27 takes on the 2024 election
One week to go...
It’s one week until Election Day.
The news keeps coming fast and furious, but in critical respects, I feel like there isn’t actually much to say at this point. It continues to be my belief that the media underrates the stakes relative to the narrative and the symbolism, and that Democrats underrate the potency of discussing their good policy issues — especially health care — relative to ringing alarm bells about the future of democracy.
But I’ve said all that (and encouraged you to give money) before. I’ll point one more time to Keyboards for Kamala as an underrated mode of engagement (posting is praxis) relative to phone banking or door-to-door communication. Really, though, I’m going to take a step back from election coverage the rest of this week, because barring some new revelation, I’ve said almost everything I want to say. The race is always on my mind, though. So today, I’m going to share all my remaining election thoughts, mostly without much in the way of supporting evidence or argument. This is just, for the record, what I think.
The most important context for this race — what broadly distinguishes the family of takes you should pay attention to from those you should dismiss — is what’s happening internationally. The UK Conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian Liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right party lost its first post-Covid elections in Australia. The incumbent coalition in Germany is hideously unpopular. This means that if you’re asking “How did Democrats blow it?” or “Why is this even close?” you’re asking the wrong question.
The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.
Back when Obama was president and I was floating various slightly inflationary schemes to engineer a more rapid labor market recovery, some of the older people on his team would tell me I was underrating how much people hate inflation.
When you ask Americans to a literal “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” question, they refuse to assess Trump as a president who left office with high unemployment and record job losses — he didn’t cause the pandemic!
Looking at countries that didn’t have an election in November 2020, incumbents who were popular during the pandemic almost all became unpopular during post-pandemic inflation — the fairly obvious logical relationship between pandemic relief programs and pandemic savings and post-pandemic inflation doesn’t seem to get through to anyone, anywhere.
Given the global trend, it’s really Republicans who should be hand-wringing and asking why it’s even close, and the answer is obviously that Trump is a scumbag. You can question whether Democrats have maximally captured the electoral upside of that fact, but the idea that he’s not paying a price doesn’t wash.
The 2012 Republican platform called for both Medicare privatization and a national anti-abortion law — if Republicans ran on that in 2024, they’d get creamed. The 2012 GOP wasn’t just against same-sex marriage, they mostly opposed allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to serve in the military.
This double movement of Trump wrong foots us constantly. He’s both a dramatically worse electoral performer than a non-psychotic Republican would be, and also a ruthless operator who imposes a high degree of expediency on the party.
Biden governed for much of his term on a theory of politics sometimes called “deliverism” that anticipated voters rewarding him for aggressive policy reforms.
I think of deliverism as a “more is more” theory of politics — you’ll win back working class Obama-Trump voters with pro-union policies and hostility to the financial sector, you’ll reach Black voters by funding DEI initiatives, you’ll engage young people with student debt reform and climate actions. The Biden team believed that if they put a one-year Child Tax Credit expansion into the American Rescue Plan, it would prove so popular that Congress would be inspired to make it permanent, even though that would require a ton of money.
This is not how politics works, it defies all the conventional wisdom, and in the case of the CTC, it involved violently misreading the “policy ratchet” literature in a way that almost defies comprehension. I think the simple explanation is that “more is more” makes coalition-management easier, and Biden and other Democratic leaders were optimizing for coalition-management.
The Democratic coalition really is tetchy and hard to manage. I’ve watched a number of Arab-American writers who disapprove of Biden’s approach to Israel but agree that Trump’s would be worse spend the final month of the campaign driving up the salience of an issue that they know is bad for Harris and being relentlessly negative about her approach to the issue — even though they agree her opponent is worse. It’s hard to do politics if people who agree that you are better don’t make the case for you down the stretch.
I see plenty of Republicans complaining about Trump, but they are the Republicans who buy Democrats’ argument that Trump is fundamentally unfit. The religious right isn’t whining into November about gay marriage or Trump’s efforts to moderate on abortion. I don’t think this is a question of Trump being better at anything than Biden or Harris; it reflects conservative donors and group leaders having a fundamentally more pragmatic approach to politics.
Tim Walz says, “You don't get elected to bank political capital to get elected again. You get elected to burn that capital to improve lives.” I think that metaphor captures the dynamics much better than the fantasies of deliverism.
Right now, though, I bet Walz wishes Joe Biden had spent down a bit less political capital on things like defending the procedural rights of asylum-seekers or trying to override state rules about who can play on a girls’ sports team. The Harris-Walz ticket winning is an important step to improving people’s lives!
The Trump 2016 move of picking up secular northern working class white Obama voters, even if it cost him college graduates in the suburbs of America’s biggest metro areas, turned out to have been inspired. If he wins again this time, everyone will say he’s a genius. But if loses, I think we’ll see all the effort expended on picking up the votes of politically disengaged young men of color as genuinely perverse. Why would you lock in on the segment of the electorate that is least likely to vote and whose votes are diluted by the Electoral College?
Trump’s best political moves have involved at least the appearance of moderation, but Trump’s elite backers see him as a vehicle for radical policy change. Elon Musk says, “Don’t just open the Overton Window, knock down the whole damn wall!”
One of the stupidest things about the 2024 election is that “Donald Trump will probably not succeed in establishing himself as a dictator” counts as an edgy pro-Trump take. But for the record, I agree. The odds of American democracy collapsing, conditional on Trump winning, are below 50 percent.
But are they below 30 percent? Below 10 percent? Below 5 percent? I’m not sure I’d go much below 5, and I’m not remotely comfortable with that — though I understand you may feel differently if you find an agenda of abortion bans and tax breaks for billionaires substantively appealing.
People whine too much about the media, but I think the fact that so many people don’t seem to realize that Trump’s policy agenda is almost entirely inflationary reflects the media’s genuine failure to convey accurate and useful information.
It’s been interesting watching Barack Obama and especially Bill Clinton on the campaign trail this past week. The older cohort of high-level Democratic Party politicians was better than Biden and Harris at actually breaking down policy issues for public consumption. It’s worth recalling that Obama and both Clintons faced a much more difficult fundraising environment and had to rely much more on free media to convey their messages to the public.
Whether Harris wins or loses, it would behoove Democrats to do some soul-searching about why the party speaks to the public so differently in its paid ads and its free communication. You can test individual spots for persuasiveness. But if the point of an ad campaign is to convince the voters that your party is obsessed with abortion rights, job creation, tax fairness, and health care, then I think you could get a lot further by hiring political strategists and communications staffers who are obsessed with those topics.
Republicans have been trying hard for multiple cycles to make political hay out of transgender issues and mostly failing. What I think makes this year’s ads about gender transition surgery for convicts different is the link to “soft on crime” and “Dems spend too much” themes, taking this out of the realm of “who cares?”
The entire right-leaning media ecosystem dedicates terrifyingly little time to right-leaning analysis of the Republican Party policy agenda. If you read publications like National Review, Daily Wire, and Free Press, you’d have absolutely no idea how people think Trump can or should square pro-Russian foreign policy with anti-Iranian foreign policy. Or that there are mutually incompatible theories of what Trump “really” means when he talks about his across the board tariffs. I’m sure this stuff is being debated somewhere, but it’s not clear where.
I’m increasingly obsessed with the South African origins of the Thiel/Sacks/Musk axis of Trump support. Not in the sense that I think these guys are all crude racists (though they might be), but in the sense that I think they have a very specific story about electoral democracy leading to worse economic policy outcomes. So even though Trump has moved the GOP away from libertarianism, they see the anti-democratic aspects of Trumpism as a feature, not a bug.
It would be great if progressive foundations had spent the past eight years trying to build bridges between social liberals and anti-Trump market liberals like Shikha Dalmia in defense of liberalism and democracy instead of financing a left-right pincer movement against “neoliberalism” that further destabilized the system.
I do think I understand why Harris hasn’t wanted to give Biden any sharp elbows or throw him under the bus in a major way. But if she loses in a week, isn’t everyone — frankly, including Biden and his inner circle — going to think it’s unfortunate that she didn’t spend the past few months saying he was too slow to pivot on inflation and asylum?
I like the list. A lot to unpack here. Two things I look forward to hearing more from Matt about:
1. The "policy ratchet" literature, in item 11: "This is not how politics works, it defies all the conventional wisdom, and in the case of the CTC, it involved violently misreading the 'policy ratchet' literature in a way that almost defies comprehension"
2. The question of how the South African experience influences Thiel / Sacks / Musk is really interesting along a couple of axes of interpretation. The one you mention -- how electoral democracy can lead to bad economic outcomes -- and also in terms of how to navigate a multicultural society that contains **dramatically** different cultural norms.
Big New: Paul Graham came out in support of Harris with a very persuasive argument to appeal to techie moderates, https://x.com/paulg/status/1851200055220306378
For context, he's among the most respected names in tech as the founder of YCombinator and Sam Altmans former boss. Great argument that will appeal to moderates in tech, including those highly suspicious of Democrats economic policy. Here's the message:
Why Moderates Should Vote for Harris
People on the far left and the far right have already decided who to vote for in the next election. Voting for the other party would be unthinkable. But what if you're a moderate?
I'm a moderate, and I'm voting for Harris. The reason is not that I love the Democrats' policies. Both parties' policies seem a roughly equal mix of good and bad. The reason I'm voting for Harris is that this election is about character.
As far as I can tell, Harris is a typical politician. That may not seem much of a recommendation. But Trump is something far worse. He seems to be completely without shame.
We saw that the last time he was president. He ran the White House like a mob boss, choosing subordinates for loyalty rather than ability. No one knows that better than the people who worked for him. Almost half the cabinet-level appointees from his previous administration have refused to endorse him. They're warning us what he's like.
The worst thing he did, in my opinion, was when he tried to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election. He knew he'd lost, but he called Mike Pence and tried to get him not to certify the election. Thank God Pence had the character to stand up to him. I don't like to think what might have happened if he hadn't.
Trying to remain in power after losing an election is banana republic stuff. You don't do that in America. Conceding gracefully when you lose an election is more important than any policy a politician might have, because it's only this principle that allows us to get rid of politicians whose policies don't work.
So sure, Harris is a typical politician. But Trump is a crook. You can't have that sort of person as president. It's too risky.