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.
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.