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.
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...
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.
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. 😎
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
“ 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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. 😎
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.
Boise has record turnout to reelect its Democratic moderately progressive pro-housing mayor.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
“ 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'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.
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.)
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.
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.