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Casey's avatar

Trump has perfected the "accuse your enemies of what you're doing ahead of time so that when you get accused you can just nyeah nyeah at them and nothing gets traction" strategy. Every accusation is a confession. It's been 8 years of gaslighting America and I am so sick of it.

Sorry for being earnest here. I find Trump repulsive. Is that derangement? No. He's deranged. The emperor doesn't just have no clothes, he smears himself in shit and demands you say it smells like roses.

Thanks Matt. Really enjoyed this column.

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Spencer Roach's avatar

Yes - people talk about "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but nearly 100% of people with TDS are his fans, not his critics

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

Biden screwing up on immigration was almost certainly an example of TDS. Trump did this and that can’t possibly be right, so let’s do the exact opposite. Revoke Trump’s executive order and refuse to do anything about it till it’s time to check the polls for the reelection.

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Randall's avatar

I used to think of this as the 180 Degrees From Trump fallacy. Sometimes the truth is just 40 degrees from something Trump said, or 90 degrees, but whenever Trump said something a host of people would decide that the exact opposite must be true.

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Maxwell E's avatar

Yascha Mounk actually has a fantastic article on “180ism”, to this point; I’ve always thought that should be the term people adopt to describe this phenomenon. Either way, it’s a useful concept and it pops up quite a bit in American politics.

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Helikitty's avatar

Hey Trump did the same thing about Obama

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

I’m not here to defend Trump.

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John's avatar

Didn't that happen because the courts were about to shut down the executive action that closed the border during Covid? And then all that happened was a backlog of post-Covid asylum seekers came through. But that has largely dropped back to normal levels *already*-- it was a backlog after a period of low immigration, not a persistent increase.

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

It has dropped because Biden issued the same executive order, not by magic.

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

Sure. Explain that to every swing state voter.

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Casey's avatar

Like what if Galactus was coming to Earth, devouring planets as he went, and instead of being united half of humanity was all "you say you want me to support professor X to help stop Galactus, but why are you so obsessed with Galactus instead of making a positive case for professor X??"

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Ethics Gradient's avatar

From the perspective of modeling the skeptics, one feels that maybe this is more like a scenario where Professor X is out of commission because plot reasons and instead you’re asking them to support Magneto to help stop Galactus, so their skepticism / demand for the affirmative case is a little easier to sympathize with.

That said: yes, you support Magneto even absent a convincing affirmative case because the alternative is Galactus eating the Earth!

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Casey's avatar

Also magneto did nothing wrong

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Seneca Plutarchus's avatar

We didn’t land on Krakoa! Krakoa landed on us!

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lwdlyndale's avatar

"Jean Grey called me a 'deplorable' eight years ago, so I'm supporting Galactus!"

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Bistromathtician's avatar

Look, I want to agree with your comment, but I must say, this is a bad plan for Earth. Professor X is obviously the right person to defend Earth against humanoid threats and inspire us with his innate moral sense, but Galactus is a uniquely bad enemy for him to contest! If he tries to use his powers, there's almost no way for him to "understand" a mind as immense and ancient as Galactus, and he's probably far more likely to die or be taken over himself in the attempt. Yes, he has access to a large team of mutants, but again, their powers are not necessarily going to line up well. Reed Richards or Dr. Strange are much better candidates for saving Earth from a cosmic entity like Galactus.

But, if neither of them is available, I think Dr. Doom is the best Dark Horse savior. "Lesser of Two Evils" is the perfect rallying cry for this situation!

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Chuchundra's avatar

Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets.

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lindamc's avatar

Please do not apologize for being earnest. The world (and the internet) would, IMO, be better places with a little more earnestness and less cynicism/snark.

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Ethics Gradient's avatar

Earnestly-expressed concern about Trump is not a commodity in short supply on the Internet, and can get tiresome to read *whether or not it’s well-founded* (the fact that some of it isn’t, despite the essentially infinite well of good-faith reasons to throw the vile scumbag on the midden of history where he belongs, also unfortunately has the effect of poisoning the well.) The Orange Man is bad — terrible, in fact - but I appreciate Casey’s approach to judiciousness in sincere public expression of that fact because I think it’s instrumentally a good idea.

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Dan Quail's avatar

The term "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is gaslighting because the people that parrot it often were the ones frothing over Obama's tan suit and Dijon mustard.

I usually just retort to those people "I guess I am sorry that I still have some human decency."

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JPO's avatar

Good lord, I forgot about the tan suit. Just learned Peter King actually said this about it:

"There’s no way, I don’t think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/peter-king-outraged-over-obamas-tan-suit.html

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Jonathan Monroe's avatar

Rep Peter King (IRA-NY), leading Congressional expert on terrorist financing (because he has personal experience), is an asshole. Why am I not surprised.

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A Cee's avatar

Don't forget "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." They still haven't gotten over that one.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were the trailblazers.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

Yeah, like when Trump says Democrats are weaponizing courts against him. That would never happen!

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A.D.'s avatar

If they had gone after him immediately on the classified documents I would take this seriously, but they gave him plenty of opportunities to return the documents _before_ getting the courts involved(other presidents have done the same thing he did, but returned the documents immediately upon being asked rather than doubling down)

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disinterested's avatar

He tried to get his lawyers to destroy evidence! There is no case that he didn’t flagrantly break the law.

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Dan Quail's avatar

It's almost as if Kevin M. is sanewashing Trump's refusal to turn over classified documents and conspiracy to destroy evidence...

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Kevin M.'s avatar

I think Trump clearly and illegally refused to turn over classified documents and also conspired to destroy evidence. That doesn't mean the courts have not also been weaponized against him in other cases.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

I don't consider the classified documents case as weaponizing courts against him. Most of the other ones I do.

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Testing123's avatar

Can you make a coherent argument in support of this sarcastic take? The NYC case is the only one that I think you can even argue was not overwhelmingly legitimate, but even there the argument boils down to "yes, he clearly broke the law, but if it wasn't Trump then they wouldn't have brought charges". So Dems are weaponizing the courts to...prosecute people for legitimate violations of law? Like, what is the actual, rational argument that there's an issue here?

And not just that one case was questionable, but rather that Dems as a whole, and Biden specifically, are weaponizing the courts in the ways that Trump a) claims is happening, and b) has promised to do himself if elected?

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Avery James's avatar

The NYC case was amazing because right after the ruling, you could read people in Vox, NYMag, and NYT all give lucid reasons why the first felony conviction of an American president and major presidential candidate actually isn't on very solid legal ground. It was surreal. The tone was at direct odds with the content of what they were arguing. Like someone informing you that your childhood pet just died with an enormous grin.

The indoor voice went "yes, it could be this is just not all that sound of an application of obscure New York law whose reading could have easily put Hillary Clinton in jail for her mislabeled campaign spending, but who can say for sure!" And then because it was in an indoor voice, they didn't worry too much about it. No, sorry, if you think this ruling is suspect, that is kind of an enormous deal like the January 6th legislature riot in *precisely the heuristic* of "we can't keep having this sort of thing happen again and have free and fair elections."

Maybe it's one weird event and we'll move on. I am quite open to that read of both Jan 6 and the NYC ruling. It's entirely possible. But the alternative is we're having regular violence at the transfer of power and regular felony prosecution of controversial politicians using ambiguous state laws. Neither are sustainable under the terms of what we call a republic.

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Testing123's avatar

Even if you think both are bad, I don't see how you compare the storming of the US Capitol to try and retain power for a man who lost a democratic election to a single state DA using a legitimate law to go after conduct that was actually committed and violated the law, even if the targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence. They didn't manufacture the facts to prosecute him. They took genuinely corrupt activity and applied the law to a highly publicized corrupt act.

I will forever be upset at the NYC DA for bringing the case, if only because it's caused such an enormous distraction.

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Avery James's avatar

Using a dubious legal reasoning of the variety Trump could've attempted to convict Hillary Clinton with in 2017 for her mislabled Fusion GPS spending or mishandling of classified information on a private email server is actually bad. One could just as easily say "they didn't manufacture facts about Hillary" or there was "genuinely corrupt activity" for prosecuting either of those two things. It's entirely plausible to read it that way. But convicting Hillary would be wrong. "The targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence." Well what a relief, the Lord almighty has stepped in and He has decided America will never again have a controversial prominent politician. I guess we don't have to worry about a thing.

Because it's a high-stakes election and a Democratic DA did it after promising people in his campaign to do something like this, the very same logic Democrats rightly used against "Lock Her Up" in 2016 is just forgotten. The problem isn't any "enormous distraction"; most voters have forgotten about it right now. The problem is the precedent for controversial national politicians running for office in the future. It's telling major liberal outlets were running pieces talking about the sheer oddity of combining an obscure NY state law with misdemeanor document charges to produce this outcome. If you can't imagine any random Republican DA trying this stunt, you have more faith in Republicans than I do!

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Testing123's avatar

"Using a dubious legal reasoning of the variety Trump could've attempted to convict Hillary Clinton with in 2017 for her mislabled Fusion GPS spending or mishandling of classified information on a private email server is actually bad. One could just as easily say "they didn't manufacture facts about Hillary" or there was "genuinely corrupt activity" for prosecuting either of those two things. It's entirely plausible to read it that way. But convicting Hillary would be wrong."

If HRC was responsible for that reporting and it could be shown that it was reported that way for a corrupt purpose then I'm not sure what the issue would be. I see this a lot with Republican defenses of Trump's corruption- "they'll come for your folks too if you let this happen!" If HRC committed criminal or corrupt actions then she should be subject to prosecution. I don't have any issues with that. My familiarity with the facts of Fusion GPS vs. Trump's behavior makes her connection to the criminal conduct feel much more tenuous than Trump's was, but that's for a prosecutor to decide.

""The targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence." Well what a relief, the Lord almighty has stepped in and He has decided America will never again have a controversial prominent politician. I guess we don't have to worry about a thing."

Again, I'm not sure why the prospect of a future controversial politician who engages in corrupt and arguably criminal conduct being subject to potential criminal prosecution is something that we should fear- we should welcome the notion that no one is above the law. My comment about his prominence highlighted a relatively basic and uncontroversial fact, which is that criminal activity that takes place in the public eye raises the possibility of prosecution. Just this past week, there was a guy arrested for fighting outside the Ravens game because the video of the assault went viral. Fights outside of football stadiums happen all the time, but the prominence of this one in the public consciousness meant that he lost his job and was arrested. Is that "fair" since other people do the same thing and don't get arrested? Maybe not, but I have a hard time feeling that bad for people who engage in legitimate criminal conduct and are prosecuted for it, even if they wouldn't have been charged if they hadn't spent so much time in the public eye.

"The problem is the precedent for controversial national politicians running for office in the future."

Won't someone PLEASE think of the future politicians?!?!?! Any future politician who is ethical isn't worried about the precedent this sets. Any individual who engages in rampant corrupt activities, such as Trump, who was thinking about engaging in a political life may now think twice about subjecting their behavior to this level of criminal scrutiny. That doesn't trouble me.

"If you can't imagine any random Republican DA trying this stunt, you have more faith in Republicans than I do!"

I certainly can! But I imagine they'll be tethered, at least ostensibly, to the law in the same way that Bragg's case was. You seem to be worried than non-criminal conduct, perhaps even non-corrupt conduct, will be prosecuted for made up reasons just to go after political opponents. I have less concern about that since, again, the charges here were based on a real law and the facts were what actually happened. Doesn't mean that Trump won't win on a variety of technical legal grounds on appeal (that's why appeals exist- because not everything goes perfectly and mistakes and misinterpretations in the lower court do happen), but that doesn't make the existence of the charges outrageous.

The charges were filed a year and a half ago. If DAs were going to turn around and manufacture charges as retaliation against this case they've certainly had plenty of time to do so. The fact they haven't is telling.

Again, I wish this case hadn't been brought, but that's because it's so easy to caricature and use for political gain, not because the underlying facts and issues are out of bounds or corrupt.

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Josh Frandle's avatar

Except there is a strong argument in Hillary's defense that doesn't apply to Trump. What she did was not illegal (or perhaps, not prosecutable if that's more palatable to you.)

While I can't speak to the Fusion GPS spending situation as I have done no research on the topic. I did listen to 16 hours of Comey (A lifelong republican) testifying before congress regarding her email server, and the man made a very compelling case that the email scandal was driven by politics rather than fact.

In his words "I know this is hard for some people to hear, but this was not a close call."

Mens Rea requires that an individual be aware they are committing a crime (beyond reasonable doubt) before you can convict them. While you don't need to know EXACTLY what crime you are committing, you DO need to have some awareness that you are doing something wrong.

Recall that the state department had a standing policy that NO classified information be transmitted electronically. Also recall that many members of congress use their personal emails for work purposes. Now recall that Hillary was ~68 years old at the time.

In other words, in Clinton's mind, she told her staff to not send anything classified through email, and that she could just keep working on non-classified documents on this "server thing" that she probably didn't fully understand but trusted was secure enough for non-classified information.

This is obviously terribly irresponsible. She should have known some classified information would inevitably pass through her server, policy or not, and it's certainly a good argument for firing her, but it is feasible she had no idea she was breaking policy, and that's what the FBI decided "unanimously" (according to Comey).

To sum up, one could NOT say there was "genuinely corrupt activity", regarding the email scandal. The legal facts were truly just different.

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Helikitty's avatar

Maybe we should hold presidents to higher standards!

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Avery James's avatar

I do not actually believe the main problem with our democracy is politicians mislabeling campaign payments from time to time. It's not great, but it's far from the biggest issue with our politicians, including Trump.

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Testing123's avatar

Should we only do things if they're addressing the main problems with our democracy? If it's not "the biggest issue" with our politicians we should just move along? This seems like a walk-and-chew-gum scenario.

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Ken in MIA's avatar

The Georgia RICO case is nonsense, too.

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Chicago Based's avatar

Why is that? I mean it has been mismanaged in a ridiculous way but that isn’t the same thing as being caught in a recorded phone call pushing a sitting governor to illegally halt an election or make some votes appear.

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Testing123's avatar

That's not much of a coherent argument.

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Ken in MIA's avatar

It wasn’t an argument: I was only pointing out that the NYC case is not the only legally dubious one.

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Testing123's avatar

I don't agree, and you've not presented any reason why I should, even though you had responded to a comment whose sole purpose was to see if anyone could lay out a coherent rationale for the claim that the courts are being weaponized against Trump.

I'd genuinely like to see someone make that argument to see what folks on here believe justifies the claim.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

I don't consider the classified documents case as weaponizing courts against him. All of the other ones I do. Look into the details of the recent Jack Smith filing. The procedural rules were bent in order for him to drop a filing out-of-turn for the purpose of influencing an election.

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Josh Frandle's avatar

Can you articulate specifically what rules you think were being bent? I'd appreciate a direct source.

But more directly, I'm not sure "a procedural rule was bent" is a great case to support the claim "The courts are being weaponized against Trump." Most court cases have some level of procedural fuzziness. If there wasn't, we could replace judges with a computer program!

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disinterested's avatar

Correct, it did not happen. Trump is a criminal.

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Patrick's avatar

I think this is pretty hilarious, given the fact that courts have been going after Trump since before the Reagan administration.

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Mediocre White Man's avatar

The Democrats weaponized Richard Nixon's Justice Department!

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Some Listener's avatar

I'm sorry are you talking about the highly classified documents that Trump himself said he took knowing he shouldn't have them or the Jan 6 case where Trump lead a violent mob to our capitol? Which of those behaviors do you think politicians should be immune from prosecution from? For that matter, at what matter is a politician so important that they we shouldn't try to keep them accountable for anything.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Well said, Kevin. Indeed, that would never happen!

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Well said, Casey, but I think that there's nothing interesting to say about Trump anymore. There's no new information and we spend too much time parsing the entrails of his every blurp.

No, the only interesting subject is Trump's supporters and voters. They see everything there is to know about Trump and they conclude, "yes, I definitely want four years of that."

There's only one truly good source to understand this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds

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John E's avatar

"No, the only interesting subject is Trump's supporters and voters. They see everything there is to know about Trump and they conclude, "yes, I definitely want four years of that."

I think this is a mistake. Most people vote against the other party. Harris will be getting more votes because she is *not* Trump/Republican than because belief that she is somehow uniquely good for president. Similarly, Trump will be getting a lot of votes who pick him because he is *not* Harris/Democrat. Are there exceptions - sure, swing voters exist. But they are a very small (but important!) segment of the population.

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Randall's avatar

Yeah, not enough electoral analysis takes this attitude into account. I have not always voted *for* Democrats but I have voted *against* Republicans 100% of the time so far. Sometimes it’s like a choice between being slapped across the mouth or kicked in the crotch, and those are the only choices. My vote doesn’t indicate that I love being slapped across the mouth.

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Steven's avatar

Perfect comment, sir.

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PeterLorre's avatar

Also this is the first column in a while where the top comment isn't something about how if you think about it clearly it's all Democrats' fault

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Thomas L. Hutcheson's avatar

I first heard about Democrats steeling an election during Obama's re-electing campaign. It did not start with Trump.

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Patrick's avatar

The "first" under Trump was that anybody took the idea seriously. In all previous instances it was a fringe conspiracy theory that caused nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle to roll their eyes.

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John E's avatar

2004 was less fringe than you think. Sitting members of congress were voicing it. It doesn't compare to 2020, but it was still bad.

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disinterested's avatar

That's when Trump became heavily involved when GOP politics, so wasn't that still starting with Trump?

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Mediocre White Man's avatar

The Bush-era US Attorney scandal was about "voter fraud" bologna.

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John E's avatar

I heard it about 1960 a lot as a kid, then about 2000, then about 2004, then 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024.

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A.D.'s avatar

In 1960 that would have probably have been related to LBJ, and he deserved the extra scrutiny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal

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Jake F's avatar

To be fair to LBJ, that was just how Texas politics was done at that time. He had previously lost the special election for senate in 41 precisely because he wasn’t as ruthless in rigging the precincts he controlled that time around, an error he did not make in 48.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Yes, the Democrats probably did steal the 1960 election. And it's to Nixon's credit that for the good of the country he didn't fight it, not unlike Gore's gracious concession in 2000.

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A.D.'s avatar

Source for that? I only found these two,

First: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/07/1960-electoral-college-certificates-false-trump-electors-00006186

Which was a bit shady but Nixon didn't need to fight it because Hawaii legit certified their recount later and because Kennedy had already won.

(This does lower my opinion of Kennedy)

Second: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27550168

Which suggests that the Democrats in Illinois may have acted shadily but it didn't end up stealing the election for Kennedy. (ALSO lowers my opinion of Kennedy)

That _is_ to Nixon's credit though - he had grounds to keep fighting and didn't. (And as it turns out it looks like he would have been wrong, even if justifiably so)

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Charles Ryder's avatar

…and Kennedy still wins without Illinois.

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John E's avatar

Meh, this makes me queasy. If Trump steals 2024, should Harris not fight it for the good of the nation?

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Helikitty's avatar

Yep! I’m proud of my husband’s grandfather for helping make box 13 happen! (We think/hope, he was a Jim Wells County election worker that year)

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

"But successful investors and entrepreneurs have no excuse for ignoring the extent to which integrity and the rule of law provide the necessary backstop for everything good that comes out of a capitalist economy."

1000000 times this! It boggles my mind that Dems aren't out there making this particular case over and over and over. The squishy Rs that I'm trying to convince actually respond to this argument!

(I know this article was about the positive case for Kamala -- which I appreciate and was well argued! -- but I didn't want to let that Trump point slide. Go out and say this to anyone who will listen!)

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Ben Krauss's avatar

I think Mark Cuban has made this point a few times. But yes, obviously, if you're a businessman who relies on imports and not in Trump's good graces. Good luck.

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Some Listener's avatar

And even if you are in his good graces now, we've seen how many times he's turned on people completely for petty reasons or no reason at all. I know every exec things they are special and will always be one of the oligarchs that isn't thrown out of a window but that is what they all think until they're halfway to the ground.

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Andy Hickner's avatar

Since you brought up Cuban, I really liked Matt's suggesting him as a potential VP pick, and I kinda want to see him run for president in 2028 if Harris loses.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

It should be pointed out that the sexual harassment accusations were not directed at Cuban personally but rather his organization and while he should have done a much better job beforehand, he did take strong ameliorative steps after it came out.

Also, there was an apparently bogus accusation against him personally about his behavior at a nightclub which the woman refused to pursue perhaps because no one there (including her boyfriend!) would corroborate her claim.

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John E's avatar

I would normally think the org stuff would be enough to derail a political career, but Trump was president, so maybe not...

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David Abbott's avatar

Totally agree. People who are in the global 1% should embrace the American project with open arms and be willing to pay slightly higher taxes to keep it going.

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unreliabletags's avatar

Do Democrats want to continue the American project with slightly higher taxes? I think these wannabe philosopher-kings hear the stuff about inequality, disparate impact, and radically reimagining all our social constructs, hierarchies and norms as actually pretty serious, and only restrained to the extent that the GOP is a meaningful force. They probably overweight it relative to Trump's more imminent and prosaic dangers, though.

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David Abbott's avatar

I rather agree. I want to reimagine America in a more hedonistic, sex positive way, but I don’t pretend to have the votes

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt's avatar

Kamala Harris in particular very clearly wants to continue the American project with slightly higher taxes.

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unreliabletags's avatar

I don’t think national electeds are advocating this stuff but blue city councils, school boards, and especially the academic/NGO/staffer complex is. A lot of Elon Twitter is amplifying and driving outrage around this stuff, which is pretty relevant to the California-centric tech community even if it’s nut-picking to a degree.

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unreliabletags's avatar

We can't have housing construction because that's colonization. We can't enforce traffic laws or have any standards for behavior in public spaces because that's inequitable. We can't have tracking or magnet schools because they're racist. Housing, transportation, public space, and education add up to pretty significant swaths of life!

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Tom H's avatar

Competely agree, and trump would be way worse but the dems aren’t squeaky clean on this. Look at how many arms of the govt, including DoJ are going after elons companies for nakedly political reasons. Spacex getting sued by govt for diversity/Eeoc violations when they can’t hire foreigners due to ITAR restrictions. Musk/tesla not envied to EV round table even though ford, gm etc have shipped like .0001% of the EVs Tesla had. Govt contracting out rural high speed to comcast at like 17k/connection and 10 years of construction when starlink can do it for 500/connection and get everyone online in a year. I’m not a fan of musks politics, but it’s dumb to the gov to act like this.

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

With all due respect, boo freakin hoo. This isn't even in the same universe of behavior, and this sort of both sidesism does nobody any favors.

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MondSemmel's avatar

Musk's response to this stuff is beyond the pale, but it does no-one any favors to deny that Democrats actively pushed him away. And furthermore, it's a genuine problem when the party of supposed competence in government does stuff like overpaying >>10x for rural Internet for asinine reasons. And even I get mad whenever a rocket launch is delayed for purely bureaucratic and political reasons.

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Greg G's avatar

This is actually somewhat of a problem. I get what you're saying about both sides, but partly as a result, Musk has put his support behind Trump to the tune of $75 M in funding. It also doesn't go unnoticed on the right, and it fuels the both sides talking points of conservatives. I prefer when the Democrats take the high road, as they have with indicting members of their own party when appropriate.

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

Fair, but I'm unsympathetic to Musk, who'd been playing footsie with right wingers well before this. I would like to live in a world where Dems take the high road all the time, but that's holding them to an impossible standard that Rs don't even try to achieve. Politics is sometimes dirty... it's fair for Rs to lob criticisms at Dems for this, but again, it's nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump is doing and the news media shouldn't be carrying water for him.

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Tom H's avatar

Your argument is that you don’t care that the govt is going against Elon for political reasons. This really negates your point about dems being above all of this. You do it or you don’t, there is no “we do it sometimes, only against the people who make us real mad”.

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MondSemmel's avatar

The problem with the "nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump is doing" criticism is that the current president is a Democrat. And while I agree that it's "nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump *will* be doing", that kind of argument is not nearly as convincing to voters.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Let's not forget that Musk, like Trump, can be a fabulist about these kinds of things, as Kevin Drum discusses regarding his claim about "sharks and whales":

https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study-whether-his-rockets-might-hit-sharks-and-whales/

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disinterested's avatar

This is like complaining that you got fired after insulting the spouse of the CEO.

Like yes, you’re good at the job, and theoretically it has no impact on your work, and you don’t even report to the CEO, but you’ve also shown a stunning lack of professionalism and it makes you a risk.

That’s Musk.

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Spencer $ Sally Jones's avatar

But knowing that Elon can just cut off Starlink like he did to Ukraine, provides a good reason for our Government to choose a different internet provider.

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John E's avatar

He didn't just cut off Ukraine! There are so many good reasons to criticize Musk, don't make up bad ones.

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Testing123's avatar

These arguments seem far more attenuated to me than you're implying. The ITAR argument is, as I understand it, literally just Tesla's argument- I'm not sure why we would assume they're right given that DOJ guidance specifically argues the opposite, so the suit strikes me as legitimate enough. Doesn't mean they'll win, but I find it hard to imagine that the Biden administration is actively attacking SpaceX in the way you imply when the federal government has awarded the company more than $10 billion in contracts over the past decade, including (according to a quick google search) an $700 million+ contract just this month. "Here's a few billion dollars and a minor lawsuit related to hiring practices" is not the most compelling "THE GOVERNMENT IS AFTER ME!" argument I've ever heard.

Starlink vs. traditional broadband is a legitimate debate to be had for which serves the needs of rural communities better. It's a massively complicated issue that can't be so easily broken down to "this is cheaper", so that seems equally dubious to me.

The round table certainly strikes me as political, but the round tables themselves are intentionally political events. If you want to get invited to those events it helps not to actively attack the hosts. So sure, in political contexts political considerations will impact Musk's treatment. I'll line up with you to condemn this activity if Trump wins office and invites Mark Cuban to meetings on issues that he has expertise in, but I wouldn't hold me breath.

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Joshua M's avatar

> The round table certainly strikes me as political, but the round tables themselves are intentionally political events. If you want to get invited to those events it helps not to actively attack the hosts.

The roundtable preceded the host-attacking; the reason Tesla wasn't invited to the roundtable is Biden's dedication to unions.

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James C.'s avatar

> the reason Tesla wasn't invited to the roundtable is Biden's dedication to unions.

How'd that work out? 😂

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Testing123's avatar

Great point! So the reason for the lack of invitation has nothing to do with Musk's behavior and everything to do with balancing various political considerations related to a political event. The banality of that decision cannot be overstated.

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Joshua M's avatar

It's probably possible to overstate the banality of that decision. Sometimes it's good to humor thin-skinned people to keep them in your coalition. Biden trying to credit GM for electrifying the auto industry was stupid and had no upside.

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Testing123's avatar

That conclusion seems to ignore a tremendous amount of actual political considerations that go into those decisions.

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Patrick's avatar

"going after elons companies for nakedly political reasons"

Oh for fuck's sake. It is not legal to bribe people to vote. Going after a guy who sets up a $1 million dollar lottery for people who sign his petition is not a "nakedly political reason".

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Electric Plumber's avatar

“17k/connection and 10 years of construction when starlink can do it for 500/connection” Separate concern,If Starlink supplied the same connections but became a sole source supplier of communications in the US and/or the world, what consequences would that bring?

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Electric Plumber's avatar

“17k/connection and 10 years of construction when starlink can do it for 500/connection “ I can’t disagree with this statement yet what would be the consequences of Starlink being the biggest/maybe only supplier of communication

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Comment Is Not Free's avatar

Musk clearly has social issues. His personality is someone who does not follow the rules. Those two things leads to not getting invited to things and investigations. Is it dumb? Maybe but equally if all other EV CEOs can’t get a word in or your product doesn’t follow the rules then maybe it’s worth an extra look. That’s why he’s paying Trump- he’ll be included.

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Eric's avatar

My two theories about Elon Musk and Trump are:

1) Musk is overworked, suffering a mental breakdown, experiencing side effects from his drugs, and is generally not thinking rationally anymore.

2) For the sake of his businesses, Musk wants to be on Trump's good side if/when Trump does win.

Not totally sure which is correct, but if I had to guess, it's a mixture of both.

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Jeffrey Zide's avatar

It's really just number 2 here. At the same time, I still think goes back to rule of law and I'm with Kara Swisher in thinking that Musk will actually be in more trouble if Trump wins because of Peter Thiel who really hates Musk and really has a lot more influence in the political realm of silicon valley than Musk does. Basically, the argument is that Musk can cheerlead for Trump all he wants but if Trump loses, the next administration will not go after him, unless there is a clear violation of laws or regulations(which yes he's been gone after in the past because he disregarded the law). On the other hand if he supports Harris and Trump wins then Trump might go after him and his contracts with the government. By going all in on Trump, he thinks he can get even more lucrative contracts(the privatization scheme etc etc.) but he's just another rich oligarch who thinks his wealth and access to power will mean the leopards won't eat his face but the leopards will always eat his face. Just look at all the Russian Oligarchs who have "fallen out of windows." It's really an old simple story that's not much different than what MY basically said. The wealthy always align with potential autocrats with no ethics because they believe they can manipulate them into giving them better deals and won't go after them when they break the law but they inevitably always fall out of windows literally and metaphorically.

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Thomas's avatar

This actually sort of sounds like an argument for him to do what he's doing? If he opposes Trump and Trump wins he's in trouble, but if he support Trump and Trump wins then he's only probably in trouble. Given that the odds of him actually affecting the outcome of the election are quite small it doesn't seem crazy to take that position.

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Jeffrey Zide's avatar

To be clear that is actually what I’m saying. He’s not entirely irrational for doing what he’s doing but he’s thinking short-term and not playing the long-game. But as I noted above Peter Thiel hates him and there can only be one King, if you understand how many of these guys think and Trump turns on everyone eventually.

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Francis Begbie's avatar

Thiel hates Musk - What are you talking about? Founders Fund is a very early investor in SpaceX

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Monkey staring at a monolith's avatar

I think #1 is underrated by most people. Related to #2, I also think Musk is just trying to maneuver into a position to have massive influence on US policy.

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Michael Weiss's avatar

This is off-topic, but I like your handle. (Unless that’s actually your name.)

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

Ha! Thanks. An obscure reference if you're not a chemist.

I'm all about the free energy!

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Monkey staring at a monolith's avatar

Speaking of chemistry, I learned about disappearing polymorphs the other day and found it fascinating.

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

It is fascinating, and this can be a major problem in process chemistry! You like to think that once you've identified the drug substance you're home free... but it is often a long road to get the scaleup worked out.

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Thomas's avatar

I like free energy, but I wish it wasn't so negative.

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Evil Socrates's avatar

It’s certainly how I approach the decision.

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Milan Singh's avatar

Voted early on Monday in the first presidential election of my life. I get that this is a lame take but January 6th is my top issue this election, so I was proud to vote for Harris for the sake of our country and Constitution.

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John from VA's avatar

A certain faction of anti-Trump people, mostly on center-right and far-left, have really downplayed Trump's election interference. They act like January 6th was just some rowdy idiots who fucked around and found out, which to an extent was true. Most of those people were probably unintelligent and got caught up and did something stupid.

They ignore Trump's role in the whole thing: whipping up the crowd in an effort towards intimidating his vice president to overturn the results of the election. It was after a long series of attempts to get various state officials to deny the results. There's a term for this: "self-coup attempt". The President of the United States attempted a coup. There's just no way around it. Those words don't mean anything if they don't describe his actions. Trump displayed enough contempt for our system of government to try to overthrow it. You could see it on Jan 6. You could see it with him leaning on officials to get his way. You can see it today with his refusal to accept the result.

The anti-anti-Trump folks often retort that our institutions held, and for now that is true. They seem much more organized in Georgia this time, although the governor seemed more prepared as well. The goofiness is immaterial. I'm not denying that goofiness. I'll look on Rudy's Four Season Landscaping press conference with joy and mirth for the rest of my life. However, lots of coup attempts are clownish. The Beer Hall Putsch was clownish, but the German government's restrained treatment of Hitler let him try again. MAGA will try again, if this crap is tolerated.

Democracy only works with broad buy-in. The institutions held, but they'll only work if people think they should work. By his words and actions, Trump cracked that consensus. It can get a lot worse, and it needs to stop.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

I think you want to fix the first sentence to say "anti-anti-Trump."

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John from VA's avatar

No, because I do see this sentiment shared by some people who nominally say that they don't like Trump. One thing in particular, is Andrew Callahan (from the Channel 5 YouTube channel) making an HBO documentary that basically disparaged election denial as nothing more than a dumb scam to grift idiots. It was partly that, but it also, to me contained a lot of subtext that it was incredibly overblown. It was extremely critical of Trump and his movement, but treated him as a buffoonish clown, not an actual threat to democracy, which the documentary, again takes a kind of cynical spin towards.

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James L's avatar

I don't think this is a lame take at all. The country and Constitution are very important.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

"I know this is a lame take, but I voted for that there fellow Abe Lincoln because by gum he wants to save the Union and that other fellow McClellan would be happy to see the American experiment come to an end."

Fact check: not lame.

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JPO's avatar

I don't know, I hear that Abe Lincoln is weaponizing the federal government against his enemies.

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drosophilist's avatar

I lol'd.

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ML's avatar

Have you seen how many of those damned, dirty Irish Lincoln has allowed to pollute our shores?

They eat weird food, they follow a false religion, and I can't understand a dang word they say because they won't learn English. They're never going to be real Americans and we should just start sending them back now.

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Milan Singh's avatar

Pre-Civil War the Republicans were the more nativist party

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lindamc's avatar

Not a lame take! Congratulations on your first vote!

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Dan Quail's avatar

You will never get the experience the schmexiness that was 2008 Obama.

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Randall's avatar

You will never know the joy of putting Bill Clinton in office to end the Reagan era (well, sort of, as it turned out), just a month after turning 18!

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Dan Quail's avatar

All I remember is supporting Ross Perot in 1996 as a child. I have no idea why. My dad only liked Perot's tv specials but voted for Clinton.

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Randall's avatar

The hottest hot take of my life: if Perot had stayed in the race all the way through, rather than jumping out and back in, he would’ve won a plurality of the popular vote. (That giant sucking sound is my credibility dropping)

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Jim #3's avatar

Jan 6 and rule of law/anti-corruption remain my top issues above my typical Dem concerns.

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Brian Ross's avatar

Also my top issue.

Peaceful transfer of power trumps all other issues. No pun intended.

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Monkey staring at a monolith's avatar

This is not a bad take. I watched January 6th on CNN while deployed to the Arabian Gulf. It's a huge deal.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

My top issue also.

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mathew's avatar

Jan 6th is a big deal. I just wish when Dems talked about the constitution they considered other parts of the bill of rights besides the 1st.

See 2nd, 9th, and 10th

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Francis Begbie's avatar

Milan, no need to virtue signal - we all know who you were voting for.

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KetamineCal's avatar

My first vote was for Bill Clinton (2nd term). You're definitely voting for the higher character candidate and also against the lowest character one.

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Lisa J's avatar

Congrats Milan. There seems to be a mistaken impression in here (not sure you really hold it) that Slow Borers are not motivated by earnest, principled beliefs. Which is def not true! I think we all just take as given that most everyone in here believes that Trump is bad and leaders who uphold the Constitution are good, so the engagement and debate comes on how to act effectively on that.

Relatedly, wondering if helping with PA GOTV is a good use of my time in this final stretch…

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Milan Singh's avatar

I’m going to Pittsburgh to knock doors November 2

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drosophilist's avatar

Yay Milan! [tosses confetti]

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John from FL's avatar

First, I agree with everything in today's column. I have serious concerns about Kamala Harris, but they pale in comparison to the concerns about a second Trump Administration.

I do want to expand on the Rule of Law point that Matt brings up, with the larger business community in mind. The tweet Elon Musk was responding to was accusing the Biden Administration of "harassing and threatening Elon Musk and his companies". Which, to Musk, probably feels true. The NYTimes just highlighted last week the number of agencies his companies must navigate. The reach of the regulatory agencies is vast, as shown in one of the graphics from that article, and, yes, there are lots of agencies investigating and regulating Musk companies.

So, he is thinking if that vast power is wielded by Trump in ways that benefit his friends and punish his enemies that will feel pretty good for Musk. For a while. But the risk to the Rule of Law -- one of the bedrock principles that is always under attack by those looking for short-term benefits -- is so great from a second Trump term that it is **irresponsible** to go that direction. It would be a modest short term benefit at the risk of catastrophe in the long term. Now, for Musk that is probably a risk he is willing to take -- he is fundamentally a risk-taker. But for the rest of the business community, taking a risk like that would be crazy. So vote for all the Republicans you want. But not Trump, vote for Kamala.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/elon-musk-federal-agencies-contracts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.UU4.BnGN.7AAxzJVXEul5&smid=url-share

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Matt Hagy's avatar

Yes, and while I believe the growing conflict between Musk and Democrats is largely on him, I do think that it was a strategic mistake for Biden to explicitly exclude Tesla from his EV push. [1] And this isn't just hindsight bias because I registered that take in Dec 2022. [2] There's no future for legacy automakers and their unions in the EV future; at least not in their current form. Their workers (and investors) should milk these companies for all they can in the short term and hopefully something of value can rise from the ashes of their bankruptcies.

Musk is insane, and deeply bought in to culture war BS, so it's totally possible the relationship would've frayed regardless. Nonetheless, it was strategic mistake to snub the future of American auto manufacturing and the leader of EV revolution in an attempt to better pander to unions. We can still pander our hearts out while recognizing those are dying industries and while building a strong relation with the future. Maybe we could just better pretend there's some future for unions in batteries?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-05/biden-snubs-non-union-ev-makers-at-event-promoting-evs

[2] https://www.slowboring.com/p/elon-musk-is-the-latest-victim-of/comment/11141199

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Dan Quail's avatar

What happened was a story about Elon Musk sexually assaulting a SpaceX flight attendant on a private jet. Musk then proceeded to adopt the GOP playbook about the liberal media and complaining about cancel culture to deflect from the fact he views and treats women solely as breeding livestock. This is where Musk flipped (and eventually resulted in him buying Twitter.)

1) Teslas are eligible for IRA subsidies and the Biden administration has pushed OEMs to source materials outside of China. https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/tax2023.shtml

As for 2), you are wrong about the huge amount of intellectual, design, human, and organizational capital of legacy automakers. They won't be scrapped. BEVs are not going to instantly replace the current technology mix. Many European firms introduced $25,000 BEV models at the Paris auto-show this year. Hybrids (a current legacy technology) are selling well. Toyota and Honda are hitting record profits (due their long-term planning and not going all in on higher-end models.) Even in China EV adoption rates are starting to plateau, and that is with massive subsidies (most of the Chinese OEMs are projected to go under in the next decade.)

Finally, there is both a strategic interest in protecting large employers and competition. Autoworkers tend to be concentrated in states that electorally matter.

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Seneca Plutarchus's avatar

I think you're way overconfident about the legacy automakers. Stellantis is already tanking, VW is about to downsize in Germany for the first time. GM already showed it was vulnerable. It's very difficult for these old guard American companies, faced with an adverserial union, they get punched in the mouth by competitors without the same vulnerabilites. Same thing happened in the airline industry.

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Arthur H's avatar

Stellantis is way behind the curve on EVs, but GM and Ford are moving forward with them fairly well. The German mfgs aren't really going any faster. I don't expect to see many Chinese OEMs in the US market soon and the Japanese are dragging their feet on EVs. Hyundai/Kia is doing great, but I don't expect them to compete much in the large truck/SUV segment which is the Big 3's bread and butter, and will continue to be so in an electric world.

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Monkey staring at a monolith's avatar

I'm really interested to see how the truck/SUV market does as EVs become more and more popular. Aerodynamics are critical for EVs & put a lot of pressure on manufacturers to build low, smooth vehicles. I predict a lot of EV trucks that look like the Hyundai Santa Cruz and SUVs that are basically wagons or minivans.

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Dan Quail's avatar

Stellantis is such a mess of a company.

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Patrick's avatar

Iomega was still pretty profitable for a few years after CD-Roms and DVD-Roms were invented. AOL made a lot of money for a while (even enough to buy Time Warner), and this was after the internet existed.

I think Matt's talking about the long term here. And over the long term, building an EV just doesn't have the same complexity as building an ICE vehicle, and the complexity that does exist is not the kind solved by union labor. If you believe that eventually ICEs will die out entirely, than it is highly likely that all of the legacy automakers will go the way of Kodak.

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Dan Quail's avatar

The problem with that analogy is that Kodak did not embrace change and OEMs are putting a large amount of resources to create BEV platforms.

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Patrick's avatar

Kodak absolutely tried to get into digital cameras. The problem was that they weren't very good at it, compared to the disruptors. Also, the disruptors were spending 100% of their effort on digital cameras, and Kodak was spending a fraction of their efforts, because, at the time, analog cameras and film were still more profitable. This is the very core of the problem outlined in the innovator's dilemma (https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244).

The thesis here is that building EVs is sufficiently different than building ICE vehicles such that firms who dedicate all of their efforts to building them will outcompete firms that only dedicate a portion of their efforts to building them, because those firms will always remain distracted by the much larger (for now) profits of ICE cars. Once they hit the tipping point and EVs are more profitable than ICEs, it's too late, and the ship will have sailed.

The fact that the EV-only firms don't have to grapple with unions will only increase their advantage over time.

You can find a few companies over the centuries who have found a way out of the innovator's dillemma, but betting on all, or even a majority of the legacy players doing it, seems like a bad bet. Of course, the timelines are uncertain. It could be 10 years, or 35.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

I'd be very surprised if Tesla has more than 5% of the US EV market ten years from now. Not because of any Democratic administration actions, but because Tesla's natural audience will be so repulsed by Musk that they would never in a million years get a Tesla. I'll get my first EV next spring when my current car lease ends and the chances of my getting a Tesla are precisely zero.

So, Tesla, thanks for opening the door for EVs here and please take your gold watch and go away and let the big boys take over.

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Thomas's avatar

That seems pretty unlikely to me unless you think the EV market isn't going to grow pretty much at all in the next 10 years. Most people who buy cars don't give a crap about the CEO of the company that makes their cars.

Last I looked Tesla still had north of 50% EV market share and the best customer retention rate of any company in the entire automotive industry. Those numbers will inevitably go down as EV numbers grow and the competition gets its shit together, but sub 5% in 10 years? You're doing as many drugs as Elon is.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Tesla went from 80% of the US EV market in 2019 to 52% in 2024. That's pretty much a straight line trend to 5% in 10 more years! (https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/percentage-of-electric-cars-in-us.html)

More competitors are coming into the US market even without BYD and Musk has really pissed off the people who would be inclined to buy EVs whereas the MAGAites who love him most certainly do not love EVs. Add to that that he is screwing up the company by, among other things, not developing popular new auto lines (I mean, Cybertruck?) and is leaving the company to drift to irrelevance. Bottom line: I feel very good about this prediction.

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Thomas's avatar

Cybertruck is popular! It's the 3rd best selling EV in the country behind the Model 3 and the Model Y. https://www.kbb.com/car-news/americans-bought-record-number-of-evs-in-q3/

I don't really get it, but I don't get the people who buy more conventional luxury pickups either so...

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Monkey staring at a monolith's avatar

my_son_is_on_track_to_weigh_7_trillion_pounds.jpeg

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Dan Quail's avatar

I’m not getting a Tesla due to build issues. The Model 3 has problems with its front wheels falling off.

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Arthur H's avatar

Plus they insist on very annoying design and driver interface decisions. I don't want all the cabin controls and information dumped on the tablet in the center. I don't want the turn signal stalk replaced with buttons on the wheel. I don't want to be forced to use one pedal driving. So I bought a Hyundai.

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Dan Quail's avatar

My incompetent butt can’t handle the doors.

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Monkey staring at a monolith's avatar

Which Hyundai? I'm loving my Ioniq 6.

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Arthur H's avatar

Same! I'm loving mine as well

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Helikitty's avatar

It’s completely nuts that Musk would troll and alienate the people most likely to get EVs.

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Francis Begbie's avatar

100%

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Sean O.'s avatar

I mean, the DOJ sued SpaceX for not hiring immigrants, when SpaceX isn't allowed to hire immigrants under federal law because it is a rocket company. I can see why Musk feels targeted.

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CarbonWaster's avatar

Do you have a link to something about this? I don't mean to doubt you but if the case was that simple it would be over within 5 minutes so I assume this is not a fully accurate summary of the case.

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Joshua M's avatar

The root issue is that SpaceX posted jobs for US citizens only, because of ITAR requirements. The DOJ contends that some refugees/visa holders could nevertheless pass muster for ITAR, so it’s illegal to dismiss them out of hand.

There’s a way to see the DOJ’s legal case here, but the practical result is that by trying to be extra careful to avoid an investigation by one branch of the executive you end up targeted by another.

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

That’s not good, but aren’t we terribly familiar with the fact that the various branches of government aren’t always perfectly aligned? This doesn’t sound like targeting.

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Joshua M's avatar

Apart from the alignment, it's a really dumb use of resources. The number of asylum seekers in the US who are qualified as rocket scientists must be nearly zero. It feels like targeting because you're finding a minor discrepancy without much in the way of actual victims and trying to extract a settlement.

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Josh Frandle's avatar

Except that SpaceX doesn't exclusively hire rocket scientists. A large percentage of any company is going to include paper-pushers, middle management, IT etc. Hanging a sign on the door saying "immigrants need not apply" is pretty heinous, even if you truly believe most of them are unqualified.

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

Was this specifically about asylum seekers? Not immigrants more generally?

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Josh Frandle's avatar

Your source refutes your claim.

"In job postings and public statements, SpaceX wrongly claimed that under federal regulations known as export control laws, it could hire only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, known as green card holders, the Justice Department said."

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David_in_Chicago's avatar

Worth noting the DOJ investigation started in May 2020 under Trump. They were responding to a complaint. The facts of the case seem pretty clear cut. SpaceX will probably pay a fine.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-08/spacex_complaint.pdf

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mathew's avatar

Not to mention all the targeting of Musk by CA

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Dave Coffin's avatar

I do think Matt has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to what I'll call the "But Gorsuch" constituency. I know there's a subset of people who really only care about Dobbs when it comes to the judiciary, but it's really really not that simple. Trump's SCOTUS appointees have been genuinely excellent relative to the baseline on the administrative state, Chevron, affirmative action, guns, anti-discrimination law, free speech, etc etc. Betsy Devos' D of Ed was a dramatic improvement on Obama and Biden.

Entirely in spite of Trump's personal corruption and lust for power his 1st term appointees genuinely made dramatic improvements in the rule of law and federal regulatory environment and outside housing Harris is fairly consistently much worse on a whole host of these issues.

Now none of this is actually good reason to expect Trump 2 appointees will be of similar quality. I expect, if he gets a second bite at the apple there will be vastly more lunatics this time around. Certainly shouldn't be any more "but Gorsuch" vote. Still Matt would be more interesting if he actually engaged with broader Rule of Law concepts than Jan 6, Dobbs, and traffic enforcement.

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Doug B's avatar

Beg to differ. Reasonable minds can debate Chevron, but to think SCOTUS and the judiciary more generally was improved under Trump is simply wrong. Let’s start with the Trump immunity decision, which is a plain abandonment of the rule of law. From there, we can talk about the created from whole cloth look for historical analogues on artificially created major questions. Let’s expand and look at Judges like Cannon and that nut job in Texas whose name escapes me but who keeps issuing nationwide injunctions that even the ridiculous 5th circuit (because of Trump) cannot affirm.

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Dave Coffin's avatar

The psycho you're reaching for is Matthew Kacsmaryk

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Doug B's avatar

I remembered the name when I was done, but didn’t want to risk spelling it.

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disinterested's avatar

Not to mention the decision that the 14th amendment does not say what it plainly says.

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Dave Coffin's avatar

As with other canonical "Never Trump... but Gorsuch" figures like Will Baude and David French, I think the SCOTUS has been quite wrong on the 14a Section 3/Executive immunity issues.

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mathew's avatar

SCOTUS and the judiciary as a whole has been improved by Trump judges.

More originalism and textualism is what we need instead of living constitutionalism nonsense.

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Isaac's avatar

The ‘originalism’ of SCOTUS looks a whole lot like ‘whatever lets Alito & CT get their preferred outcome’. The ruling in Bruen has been a disaster & 14th amendment case ignored the plain text.

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Dilan Esper's avatar

If I were to defend a Trump appointee who got a bad rap, it would be De Vos.

The problem is, is it worth screwing up the rest of the federal government just to get one appointee in one area who does some good stuff?

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Ethics Gradient's avatar

I don’t think he gets a bad rap, but I think most people paying attention would also give Jerome Powell plenty of credit.

Ed.: that said, Trump wants to rein in Fed independence (which should really have the business community waking up in a cold sweat) because of course he does.

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Dilan Esper's avatar

Powell was a good appointment. That's true.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

In his second term, would anyone stop Trump from nominating and forcing through a Steven Moore or a Herman Cain?

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Dilan Esper's avatar

Well the fact that Cain is dead might stop that.

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Dave Coffin's avatar

I don't think it's sound reasoning for voting for Trump, not in the past, definitely definitely not now. What I'm responding to is some of the degree of incredulity I see when someone expresses that they don't remember the 1st Trump term being as apocalyptic as some of the hysteria seems to imply. The "but Gorsuch" voter genuinely got a good deal of what they wanted that is not thoroughly encompassed by 14th A fetal person hood lunacy. I think it's important to make the case that Trump 2 will genuinely be very bad without simply relying on assumptions that everyone experienced Trump 1 as being very bad. Some of the things that Trump 1 did are genuinely appreciated outside MAGA. Trump 2 will be much worse in ways that genuinely did not manifest prior to Oct 2020.

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Patrick's avatar

Trump 1 administration was, honestly, mostly fine, because Trump is a lazy moron who mostly played golf, and mostly let standard republicans run things, figuring that he has to at least pretend to be a president.

Trump 2 would be a disaster because most of the standard Republicans are gone, and because he will (probably, correctly) interpret the fact that he was elected despite all the bullshit around Jan 6th, and despite the fact that he is a felon, and despite all the literally fascist shit he keeps saying, as a literal blank check for him to indulge all of his impulses. It'll be the obvious extension to "I could shoot a guy on 5th Ave in broad daylight, and no one would care."

Oh, and he is very likely suffering from serious cognitive decline that was less present in 2020, so there's that, too.

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Avery James's avatar

No, someone really focused on court appointments will continue to get some solid FedSoc appointments because conservative elites spent a lot of sweat and blood curating a network over the last generation and Trump is fine taking their recommendations. By that particular metric, Trump 2 will be perfectly fine for them and they should vote Trump.

But what the metric leaves out is that politics isn't mostly about court appointments. It's just conservative elites put a lot of effort into focusing on that, and now they're in an awkward situation where they hired a Roy Cohn acolyte from Queens to solve their PR problem since 2012, and it went about as well as you'd expect making Joseph McCarthy instead of Dwight Eisenhower the president.

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Dave Coffin's avatar

As far as I can tell Trump thinks deferring to FedSoc was a huge mistake.

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Avery James's avatar

What is he going to do? Come up with a list of new MAGA judges the GOP Senate will agree to vote to confirm? No, he's definitely putting more FedSoc guys up in a second term. It's just other things are worth considering than judges.

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db's avatar

What is the defense of Betsy De Vos? She seemed genuinely terrible to me. She fought tooth and nail, to the point where she was literally fined and held in contempt of court, over refusing to forgive loans from a corrupt and fraudulent for profit colleges.

Then this (from NPR):

When DeVos had to sign off on thousands of borrower defense claims that had already been approved by the previous administration, she added three words below her signature: "with extreme displeasure."

She also chose to grandstand with Trump on re-opening schools which was counter-productive.

But what else did she do that was positive?

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A.D.'s avatar

Restoring due process for college students under the Title IX changes.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/06/politics/education-secretary-betsy-devos-title-ix-regulations/index.html

Which the Biden administration rolled back in April.

(It's one of the things I feel Obama did wrong, which Trump's administration fixed, and Biden is going back to what Obama did. I think both sides are well-intentioned on this, but I think the Democrats are in the wrong here)

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Dilan Esper's avatar

That's one. Also, De Vos was a lot more supportive of charter schools than the Biden people have been.

And her position on reopening schools was good, not bad.

The honest truth is that these days, the Left treats education policy as basically a vehicle to do coalition service and not as a means to the end of better outcomes. Obama kept at least some of this under control (though he did sign off on the elimination of due process madness). But at this point it's hard to see a Democratic administration standing up for actual education if it means coming to battle against one of its coalition members.

And that means that a Republican Secretary of Education will do a lot of things a Dem probably won't do.

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db's avatar

“The honest truth is that these days, the Left treats education policy as basically a vehicle to do coalition service and not as a means to the end of better outcomes”

How do you apply this to “the Left” but not someone like DeVos? Could her support of for profit colleges, rules on due process that could be characterized as “fighting cancel culture at woke institutions”, and support for “school choice” to break the power of teacher’s unions not also be seen as “coalition service?”

Of course, we would have had those policies with a more normal Republican, too.

DeVos was right about reopening schools but proceeded to go about accomplishing that in a way that was destined to be controversial and fail. Almost as if that was the point, actually?

It seems like she was pegged correctly right from the beginning. But, that’s just my take.

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Andy Hickner's avatar

Another thing DeVos did which was bad was roll back accountability measures, such as the "gainful employment rule," for for-profit colleges that had been initiated under Obama: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-12-04-how-for-profit-colleges-benefited-from-trump-administration-policies.

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Dilan Esper's avatar

That wasn't good. The right's love affair with fraudulent colleges is bad.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

Yes. It is a well known precept of good government going back all the way to Pericles that the administrative state works best when the archon is free to break the law.

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Greg G's avatar

What's the case for Betsy Devos?

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Dave Coffin's avatar

In this context I'm focusing on Rule of Law stuff where the Devos Title IX Sexual Assault allegation rules she promulgated reversing Obama's catastrophically unjust "Dear Colleague" letter was a vast, necessary correction in favor of Due Process that Biden has subsequently reversed.

Beyond that there's a bunch of stuff where she worked to weaken the absolute worst of the D affiliated "groups", the teachers unions.

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A.D.'s avatar

Her Title IX changes are certainly one of the things I mention if someone asks me what did Trump do that I liked.

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Patrick's avatar

I'll bet you $5 that Trump is not even aware that she did this.

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db's avatar

It involves potentially protecting perpetrators of sexual assault, so I’m sure he’s aware and pleased.

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RIOldFolksHome's avatar

Eliminating the truly obscene kangaroo courts in colleges re: Title IX "trials". Unlike what Obama did and Biden restored (and Biden also reappointing the truly evil Catherine Llhamon), DeVos forced colleges to do some actual due process, rather than the "No shit, of course the accused is guilty, and we should design the process to insure the accused is automatically found guilty without any meaninful change to defend themselves" regulations that Obama and Biden championed.

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Dilan Esper's avatar

It wasn't Biden, but the thing that happened to Musk at the California Coastal Commission was real and was a First Amendment violation. Even paranoid people have enemies.

But that's the point- while there are stupid people in the Democratic Party, Biden and Harris don't do that crap. And Musk and other rich people are making up a narrative where they do because they want a tax cut.

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

That may be the case for other rich people but I don’t buy this nonsense for one second that Musk is doing all this just to get a tax cut, no matter how many times MattY or anyone else repeats it.

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evan bear's avatar

I actually agree that Musk isn't doing it for a tax cut, at least not per se. When I think about Musk, I'm mainly reminded of Michael Kinsley's quote about Robert Novak, which went something like "Underneath the a-hole is a nice guy, but then underneath the nice guy is another a-hole." Musk's social media contributions are clearly calculated to mislead people with fake right-wing ragebait, but that doesn't mean that underneath that ragebaiter lies a cynical but sane guy who just wants money. Rather, the guy underneath genuinely has brain worms. It's just that his brain worms are about other issues than the ones he focuses on in his tweets.

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

You need those brain worms to do whatever he’s doing on multiple fronts. I don’t think regular people like me would attempt something like SpaceX even if billions of dollars were to suddenly appear in my bank account.

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Matt Hagy's avatar

Agreed. As much as I hate to admit, Musk is both insane and brilliant. And the risks he took w/ Tesla and SpaceX are deeply rooted in the insane portion. Musk started w/ the premise that EVs or orbital launches must meet some unrealistic (at the time) cost structure and worked back from there. Supposedly for his outlandish vision of colonizing Mars and rapid zero emissions. All the established players rightfully dismissed this as madness and the mad man made it work.

I recently found this well articulated in "Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons", https://stratechery.com/2024/elon-dreams-and-bitter-lessons/ . Something rather poignant about the whole ordeal, but gotta admit there's something to that old George Bernard Shaw quote.

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

* Edited to fix grammar error

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evan bear's avatar

I don't agree that the brain worms are necessary. Put me down as anti brain worms. I'll put you down as pro.

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Joshua M's avatar

I mean, some level of brain worms are absolutely necessary to think you can do the things SpaceX has done, much less the things it plans to do in the future. I might wish the brain worms would stay on target better, but there’s not a reality where a McKinsey consultant plus a couple million dollars is going to conjure up reusable private spacecraft.

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ML's avatar

if my choice is brain worm billionaire plus Spacex vs no brain worm billionaire and a plodding NASA I'll take NASA very time.

I actually believe pretty strongly in market forces. If there's a profit opportunity in private space flight someone will find it. I don't think lunatic is the only possible version of who will find it.

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

Good thing is no one gave you that choice.

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Joshua M's avatar

Congratulations, you chose being dependent on Russia for human spaceflight.

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Sean O.'s avatar

David Sacks probably wants lower taxes, but Musk has greater ambitions.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

I agree. This Marxist take by Matt seems to elide the real reason for Musk's behavior: he's just an asshole.

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Nicholas's avatar

This is the situation where I feel like Democrats really should have tried harder to be unconventional. I feel like this was the election for Harris to nominate not just Josh Shapiro, but like, Pat Toomey or Mark Cuban another anti trump moderate republican as her VP. Particularly because the VP is such a nothing burger position but the symbolism and earned media for doing so is so spectacularly high. They needed to make crystal clear that Trump was an unconscionable choice, and present the original Biden case of a fair shake negotiator and restoration of the status quo ex ante. The groups would have predictably lost their minds, and this would have only helped Harris. For almost a decade lay people have viewed the democratic threat talk as a veil because the natural implication of such rhetoric is nothing else would be more important and you should be willing to make sacrifices to achieve that goal then. And Dems writ large never have proven that to the skeptics.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

>I feel like Democrats really should have tried harder to be unconventional.<

Successfully pressuring your own second-term-eligible incumbent president to quit the race was massively unconventional. Seriously.

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Dan Quail's avatar

But have you considered that for dishonest actors Democrats will never be able to do enough to meet their evershifting goalposts?

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drosophilist's avatar

No?!? You don’t say!

[shocked Pikachu face]

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

Strong disagree. Pat Toomey is an extreme conservative in every sense of the word (I have a ton of respect for any conservative who has stuck to their Never Trump principles). The Dems are under no obligation to nominate a VP who doesn't adhere to party principles. The VP is there to maintain continuity with the administration in case of death and to break ties in the Senate. That's it. Having an R VP accomplishes neither.

I get your point, but promising Cabinet positions to Rs is far more palatable than the VP slot.

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Nicholas's avatar

Pick whomever you want then, but the obvious advantage of doing it for the VP vs a cabinet member is 1) Voters will know who it is before voting for you in the election, unlike a cabinet post, 2) unlike the occasional bipartisan cabinet post, this would be a genuinely novel attempt that every voter would hear about, not like a loosely GOP affiliated Sec. of Commerce that only the comment section of Slow Boring can name, and 3) because of its salience, the earned media potential is stratospheric, far more than even Liz Cheney or anyone else. I'm exceedingly confident that if a voter already knows who Liz Cheney is and why her endorsement is meaningful, they are higher information news consumer than the median persuadable swing voter.

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

But that still puts you at risk to an R casting tiebreaking votes the opposite way or waiting in the wings to take over in case of death or incapacitation! I get what you're saying, but it's simply too big of a risk to take if you win.

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Nicholas's avatar

Again, either trump is a singular, sui generis existential risk to the very continuation of the republic or he is not. You make fundamentally different choices to prevent that from happening if you believe that than you would make if you didn't think that was true. If you don't think this gambit would help you that is fine and reason to contest it, but avoiding taking an extreme measure with a potentially high payoff because it has a lower comparable risk to the alternative does not make sense. And the person you pick absolutely matters of course and you should discuss this situation ex ante. Reality in 2024 is Harris is phenomenally unlikely to have a Dem Senate anyways, and if she does, she likely won squarely. So the risk of a tie breaker problem is super low, and of course the President could always simply then veto the tie broken GOP vote the VP approved! But you are trying to block Trump! Either that is totalizing or it is not.

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Tom Hitchner's avatar

I think the missing part of your argument is where you show (or even justify) that appointing a right-wing VP would make Harris's election more likely. Otherwise it's a bit like saying "Harris has never tried to jump Snake River Canyon before, but if this is supposedly such an important election why is she afraid to do something extreme?" The answer isn't just the high downside, the answer is that the upside is highly questionable.

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J. Willard Gibbs's avatar

You still have to, you know, govern if you win. Handing the GOP a loaded gun when they've already shown they'll leverage every possible tool at their disposal is pure folly. Simply not worth the risk.

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Helikitty's avatar

The Republican Party, Fox/OAN/Newsmax, and Republican voters are the clear and present risk to America…

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Allan Thoen's avatar

Mark Cuban, at least, has emphatically said he has no interest in public office, because he feels he can accomplish more outside government than in it. And if he can make a go of his latest project with his drug company of disrupting the dysfunctional pharmaceutical supply chain with a straightforward business model that also provides better value to patients, he’ll be right about that. He’ll not only stand stand to make more money than he’s made before, but will have accomplished more good for the American public than the countless politicians who’ve been talking for years without any success in making this particular market more functional and efficient.

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Nicholas's avatar

I agree! Just throwing out names of unconventional VP picks in general but as for Cuban himself yes, the potential upside of his latest project is massive.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

VP nominations don't matter in almost every case.

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Nicholas's avatar

They certainly don't matter to the extent you pick replacement party member. All the more reason to maybe try something different. I don't think this will be the reason harris loses if she does but again either this is a time for caution or the kitchen sink. Party rhetoric and actions are divergent here.

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

This is backwards on the VP. As we have seen, sometimes the person you picked as VP nominee for momentary political reasons actually gets into power, and it matters who that is. But the momentary political reasons almost never does, because people don’t vote for the VP.

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Dan K's avatar

Andrew Johnson says hi.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

I find it amazing that all the people who support Trump because they believe he will help them because they're in his good graces don't realize that no one stays in Trump's good graces very long.

Compared to him, Caligula was Caesar Augustus.

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John from VA's avatar

I'm sorry, but this again seems overblown. Most of Musk's business empire is heavily reliant on government contracts and subsides. That comes with a lot of strings attached.

Now one can certainly question the profusion of those rules. A bipartisan bill to reform the CHIPS Act went in just such a direction, but Musk's companies aren't above the law. Regulations on contractors might be overly burdensome. He might develop some conservative views based on this dynamic. That makes sense, but it doesn't make him the victim of a politically motivated hit job.

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Dan Quail's avatar

These people are coming up for a post-hoc rationalization for Musk's shift. He went all out with "liberal media" and "cancel culture" tirades after stories came out that he sexually assaulted a SpaceX flight attendant. That is what happened and that is what he joined the party of rape denial and rampant misogyny.

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David S's avatar

To that end, is there any evidence that Musks' companies have been specifically targeted by the Biden Admin or are they just being regulated and seeing the same types of law suits that businesses tend to see when they get to a certain size? There's a reason why all large companies that have government contracts have massive legal teams with lawyers who specialize in niche areas of law like regulatory affairs and government contracting.

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Stuart's avatar

I am surprised Republicans do so little to improve the complexity and burden of regulations. And even on bipartisan basis, I don't get why something like Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015 failed. It had bipartisan support from the center and this kind of bill has been kicking around for years.

It's a fairly neutral technocratic way to go about reducing the burden of regulations - it establishes a commission like BRAC that was so successful - where you have an expert independent commission look at the issue and make recommendations to Congress. And crucially, it gets a "yes or no" vote in Congress, so it's not ultimately just a report gathering dust on the shelf.

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Some Listener's avatar

I am continually more and more convinced that Musk will be one of the first oligarchs to fall out a window. There are just so many places he or the Trump administration could slight each other at which point each of them only knows how to escalate conflict and then bam he's on the enemies within list have fun dealing with whatever violent people Trump can send your way. The only person an autocracy works for is the autocrat, everyone else is either on thin ice or getting attacked from the beginning.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

>>her identity gives her greater authority to push back against bullying from inside the coalition<<

Underrated advantage to a Harris presidency (and elegantly put).

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John E's avatar

Its probably true, but also one of the more disappointing things about the Democratic coalition.

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ML's avatar

Is it any different in any political coalition? If your identity is a strong, pro-business republican, and you end up compromising with a democratic legislature, you're going to be able to bring your side along because you have built in credibility from that identity. Only Nixon could go to China.

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John E's avatar

If her identity as a moderate for California politician who was a former DA is the reason that she is able to push back against bullying inside her coalition, then I'm all for that. I don't think that was what Matt was referring to, do you?

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

That’s also not what ML was referring to. They were saying that only the ardent anti-communist Nixon was able to create a rapprochement with China. Nelson Rockefeller would have been seen as capitulating to the commies, and any Democrat would have been accused of being a secret communist agent.

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John E's avatar

Can you or ML connect the dots on how Harris' political positions help her repel the bullying inside her coalition?

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

If someone accuses a politician of pushing policies because they have a bias against women, a woman politician is going to have an easier time saying “no, that’s not what I’m doing”. If someone accuses a politicians of pushing policies because they have a bias against black people, a black politician is going to have an easier time saying “no, that’s not what I’m doing”. If someone accuses a politician of being weak on communism, Nixon is going to have an easier time saying “no, that’s not what I’m doing”.

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ML's avatar
Oct 25Edited

It’s not that her political positions allow her to repel bullying inside her coalition, it’s that her identity, female and black negates attacks, and defections, that might be levied against her if she implements policies that representatives of those members would characterize as counter to their interests.

Let’s say there’s an omnibus budget that cuts back some of the everything bagel requirements for child care. Under Biden or a Prez Walz, AOC might say we shouldn’t support this because it will hurt working women of color. Under Harris, whatever other objections there might be that one is short circuited because she can say I’m a working class woman of color, I understand their needs, and it’s absurd that I could betray them.

Similar thing would happen if say Rubio were to come out in favor of easing sanctions on Cuba, the charge that he was betraying Cuban-Americans wouldn’t easily stick.

It’s not bullying per se, it’s that people in a coalition place different priorities on different issues and prioritize different members within the coalition. That’s the nature of all coalitions, it’s why they’re harder to manage than narrower political alignments.

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John from VA's avatar

Voters of all stripes routinely ascribe more leftwing beliefs to women and minorities. Women are generally seen as more progressive by voters.

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Avery James's avatar

What is the evidence Harris utilized her identity to govern more conservatively as Senator or Attorney General for California than a major party faction would have preferred? I used to believe this exact phenomenon would be possible back in 2019. Then I watched her in the Democratic 2020 primary clearly not do that. Now in fairness, that was a primary with odd types of voters, but she clearly didn't push back on any of the terrible policy ideas with her identity.

Now I've sat through a Democratic presidential term and can guess roughly what to expect on policy compared to the primary. This theory certainly could be hypothetically true, but so far it sounds a lot more like a thing moderate Democrats who like writing things (or recent ex-Democrats like me in 2019) desperately want to be true than a thing they can point to any concrete examples of. I'll be generous and write off her VP role experience since she obviously didn't call the shots in that role (Biden did.)

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Rick Gore's avatar

I remember that dark day after the Biden-Trump debate, when we were all (rightfully) panicking about Biden’s chances. I also remember that while there was much talk about waving some magic wand and replacing Biden with a stronger candidate, there was ALSO a large amount of skepticism that Harris was the best possible replacement. I will be the first to acknowledge that Harris has done way, WAY better than I expected, which I am very happy about. But “we put this fighter into the ring who we had many concerns about but who is actually doing way better than we expected” is not the same thing as “we put our best fighter into the ring”. Ultimately we picked a replacement for Biden not on the basis of maximizing the chance of beating Trump, but on minimizing intra coalition drama, and as such was always more of a gamble than it should have been. I dearly dearly hope it works out, but we shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

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Polytropos's avatar

I think that somebody like Gretchen Whitmer would probably just be running away with it right now, but in practice, it doesn’t seem like there was really a coordinating mechanism for picking a non-VP replacement in a timely way. If Harris loses, I hope that we go to the bench of Midwestern swing state governors in 2028, but I’m glad that we pushed Biden out for Harris and that we’re getting a competitive election and probably avoiding a total downballot massacre.

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Jim #3's avatar

When I recently asked my Michigan residing family "Do people actually love Whitmer, or is she just the current face of generic Dem in Michigan?" I got a lot of "Eh, she's fine, nothing special, a nice generic Dem"

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David Abbott's avatar

A generic Dem who could win a home state premium in a state that mattered, wasn’t weighed down by Biden’s baggage, and hadn’t campaigned on banning fracking in her last election would be materially stronger than Harris.

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Andy Hickner's avatar

If you compare this to where her 2 immediate predecessors (Snyder and Granholm) were at this point in their second terms, that is gushing praise. Snyder was knee-deep in shit from the Flint water disaster, and Granholm was incredibly unpopular even with Democrats.

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

The one person I’ve heard from with any inside Michigan political connections says that Whitmer is as sleazy as Newsom, but I didn’t hear any specifics.

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Polytropos's avatar

Being a boring generic Dem is probably better than being the VP to a very unpopular president and having a record of taking unpopular issue stances in the last national primary. Harris and her campaign have executed pretty well, IMO, but they have some significant specific problems that “generic Dem” would not.

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Dan Quail's avatar

I think we would be in the same equilibrium with legacy media sanewashing Republicans, fabricating concerns about Democrats, and a large number of voters still concerned about Biden's age while feeling perfectly fine with the brainrot coming out of Trump's mouth.

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Polytropos's avatar

I think this would be true to some extent, but on the margins, both having more freedom to throw Joe Biden under the bus and not having a record of taking unpopular issue stances (in a highly visible way) during the 2020 primary would help.

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Rick Gore's avatar

Well, there was a coordinating mechanism - it would have been a real primary without Biden (because he had previously announced that he wouldn’t be running again). As I mentioned in my comment, I do think that Harris is over-performing - but if we lose you can make a solid case that it’s because of the lack of that true primary and that is 100% on Biden.

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John from FL's avatar

We can’t pin 100% of this on Biden. He is old and addled. That was covered up by his cabinet and the media until it was too obvious to ignore.

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MondSemmel's avatar

I don't think this defense works. Biden is responsible for picking his cabinet and for deciding who to treat as his trusted advisors. If the advisors you picked tell you not to retire against all common sense, that's ultimately on you for picking them. If your campaign is based on a theory of poll trutherism, that's ultimately on you, too. Plus Biden is the only elected official in all this, so in an important sense he's the only one who voters *can* blame. "The buck stops with me", and all that.

Finally, while the media is obviously not innocent, it's noteworthy that the White House actively misled the public and the press about Biden's health and level of competence. And since such lies affect your own partisans much more than the other side (that's a common Yglesias argument), those partisans then criticized any of the few media stories who *did* cover the age story.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

When would the magic wand have been waved that made Whitmer this awesome nominee? If that had been done in late July, Whitmer would have been a terrible candidate. She had no structure, no money, no practice at being on the national stage. She might have turned out to be a unicorn and the greatest natural talent in history, but more likely she would have stumbled and struggled to hit her stride, with no time to recover.

Given that the change occurred so late, Harris was the best possible option. Had Biden dropped out in December 2022, it might have been an entirely different story. But he didn't. We should thank our lucky stars that Harris turned out to be as good as she is.

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Chuchundra's avatar

The person who isn't running is always the better candidate because it's easy for people to imagine that they would be. It's a fantasy. "Bernie woulda won". It's nonsense

As they say in football, the most popular guy on the team is the backup quarterback.

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

I don't think any Democrat would be running away with it in this highly polarized political environment where they are the incumbents. It is however, a game of small margins and it's not hard to imagine a popular governor from a swing state doing better than Harris.

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ML's avatar

That seems to assume a lot of can openers. There was no feasible way to run a primary, and whatever came out of a contested convention was no more likely to be better than or worse than Harris.

This was always going to be a 50/50 election because of Trump, because if 50% of the electorate can look at this choice and say Trump is better than there's no real hope that a different not-Trump would do any better. The problem here is not our candidate.

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Rick Gore's avatar

That’s totally fair- which is why Biden should have announced he wouldn’t be seeking a second term by early to mid 2023 at the latest, to allow for a true, normal primary process.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

The problem with the Harris campaign is that it lasted about 2 months before the cracks started showing.

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

Have cracks started showing? My impression is the opposite - it started seeming very cracked, and then over the next several weeks seemed to right itself.

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Chuchundra's avatar

If Biden had dropped out in early 2023, which would have given everyone who wanted a shot at the big chair a proper chance to build an organization, raise money, promote their agenda and stump for their candidacy, followed by a normal primary season in 2024, there is a 95% chance that Harris is still the nominee.

No political party in US history has denied the presidential nomination to the sitting Vice President if they desired it. The institutional advantages are huge.

Presidential primaries don't pick "the best fighter", whatever that means. The winner is almost always someone with the connections, institutional advantages and the ability to raise a lot of money

Was Hillary Clinton really our best fighter in 2016? Obviously not. But she had the inside track even though she clearly sucked at running a campaign.

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Eric's avatar

I would argue that "minimizing intra coalition drama" is a very important necessary condition for beating Trump, and that argument that Whitmer would have done better under the same circumstances as Harris is largely fantasy.

If Trump wins, the reason will be some combination of:

1) Biden having stepped down too late to allow for a normal primary to determine the replacement.

2) Bad luck with regard to random economic cycles, Democrats taking the blame for problems beyond their control.

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David Abbott's avatar

The backup quarterback has played hard and fought honorably. The problem is she wouldn’t have had the chops to win a contested nomination. She’s the back up for a reason.

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David Abbott's avatar

Your scenario is possible and not implausible. I’ll go no further without exquisite regressions.

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David Abbott's avatar

I understand that Harris has said a couple encouraging things about housing scarcity, but it seems a stretch to say she recognizes it as “the major problem in the American economy.” Does she think building houses is more important than creating “good union jobs”? Is she willing to build exurban single family homes even if it means more carbon emissions? Harris is the product of a blue state political machine. Red states like Georgia and Texas have achieved housing abundance, blue states have worried about climate and green friends and good union jobs. I fear Matt is wish casting on this one.

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Flume, Nom de's avatar

> Harris has said a couple encouraging things about housing scarcity

A couple? Are we even listening to the same person? She won't shut up about it!

In just her debate with Trump when she mentioned it in passing the third time I began to worry she was spending too much time pandering to Slowboring readers and not enough time pandering to other groups!

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

Hasn’t housing been the first issue on most of her lists of priorities?

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Flume, Nom de's avatar

Probably second to protecting access to abortion. Which is the right move politically. But I've never seen an explicit 1 2 3 policy ranking.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

Matt isn't dumb enough to actually believe what he wrote. He's just cheerleading the Harris campaign in a way that is, frankly, insulting to his readers.

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Milan Singh's avatar

I’m surprised whenever Matt writes a “Democrats are good” column that so many commenters end up being surprised that Matt is a Democrat and sincerely believes that Democrats are generally better than Republicans.

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John from FL's avatar

Most subscribers are here for the policies Matt writes about, not the partisanship. There are better places to hang out online for the dyed-in-the-wool partisans.

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Milan Singh's avatar

You don’t actually know if most subscribers are here for that. These types of takes get more blowback in comments but commenters are <1% of all subscribers. Only Matt and Ben and Kate would know how they perform based on views and paid conversion rates.

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John from FL's avatar

Fair enough.

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Dan Quail's avatar

Isn’t today a free post? Lots of irregular names (with some sanewashing Trump.)

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Matt *has* to root for Harris. If Trump wins, anything he writes on policy will be sad, pathetic and futile. If Harris wins, he can really sink his teeth into meaty policy proposals and, I'm sure, will be quite happy to rip the administration a new one if he thinks their policy prescriptions don't measure up.

I fear for Slow Boring under a Trump restoration. It's really not built for that kind of discourse.

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Siddhartha Roychowdhury's avatar

Partisan MattY is not my favorite MattY. Policy wonk MattY is. Partisan MattY has dumb takes like Biden was fit to run for reelection, something that a normie with two working eyes could easily tell wasn't true.

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Avery James's avatar

Also me lol, don't worry Matt you weren't the only one let down by propagandists in the liberal press.

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Dan Quail's avatar

If this column was about Biden or another male Democratic leader you would not be seeing some of the comments on here. Some of them a really sheesh. Though I did see a version of the flip flopper narrative (which is new). Most of it is some version of the "you cannot trust the duplicitous woman in power" trope that saw so much traction in 2016 (and goes way back to conservative talk radio - which I used to listen to on an old Radio Shack AM/FM alarm clock.)

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Milan Singh's avatar

I just think it’s funny because everyone here liked the “Kamala should try harder to be popular” takes a few years ago and now that she’s done the steps he recommended people are complaining that she did it!

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Dan Quail's avatar

It’s like that rant in The Barbie Movie. Contradictory expectations.

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Thomas's avatar

Is anyone complaining that she did it? There's plenty of skepticism that she's sincere about it given it didn't happen until she unexpectedly became the nominee. I don't see anyone around here saying they liked old Kamala better.

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Tom Hitchner's avatar

Comment of the day.

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Joshua M's avatar

This comment section was much tougher on Biden this year than it is on Harris, both before and after Matt’s post-debate volte-face, and it’s either delusional or dishonest to pretend otherwise.

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Dan Quail's avatar

This is the same exact deflection I got when I made the similar observations to how Hillary Clinton was treated in 2016…

Also your response doesn’t address the substance of my observation about the TYPES of recycled and non substantive criticisms.

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Joshua M's avatar

It’s not a deflection, it’s a direct disproof. And Harris gets different criticisms because her problems are not in the category “cognitively impaired octogenarian who can’t see he shouldn’t be running.”

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Avery James's avatar

If it was a column about Biden the tone would be *far more ruthless*. "Biden is going to implement supply-side liberal policies guys, trust me" could be the subject of intense mockery and laughter, like Matt is arguing we're supposed to trust the wallet inspector to make sure our wallet is in good shape.

The only reason Matt is even remotely convincing is because he has a different candidate, who notably is steadfastly avoiding clarifying any policy she would have done different in the past three and a half years. And then on the tacit grounds "you shouldn't vote for Trump given his behavior as leader", he's a lot stronger, but that's precisely not what a positive case for Harris is.

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Grigori Avramidi's avatar

i think the signals she is sending, and the things she is saying explicitly, out loud, over and over again are very clear to anyone paying attention.

the argument saying ``we don't know how she will govern'' are based on the assumption that she is lying about everything she is saying. where is this coming from?

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Avery James's avatar

She has been asked point blank by numerous reporters and hosts how she would govern differently than Biden did and I welcome you sharing what you think her best answer was.

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Avery James's avatar

Okay but he's supposed to make a convincing argument on housing policy Milan, he wrote an entire book on it.

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David Abbott's avatar

I wouldn’t go that far, but the negative case for Harris is far stronger than the positive case.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

It's really simple. Either you think Trump is fit to be President or you don't. If you don't, it has to be Harris. I disagree with you that the negative case for her is the stronger but at the end of the day I really don't care. You have to choose.

Once safely elected (fingers crossed) then we can have all the debates about her strengths and shortcomings that we want.

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David Abbott's avatar

I can debate anything I like up through the election. If she wants me to shut up, I want a federal judgeship. I doubt she would pay that price to a middling lawyer. It’s my election, too.

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Gordon Caleb's avatar

But your main negative about Harris is that she is a DEI hire. Which is.....not a negative.

I mean, Trump is a DEI hire too if we get down to it. Nobody with his qualifications (elderly, mentally deficient, felon, never been in public service before) would ever be considered for the post unless we were trying to be more inclusive in our candidates.

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David Abbott's avatar

It is totally, utterly a negative in the worst possible way if you want to catalyze a pan racial, working class coalition. She is 40 points underwater with working class whites. Obama was better. QED.

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Gordon Caleb's avatar

I agree with you that she is likely to lose (a fact not lost on her, she has repeatedly said she is the underdog from the very beginning).

But the DEI argument falls apart because, like I said above, both candidates are DEI beneficients.

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Avery James's avatar

I understand Matt is a Democrat, and I respect that is his political commitment on larger first order grounds. But I struggle to believe a smart housing policy guy like him seriously thinks the executive is going to produce large positive effects on state and local zoning decisions. It doesn't really follow with what we've seen or know about zoning policy right now.

The largest effect I can imagine is just ramping up the Biden-Harris immigration policy back to 80% of what it was for 3.5 years once the election season is over, and thus poisoning the well for some local YIMBY politics when people want control over their municipal quality of life and start seeing high housing prices as a feature to accomplish that in spite of a federal immigration policy that makes it worse.

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Eric's avatar

Housing affordability is becoming an issue in red states too. Look no further than Austin, for example.

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Ray's avatar

This is a great article. I am voting for Kamala mostly for negative reasons so I appreciate the positive pitch. I hope she governs on this basis and we can finally break away from Elizabeth Warren Thought, which I do feel is the root cause of the big Tech realignment the last few years.

One lesson I hope we can learn from the Trump era is that there is genuine downside to just saying every negative thing you can imagine about your political opponents at all times. I feel like Sachs and Musk should know better but I know a lot of people who bucket “Trump Corruption” right next to the genuinely deranged Trump-Russia stuff in terms of credibility. From the Right the comparable would be the Hunter Biden laptop, which should have been more damaging to Biden but came at the tail end of months of “Biden Crime Family” lunacy so was easier to dismiss. Anyway would be nice if we could get back to normal criticisms of our opponents vs grandiose global conspiracy theories with zero basis in fact.

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Patrick's avatar

"One lesson I hope we can learn from the Trump era is that there is genuine downside to just saying every negative thing you can imagine about your political opponents at all times"

I mean... I guess I am still waiting for this downside to affect Trump in any way?

I get why Democrats are so frustrated. They are literally the normal school kid punching back at the bully, and the teacher comes by and throws you both out of school and talks about how violence is never the answer. It's just beyond frustrating to be the only side that has to play by the rules.

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Tom Hitchner's avatar

I think the downside is his deep unpopularity and also his inability to get things done with possible allies (he screwed himself out of killing Obamacare, for instance)

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David's avatar

Biden mostly did the right things with respect to prosecuting Trump, but those small errors will leave a mark.

Both of these things are true

- Trump committed more crimes than other presidents

- Trump was prosecuted for more nonsense than any other President

That NY hush money case is nonsense. I suspect it will both be overturned on appeal and be remembered as the worst recent example of going after your political opponents.

We'll be suffering from it for a decade or more.

It was good that Biden stayed out of the case, but once you start cutting ads talking about the guilty verdicts, you're in on it.

In my West Wing fever dreams, I wish Kamala

- Called out the NY case as being bad

- Talked in detail about the mob-boss level behavior that Trump did around the documents case, and how that would send anyone to prison

- Offered Trump a pardon post-election

Something seems wrong about trying to send your 78-year-old political opponent to prison, even if he so richly deserves it.

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theeleaticstranger's avatar

The NY case was prosecuted because it was illegal and relatively easy to prove, as evidenced by the fact that other similar cases are prosecuted in NY (as Matt and Brian covered on Politix some time ago). So while I agree that it seems little trivial on its face compared with other stuff Trump has done, there is nothing wrong about choosing to prosecute it in my opinion, and choosing to prosecute it is upholding the rule of law over politics. It’s just a fact that high profile scumbags will invite more prosecutorial interest, such as Al Capone getting prosecuted for tax evasion or Martin Shkreli for financial crimes.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

No, the New York case was prosecuted because the prosecutor ran on prosecuting Trump, and he was grasping at any straws to be able to do it.

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disinterested's avatar

This is a lie, and it's been repeatedly pointed out as a lie, and it's frankly annoying and suspicious how much you're over this thread shitting out Trump apologia.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

A direct quote from Bragg during the campaign: "I believe we have to hold him [Trump] accountable."

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

Is that what “campaigned on” means? I would want to see what the front page list of his priorities on his campaign website or in his ads were, rather than just hearing that he once said this thing.

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theeleaticstranger's avatar

I don’t see anything wrong for a prosecutor to run on upholding the rule of law.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

And yet the defense couldn't get even one juror (in a jury which included Republicans) to agree.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

Yes, because the facts were not the issue. The interpretation of the law was. Once the judge got on board with the absurd interpretation, it was game over. At least until we get to the appeals court, where it will probably be reversed.

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Jacob's avatar

Meh, if you’re mega famous and talk about doing crimes all of the time, I am not going to feel bad when you get prosecuted for it. Very similar to Hunter Biden. Do most people get charged for being an addict in possession of a gun? No, but it’s clearly illegal and Hunter Biden wrote a book admitting to it! I think there’s value to prosecuting high salience examples of law breaking to establish deterrence.

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João's avatar

Not quite. The big Bragg story prior to the Trump prosecution was how he went after some Dominican grandpa with murder charges for stabbing a crazy guy who tried to attack him while he worked the counter of his bodega. The Trump thing made everyone forget that.

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mathew's avatar

I suggest listening to Advisory Opinions episodes where they discussed the Hush money case in detail.

The fact was what happened just wasn't a felony. And no it never should have been prosecuted.

Paying people off isn't a crime.

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Jacob's avatar

I think that’s too strong of a characterization. Trump was charged with falsifying business records in the first degree, which is a felony and requires proving that the falsification was in furtherance of another crime.

It would have been more conservative to charge him with falsifying business records in the second degree, which is a misdemeanor and does not require proving it was in furtherance of another crime. In New York, misdemeanors have a 2 year statute of limitations, which had expired when the charges were brought, whereas felonies have a 5 year state of limitations.

Yes, it’s aggressive to charge first degree instead of second degree to get around the statute of limitations, but that’s the sort of thing prosecutors do all the time. He was convicted by a jury!

I agree that it would have been wiser not to prosecute him for it. Prosecuting a former president is inherently inflammatory, so I would’ve been as conservative as possible, but I don’t think he’s faced any particular injustice compared to other criminal defendants.

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mathew's avatar

The falsification is only a felony if it's in service of another crime. What's the other crime? There is none.

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Matthew's avatar

This is biden's fault in choosing Garland. Once that mistake was made... Nothing Biden could do.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

Exactly. If Trump had been promptly prosecuted on the reasonable charges, he might have been in prison before the primary even started.

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Tom Hitchner's avatar

So in another comment you complain about the courts being weaponized against Trump. But here you complain about not prosecuting him more promptly in the documents case. Doesn’t giving him time to give back the docs without being prosecuted help defuse the idea that the prosecution was political?

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Kevin M.'s avatar

The different cases are different. The New York cases are totally bogus. The documents case is very clear cut, but you're right that the timeline of events meant that couldn't be taken care of as quickly. The other federal case about trying to steal the election could have been brought much faster and with much more reasonable charges. For example, the Supreme Court was never going to let a President be prosecuted for trying to fire the Attorney General.

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VJV's avatar
Oct 23Edited

I would be fine with offering Trump a pardon if and only if it was offered in exchange for a credible promise to stand down in the Presidential race. But that was never going to happen, because promises from Trump are not credible.

My sense is that the NY case was a close-run thing, and politics tilted the scales in favor of prosecuting it. Which is definitely unseemly, and they shouldn't have done it given the circumstances, but it's not the kind of persecution MAGA and the anti-anti-Trump crowd make it out to be. I suspect politics-tilting-the-scales-when-its-a-close-call is more common in the justice system than people realize.

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Patrick's avatar

What the hell, offering a pardon in exchange for quitting the race would be the highest form of corruption imaginable.

The pardon should be promised exclusively on the merits of the case, and with no strings attached.

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Sean O.'s avatar

For whatever reason or reasons, it seems like many voters do not trust Harris when she says she does not hold her policy positions from 2019. This may just be an excuse, cynicism, or general distrust of politicians, but it is very much holding her down.

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Joshua M's avatar

They don’t believe her because she’s never come close to articulating a reason why all those positions changed. She’s not a good communicator.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

People don't believe her when she's changed every single policy position she's ever had within the last 4 months, as soon as she gets a major party nomimation. I can imagine why anyone's doubting her!

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ESB1980's avatar

"every single policy position" -- histrionics this morning!

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Kevin M.'s avatar

Yes, I was employing rhetorical hyperbole. So what?

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REF's avatar

So, it makes people roll their eyes at your comment rather than consider it seriously. Look at the replies and relative "likes."

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Kevin M.'s avatar

I look at the replies and relative "likes" and see a lot of groupthink shunning independent thought.

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M Harley's avatar

Donald Trump has flip flopped so much he should be a gymnast but he always get a pass 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Kevin M.'s avatar

How on earth does he always get a pass on that? He doesn't get it from me, the mainstream media, this blog, or a lot of conservative media to boot. I don't see much of the liberal-but-not-mainstream media (like this blog) holding Harris to account in the same way, say, the Dispatch or the Bulwark do to Trump.

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M Harley's avatar

We literally spent a month this summer with political pundits saying Harris was bad and eviscerating her record.

I’ve always found it odd that we all want our politicians to change and when they succumb to popular pressure and change. We pillar then for it.

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mathew's avatar

Yep and we all know Trump's a liar, and he's been called out a LOT for being a liar.

Most of us believe Harris is also a liar and don't believe her recent moderation.

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M Harley's avatar

I’ve always found it odd that we all want our politicians to change and when they succumb to popular pressure and change, we pillar them for it. I personally like when politicians listen to voters and abandon shitty policies.

While Harris wouldn’t be my first choice for democrats (I really prefer moderate candidates) I’m personally heartened that she seems to have listened to voters and is trying to moderate, going so far as to campaign with republicans, something no Dem has done on this scale.

Such moderation would *never* happen with Trump.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

"Such moderation would *never* happen with Trump."

For better or for worse, Trump is completely transactional and will change to whatever position benefits him. Sometimes this is essentially a form of moderation. For example, he promised to veto a national abortion ban.

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M Harley's avatar

Fair take. And I wouldn’t even be opposed to the transaction nature of Trump if he didn’t take it to the extreme. Say what you want about Harris, but I genuinely believes she cares about America, believes in the rule of law and wouldn’t sell us out to dictators.

If Trump could just be less transactional and insane, I would consider voting for him!

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

Only political junkies remember anything she said in 2019. Normies don’t know about any of that.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

If you lived in a swing state, you would see non-stop advertisements of her proclaiming her positions in 2019.

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Bret M.'s avatar

I’m not sure if this is true. Recent Gallup polling shows that voters don’t see her as more politically extreme than Trump. Considering her past positions, and her San Francisco background, I think that’s notable and a credit to the work her campaign is doing. https://news.gallup.com/poll/651692/voters-choice-character-leadership-skill.aspx

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Thomas's avatar

She's saying a lot of things, and her instincts on what to say are a lot better than I thought they were. I'm still way less confident than Matt projects about what it is she'll actually do once elected.

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What-username-999's avatar

I’ve come around to Harris a lot more since she got the nomination.

Is she perfect? No, but who is?

Is she who I would have picked? Probably not.

Is she 100,000x better than Trump? Yes, so I’ll take it.

I’m hoping she will win and be a great President.

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Andrew J's avatar

Positive case for Kamala for me is that she has incrementally moved the policy positions in the right direction. It speaks to her having the right mindset for the moment: incrementalism is mostly what we need now.

She's run smart campaign and excelled in the debate, looking like an adult vs a child. She's perhaps been a little more cautious than optimal, but again, at the moment that's probably a virtue.

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Andrew S's avatar

Matt writes: “Because after eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives.”

I liked this piece a lot, and Harris is clearly the correct choice for dozens of reasons, but seems like there is a core problem with this argument that Matt didn’t grapple with - namely that you could replace the words “eight” with “four” and “Harris” with “Biden” and it’s effectively the case for Biden in 2020.

And then you end up with some voters looking back and saying “well that didn’t actually happen, so why should I believe it’s going to happen now with Harris?”

I think there’s a real and overlooked challenge for Dems/Harris to convince people who have already made it through a first Trump term that a second one is going to be that much worse. We need to talk about that more.

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

Biden absolutely did turn the temperature down. I’m not sure if you remember the years 2016-2020, but the last couple years have been totally sane and calm by comparison.

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Andrew S's avatar

Yeah to be clear I absolutely agree Biden did that. But voters don’t seem to care that he did. That’s why I’m questioning whether it’s a helpful message for Harris.

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Binya's avatar

This is factually inaccurate IMO. Biden ran on a pretty left-wing platform: "positions included codifying Roe v. Wade into statute, creating a public option for health insurance, decriminalizing recreational cannabis, passing the Equality Act, providing tuition-free community college, and passing a $1.7 trillion climate plan embracing the framework of the Green New Deal."

Harris doesn't have a comparable platform as far as I can tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_2020_presidential_campaign

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Andrew S's avatar

Sure there were policy planks that Biden had varying levels of intention and ability to act on - there are in any election - but fundamentally he ran on being a normie.

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John from VA's avatar

This is memory holed, but this isn't quite true. Biden ran in the primary on that platform, but by the time he sewed up the nomination, the economy was collapsing. It was to such an extent that Trump successfully bullied his party into working with Democrats to create a quasi-UBI program with unemployment insurance. Biden took the unusual move of moving left after the primary, and did promise "fundamental change". Democrats were expecting a landslide in their favor and wanted to take advantage of it. The election was much closer than anticipated, but even then, theyve made quite a bit of their gains.

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Andrew S's avatar

I’m really not sure this is true because of the Senate. Even had Dems performed better in Maine and N.C., they would still have only come out of election night with 50 senators. There was no possible landslide to take advantage of.

And in any event if the question is “did Biden turn down the temperature?”he undoubtedly did. Your comment is representative of the exact problem, which is that no one seems to give him credit for it. (And therefore I’m worried it’s not a good message for Harris.)

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MikeR's avatar

When...and how...did Biden "turn down the temperature?" Because I've spent the past eight years interacting with people from across the political spectrum, and as best I can gather, about all that happened is a) having a Democrat in the White House meant a lot of people no longer felt they needed to aggressively prove their leftist cred by signing on to some very stupid ideas, and b) people started both experiencing and acknowledging the effects of those stupid ideas.

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Andrew S's avatar

How about the way he acted normally and within the historical bounds of civility for a president? Or the way he hired capable, competent people who you might not agree with, but weren’t outright dangers like Michael Flynn? Or the way he didn’t defend white supremacists or scapegoat Muslims?

If the GOP had just declared Trump a loser and moved on from him, it would have been a decently typical if partisan four years under Biden.

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Christopher Johnson's avatar

Yeah, I think you have to put your hope in a combination of:

1. Trump going away will lower the temperature, particularly in terms of rhetoric and the reaction he produces.

2. Harris, despite her progressive instincts and roots, will keep the activist Left in check. She will be able to succeed where Biden failed because she has (a) identity status credibility, (b) a reelection to worry about, (c) intact cognitive abilities.

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VJV's avatar

I think the best way to think about this is that removing Trump is a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, precondition for turning down the temperature or getting back to normal or whatever. It may or may not happen if he loses; it definitely won't happen if he wins.*

I'd also arege that the odds of it happening are a little higher this time around because a) we're not in a pandemic anymore and b) Harris is in the normal age range for a President. But it's true that it's hard to say with certainty.

*Well, it might sort of happen in a way if Trump wins, because the country is pretty exhausted. I suspect a lot of people (probably including me, let's be honest) will just throw up their hands and let him do what he wants to do. I don't think the late 2010s are coming back, though we might get a weak facsimile of that.

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NotSoCoolHandLuke's avatar

You’re right and much of the discussion across all of these comments seems to focus on 'I don’t like Trump' rather than providing clear reasons why voters should choose Harris over him. This reflects a classic case of being stuck in an echo chamber, where Harris’s success would seem more due to chance than a solid strategy. Voters know who Trump is and what he stands for, but the same can’t be said for Harris.

She often comes across as inauthentic, more like a continuation of Biden, with handlers and a political machine behind her, rather than an independent, decisive leader. If she can change that perception in the coming weeks, she could win convincingly. But if she stays the course, she risks either a narrow and contested victory, or a Trump win, fueled by silent voters who don’t want Biden 2.0.

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mathew's avatar

Yep, I voted for Trump in 2020. Due to the election lies and January 6th I won't be voting for him in 2024.

If Biden had actually governed as a center left Democrat I would probably be pulling the lever for Harris now.

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Andrew S's avatar

Genuinely curious how you think Biden governed? I think he is the epitome of a center left Democrat.

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Marc Pinsonneault's avatar

A major challenge with this argument is accountability. Matt acknowledged that the border was mishandled, for example. The summer of 2020 - and the entire rhetoric of the 2019 Harris campaign - had a lot of overheated and radical ingredients. No officials were fired for this, and there has barely been any admission that any mistakes were made. Biden was clearly dimished in capacity, his administration covered it up, and we're just supposed to ignore this. We had massive 2021 projects that I really liked, but three years later we still barely have any new (say) charging stations. A mea culpa would go a long way, but apparently we can't have that. The idea that we are supposed to just ignore all of this, and assume that better things will just happen in the future, strikes me as wishful thinking. Incompetence doesnt transmute into competence if there is no consequence for failure.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

>Incompetence doesnt transmute into competence if there is no consequence for failure.<

Things are never perfect, but the country is being run vastly more competently that it was under Trump. It's a scary world out there to be sure, but America itself is enjoying peace and prosperity. Our economy, to quote The Economist, is "The Envy of The World." Under Trump Americans couldn't even go abroad—other countries wouldn't allow us to enter. Now foreigners are groaning under the weight of our tourism dollars. Look at the comps wrt US growth/incomes vs. growth/incomes in other countries. The best job market in a generation. Booming stock prices. Huge increase in manufacturing investments. Falling crime (under Trump we saw a murder surge). And, far from toppling the Ukraine regime in weeks—as was widely predicted—our chief adversary in Europe is locked in a blistering, costly quagmire a full 2.5 years after its invasion, largely thanks to the leadership of the Biden-Harris adminstration.

Meanwhile Beijing dealing with both human and financial capital flight:

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-capital-flight-2ba6391b

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Why-so-many-middle-class-Chinese-migrants-take-risky-illegal-route-to-U.S

The state of the union has seldom bet better. It would be a real tragedy if a minority of US voters dragged us back down to where we were four years ago.

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VJV's avatar

"Under Trump Americans couldn't even go abroad—other countries wouldn't allow us to enter."

What? Huh? I traveled abroad without issue multiple times during the Trump administration.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

When Trump left office Americans were among the most banned people in the world, owing to the international community's mistrust of US pandemic measures:

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/18/1008187671/eu-opens-the-door-to-american-travelers-but-they-may-not-be-welcome-everywhere

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Christopher Johnson's avatar

Did you even read the article you posted? I don't think it says what you think it says

‐----------

"Americans are now able to visit the EU"

"And there's yet another factor EU governments may take into account when deciding whether to grant access to American travelers: reciprocity. The U.S. government has not yet lifted its ban on non-essential travel by Europeans. It's a touchy point. European Commission spokesman Adalbert Jahnz explained, "It goes without saying that we would expect the same from partner countries outside the EU for EU citizens traveling to those countries."

...

Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law and policy at HEC business school in Paris, believes the U.S. hesitancy to open its borders to European tourists is largely due to a "negative perception of the EU's handling of the pandemic — notably, slow vaccination programs. In other words, Europe is not perceived as safe [yet]."

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Charles Ryder's avatar

When various countries began to open up to International arrivals—starting as early as the summer of 2020—US citizens were frequently among the last to be allowed in. This is a matter of public record. Thankfully the situation wasn't overly prolonged. But I brought it up above only to highlight the poor job the Trump administration did at pandemic response, as well as the dire state of national conditions when he left office (COVID deaths peaked at nearly 4,000 per seven days THE VERY WEEK Trump left office!).

Much of the world outside the United States not unreasonably viewed America as a dumpster fire by late 2020 and early 2021. This is courtesy of Anthropic:

"During the initial phases of reopening international travel in 2020 and 2021, many countries did restrict or prohibit entry for travelers from the United States due to high COVID-19 infection rates. For example, when the European Union began reopening its borders in summer 2020, the US was notably absent from their list of approved countries whose residents could enter. This was particularly notable because pre-pandemic, US passport holders generally enjoyed relatively broad travel privileges globally. Countries like Canada, New Zealand, and many EU member states maintained restrictions on US travelers for extended periods while allowing visitors from countries with lower infection rates. The EU's criteria for allowing visitors included factors like the number of new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the previous 14 days, and the overall response to COVID-19 in the country. The US infection rates during this period frequently exceeded the thresholds set by various countries for allowing international visitors."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/25/world/europe/american-travel-to-europe.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/18/1008187671/eu-opens-the-door-to-american-travelers-but-they-may-not-be-welcome-everywhere

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Marc Pinsonneault's avatar

I understand and agree with the Trump concerns. But there are also real issues! As an example, average wages matching inflation still leaves a lot of people who don't get average wage increases and who lose, badly. An example I know: retired teachers in Ohio are not in Soc Sec and have gotten minimal increasea in their pensions. They took a huge hit from the inflation spike. Telling them that everything is great really backfires. My biggest concern is the prospect of having no lessons learned.

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Eric's avatar

I see the whole inflation thing as irrelevant to a relational voter because it wasn't caused by Biden, it was caused by supply chain issues that fell out of the pandemic, and Trump being president would have done nothing to prevent it.

If anything, promises that Trump has made, including tariff hikes and mass deportations would exacerbate inflation by taking away a chunk of the labor force in a tight labor market, and adding what is effectively a tax on every product imported from abroad. Trump's promise to rein the fed's independence and start ordering them to lower interest rates prematurely would also move inflation in the wrong direction.

The only reason inflation is even an issue at all in Trump's favor is that there's a large number of uneducated voters who don't understand how inflation works. In their mind, every president has a lever - pull it to the left, inflation goes up, pull it to the right, inflation goes down, Biden and Harris pulled it to the left, Trump pulled it to the right, end of story. In the real world, inflation just doesn't work like that.

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Jonnymac's avatar

Why shouldn't they take that up with Ohio?

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Marc Pinsonneault's avatar

It's a specific example of a group that has fallen behind, and why these claims about the best economy ever fall flat. Imagine that you're in that group - how would you feel about a party that told you that you were better off?

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Jonnymac's avatar

Okay... Are they pissed off at Ohio though? Like, of course there's examples of people who are not better off, but statistics are what they are

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Milan Singh's avatar

Fair points, but we should be comparing to the alternative and not the ideal. Would a Trump administration increase competence? I doubt it.

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Joshua M's avatar

Correct, which is why the negative case for Harris is so much more compelling than this weak positive case for Harris.

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Milan Singh's avatar

Being the better candidate is a positive!

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mathew's avatar

Hard to say. Trump himself is pretty incompetent. His last administration wasn't. Operation Warp speed was a huge success.

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Patrick's avatar

Noah Smith writes a lot about this, but there's actually been a ton of investment in factory builds thanks to CHIPs.

I guess if you expected the benefits of those big deals to all come to fruition and wrap up in a neat tidy bow in 1-3 years, I can understand why you are disappointed, but I can promise you that the next administration will also disappoint you if these are your expectations.

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Marc Pinsonneault's avatar

I expect that it should be possible to build electric charging stations in less than 3 years, and if that is not possible it's a real problem with the system.

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manual's avatar

It would seem to me that the US economy is the best positioned in the world following a world shattering pandemic with unemployment low, gdp growth strong, and inflation tamed. Which seems like an extremely compelling case of competence. I’m currently a 30 minute drive from the US border at my parents house in the desert, and things are quite fine. Yes they didn’t handle the border issues well and let it fester but this dystopian view of the border just does comport with how people live out here. I really find it fascinating how much “immigration” and “the border” dominate peoples’ minds who don’t appear close to those issues or the places that actually face immigration. Anyway, getting some coffee and going for a hike, and I’ll keep people posted on the danger and crime.

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VJV's avatar

Reading through today's comments, I'm reminded of a certain sort of person that I see a lot on Twitter (and who describes one or two people I know IRL, as well): people who refuse to see that the far left's influence on the Democratic Party peaked in 2020-2021 and has since receded. Not all the way back to where it was 15 years ago, when the far left was basically powerless, but still meaningfully.

I often think this is a matter of people who have a visceral hatred of the far left seeking to conjure up a permission structure to vote for Trump.

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srynerson's avatar

I don't want Trump to win and am definitely not voting for him, but I missed where there's been much, if any, explicit repudiation of 2019-2021 stuff (however characterized) as compared to Democrats in 2024 largely ignoring it or pretending that it didn't happen even as overwhelmingly the same people have remained in positions of power and influence in the party over that same time.

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Christopher Johnson's avatar

Great point.

I think there are at least two things playing into this:

1. Right wing media nutpicking for clicks, as there is still an ample supply of far left nuts to spotlight disproportionately to their influence.

2. Rather than a clean repudiation of the cultural left in some kind of fake "Sister Souljah" moment, there has just been sort of a quiet drifting away from some of the excesses of those years (remember when Elizabeth Warren promised a trans child would need to approve her education secretary, or when the police would be defunded, etc ... yeah, got carried away but motives were pure ... best to just move on)

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Kevin M.'s avatar

No one has any idea what a Harris presidency would be like, and it's laughable that you pretend that you do. Last time Harris went through primary, she went as hard left as she could on pretty much every issue. Now that she got to skip the primary, she's pretending like she's always been a moderate. It's obvious that she's taking advantage of not having to compete with Democrats in a primary earlier this year by pretending to be in the middle of the road. Why on Earth would anyone believe that?

Matt, I'm not saying anything you don't know is true. Your gaslighting Harris will govern as a moderate, actually, is discrediting. You are blowing up your credibility with your readers. You should openly admit that no one knows what we're going to get from a Harris administration, but we know what we'll get from a trump administration, and you can explain why that's worse. But your BS that Harris is actually all in on fracking or YIMBYism is contemptible cheerleading.

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Xantar's avatar

If you need a permission structure to vote for Trump, you've articulated it. Go ahead and do it, and understand - and own - what you're getting if he wins. Don't try to pretend it's because a liberal Democrat doesn't spend all day on the campaign trail atoning for not being a conservative Republican.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

I didn't say anything about Trump! I think it's perfectly reasonable to support Harris over Trump, even for right-leaning voters. But you don't really know what you're going to get, policy-wise, other than she'll be somewhere between a pretty lefty progressive and the left-leaning moderate she is now claiming to be. Conversely, and probably more importantly to a lot of people, she'll be mostly a "normal" president, unlike Trump. But you're a fool if you believe her pivot to the center is anything other than an election ploy, and I don't appreciate Matt gaslighting me by trying to tell me otherwise.

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ESB1980's avatar

But she was more or less a centrist in California Dem politics? I just don't understand this "we have no idea if she's a radical leftist" argument-- she's not. In 2019 she tacked to the left to try to win the primary, but it's like looking at Mitt Romney after that 2008 run and wondering if he's some far-right Republican despite his previous record as governor in Massachusetts.

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John Freeman's avatar

But how do we know she tacked to the left cynically to win the primary, as opposed to it having been a genuine expression of upgraded beliefs given the events of the preceding years?

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Marc Robbins's avatar

One can't know her internal thoughts but it seems to me that she was hesitant and awkward when she was expressing all those leftist opinions in 2019 and she appears very confident and relaxed when espousing her much more moderate positions now. Not conclusive, but I find that highly suggestive of where her heart truly lies.

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Binya's avatar

The likely make-up of the Senate, and SCOTUS, makes it unlikely anyone will be able to govern as a lefty progressive beyond maybe the odd executive action here and there.

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Chris Everett's avatar

Thankfully

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Kevin M.'s avatar

Yeah, it really doesn't matter except for things like immigration, foreign policy, federal criminal prosecutions, vetoes, the state department, the treasury department, HHS, and little things like that.

Oh wait.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Oh wait. Biden's foreign policy, treasury department, state department, criminal prosecutions have been totally leftist during his term.

We can debate immigration and HHS.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

You're assuming her 2019 positions were her real ones and her current ones are fake.

You know, you actually don't know that. Maybe it's a mark against Harris that we don't fully trust her when she takes a position, but some people see that as a plus in a President who thereby preserves lots of flexibility.

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Chris Everett's avatar

It's not about voting for Trump it's just saying hey Democrats were captured by a bunch of dummies, these dummies are just one step from becoming like the dummies on the right, they are not better thinkers, they played a bunch of stupid social capital games, pretend they are on the right side of history, And because Harris is a couple steps above the literal worst candidate to ever win the presidency who wants to run again ... We are supposed to be like yay Harris. If the Democrats are so good how come they keep finding such God awful candidates and bury people like say Amy klobuchar.

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Marc Robbins's avatar

Yes, it's about voting for Trump. Because, like, he would become President.

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Chris Everett's avatar

Yes vote for Harris, I will be voting for Harris.. but the broader criticism of don't feel safe with Democrats they are made up of people that are just as prone to crazy group think and stupid ideas, and pretend to be not prone to the kind of idiocy we see on the right right now. It's just a matter of luck that the left hasn't been co-opted by some kind of strong leader that could introduce illiberal laws and views under the guise of whatever the flavor of the week is for Dems.

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Christopher Johnson's avatar

So I guess we all say "a permission structure" instead of "permission" now

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Tom Hitchner's avatar

It's like how everyone says "Iron Law" as opposed to "Law."

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Xantar's avatar

Fair point. I'd settle for "rationalization".

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Milan Singh's avatar

I think we do in fact know what we will get from a Harris administration. She will appoint pro-choice judges rather pro-life ones. The 2025 tax fight will likely result in lower deficits going forward than if Trump won. January 6th rioters will not be pardoned.

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Ben Krauss's avatar

Those all seem important!

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David S's avatar

You can certainly add that she'll support Ukraine, Israel (while likely pushing back on Bibi more than Trump would) and the rules based international order whereas none of these are a given if Trump wins.

Anecdotally, many American Jews that I know aren't convinced convinced she'll support Israel. She needs to make the argument that since she can't be bought and sold like Trump can, she's the safer bet for Israel.

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Greg G's avatar

In my opinion, it's not that Matt is overweighting her current campaign, it's that you're overweighting her 2019 primary campaign.

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ATX Jake's avatar

Yeah, I'm willing to accept "Kamala is unprincipled and will take any position to win" as a criticism, but then she's clearly not a hardcore ideological progessive. And the idea that she would tack hard left after winning an election by running to the middle (an election that Dems were on track to lose before the pivot) doesn't make any sense.

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Dan Quail's avatar

It’s because it’s the same unfounded “duplicitous woman trope we saw carted out in 2016.

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Eric's avatar

Declaring “Kamala will govern as a moderate” as gaslighting is silly.

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VJV's avatar

Harris is a pretty banal, normal Democrat and we can say with considerable confidence that she will govern like a banal, normal Democrat. There's room to maneuver within that description, but saying "no one has any idea what a Harris presidency would be like" is laughable, and sounds like pro-Trump concern trolling.

Did Harris run far left in 2019? Yes, but pretty much every Democrat other than Joe Biden did this! And it was really, really stupid, and wrong on the merits, and the mainstream of the party realizes that now! Come on.

I do think it is true that we can't say with a great deal of confidence whether or not Harris is, in her heart of hearts, a hardcore progressive. (Personally, I think she just isn't particularly principled.) But what we *can* say with a great deal of confidence is that a President Harris will face many constraints, and that even if she wanted to govern like a hardcore progressive it is hard to see how she will be able to. She will have a Republican Congress, or very very narrow majorities. She will want to be re-elected. She will have moderate factions in the party that she must please alongside the progressive ones. This stuff actually matters a lot. The Presidency is not a blank slate.

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Kevin M.'s avatar

I agree with your last paragraph, but that is in tension with your first paragraph.

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Jacob's avatar

I think the arc of Kamala Harris’s career is actually quite similar to Joe Biden’s. They are both close to generic Democrats.

When Kamala was a DA and California AG, she was moderate-ish and tough on crime, basically what you’d expect for generic Dems in those roles at the time. As Senator, she moved to the left, again basically what you’d expect for a generic senator from California.

Kamala and Biden had different reads on what Dem voters wanted in the 2020 primaries and Biden was clearly correct, which is why he won. If you look at Kamala’s role in the Biden administration or her 2024 campaign, she’s not some committed ideologue. I don’t really expect much daylight between how she will govern as president and any other broadly mainstream career Democrat.

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Andy's avatar

I agree to an extent that Harris is a bit of an unknown in terms of how she’ll actually govern. But the promises she made and the things she’s advocating for in this campaign do matter, because if she flip-flops on them once in office, she will pay a political price. And the very likely reality is that she won’t enjoy a trifecta with Dem control of Congress and the Senate, so the opportunity for her to engage in any radical policy making would be extremely limited.

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Grigori Avramidi's avatar

i think it is useful to look at the predictions you made about what kind of campaign harris would run when it became clear she would be the nominee and compare it to the reality of what has actually happened. was she more moderate than you expected? if yes, then you should extrapolate from that. if no, then i am quite impressed.

and if you think she is a complete liar, then i just don't have any reason to believe that at all, but i don't really know what to tell you.

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