still feel afraid, distrustful, and waiting for some kinda bullshit to happen.
(And given Trump's explicitly-stated plan to venge-purge the US government and install an autocracy, hard to blame them. Even if that is kind of, maddeningly, a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
So people feel the need to blame that on something, and they pick Biden's age. If they felt completely safe and prosperous and stable and 100% Back To Where Things Were, Joe Biden could be 95 years old and no one--NO ONE--would give a shit.
(Nate Silver disagrees, I'm sure, but he's a little bitter at life right now.)
Difference is that Hillary wasn’t becoming more “womanly” and Obama wasn’t becoming more black everyday. Biden is getting older everyday. Liability isn’t fixed but growing
Kind of an aside, but it was really interesting watching the returns coming in for Issue 1 (abortion) and Issue 2 (marijuana).
The initial tranche of early votes were not nearly as strongly pro-marijuana as they were pro-choice, creating a brief bit of panic among Issue 2 supporters. If both races narrowed at the same rate, then Issue 2 was going to be very tight.
But that’s not at all what happened. Issue 1 predictably tightened, but Issue 2 did not, and actually ended up half a point *ahead of* Issue 1. It’s just so jarring watching races that aren’t as geographically-correlated or as front-loaded in the early vote that I forgot an election night trajectory like this was possible.
Also proud to see counties deep in SE (Appalachian) Ohio with above-water support of marijuana. Interesting to think that West Virginia is probably closer to legal weed than is Indiana.
The hillbilly/redneck divide is real and important! 😅
Interesting thought!
Plenty of reactionary white guys LOVE their weed. They may hate women, but they LOVE their weed. Gone are the days when legal weed was a 100% liberal issue.
The Democratic party has popular ideas that win decisively even in “red” states like Ohio. It has unpopular leaders that poll poorly in swing states Democrats need to win. Keep the ideas, switch the leaders should not be a hot take. It is common sense.
The problem isn’t only Biden and Harris. It’s that our entire leadership class has grown so risk averse that no senator or governor is challenging our obviously too old, historically unpopular president. That Biden is disliked when unemployment is under 4% and inflation has declined by half shows the depth of his unpopularity. He is so old that achievements that would make a generic President popular don’t help him. Please find someone else.
As bad as Democrats are at this Republicans are even worse. I suppose the reason is that smart ambitious people see politics as a dead end and run companies instead?
No, the issue is you can vote for an abortion or Medicaid referendum, without voting for the same politican who is supported by The Other, where the Other is immigrants, feminists, BLM protestors, Muslims, college students, or whomever you dislike.
I’m pretty sure they are. See the Dave Weigel post on here. The “defund” rhetoric has almost entirely petered out. And crime has been dropping most places so it’s harder to run on the issue if you are GOP. Outside of inflation (and that’s on Jerome Powell at this point), it’s GOP best issue. But at a certain point, objective reality starts to bite even if it’s only moving the needle a few percentage points
Of course the depressingly hilarious exception is Long Island because of course a rich place with objectively low crime rates should have big shifts to the right based on “hey you hear. My buddy’s cousin who’s friend rides the subway says it’s never been worse”. Oh and NY Democratic Party is terrible. I actually think bad candidates and bad strategy is way overemphasized in post election moratoriums. But in NY I’m increasingly believing it’s a factor.