Indeed this got my attention when I saw 9pts miss, by a Lefty-Left candidate in that kind of district: 'If Democrats can put up 13 points of overperformance in a meaningfully contested House race with a candidate who is terribly positioned to win crossover voters, that suggests Republicans are in deep trouble.'
The chart on movement of Trust re Cost of Living is quite meaningful so @ ' I think the moral of this story is pretty clear: Democrats — not just those in tough races, but as many Democrats as possible — need to portray themselves as a political party that is obsessed with health care, the cost of living, and economic growth. That means prioritizing those issues in a real way when faced with a tradeoff on climate change and the environment.'
Seems spot on.
Being mad about Democracy should mean being serious about reflecting on what it takes to win in said democracy, not intellectualising about it but taking lessons on what's needed to flip votes to get the power to protect democracy. The 1930s showed similar lessons, masses don't value democracy as democracy [good or bad they don't overall] they value pocket-book issues.
Trump's speech yesterday where he went off the rails apparently - flipping back to immigration and anti-foreigners rambling when he was supposed to talk Affordability (i.e. pocketbook issues) shows the vulnerability - he's got no 2nd script really and under stress he retreats to where he sees accolades. Suggests rather strongly that like the Biden Admin / Proggy Left of Biden era, Trumpies are going to make the mistake of thinking that they can emphasize Their Points and ignore / downplay / argue away Cost-of-Living.
Amazing that Republicans are doing "don't believe your eyes on what stuff costs" less than 2 years after Democrats pied themselves in the face with it.
The hardest thing for people to understand is that Trump is only a competitive force in a world where the Democrats for the life of them can't just nominate some bubbas who think Medicaid expansion is a good idea. Sadly we inhabit that world.
We can nominate someone who thinks Medicaid expansion is good, but then the college educated progressive donor class lumps in a bunch of constantly changing unrelated agenda items that only serve to signal how "Good and Smart" they are.
Per Trump's word's "Affordability is a scam." Trump is making the same mistake Biden and company made. That is, communicating over and over that his priorities are everything but voters' priorities.
This was essentially my Sunday mailbag question I asked of Matt. My hunch was that he would respond something to the effect of “we shouldn’t read too much into the tea leaves of an uncompetitive red district”, so I’m a bit pleasantly surprised to read this piece.
Here's a simple way to put it: Democrats should want winners, and anyone who can't put together a plan to win should be branded as losers. They can try to say that they're losing for a great cause, suc as staying ideologically pure, but they're still losers. Call out the losers as such, set them aside, and put some people in that can be winners.
The fact that Stacey Abrams was the subject of endless praise within the party will always be bewildering to me. She lost and then declared the election illegitimate and refused to accept the results. She then ran again and lost badly. Any healthy party would throw out the election denying losers instead of running them again and putting them on every podcast.
Abrams's story looks a lot better when GA was perceived as a very red state, but Democrats won the last three Senate elections there, with pretty middle-of-the-party-style Democrats. Biden won it in 2020. Now that we know that GA is winnable, her lack of wins are less impressive.
To me it is bewildering. If you want to get inspired by a black democrat winning state-wide in Georgia, Warnock won in 2020. Instead of giving him any of the fanfare or credit, the media and party apparatus chose to pretend Abrams organizing drove those wins. Which was mostly not true. In the NY Times version of this ridiculous story, they admit halfway through that the Georgia senate wins were mostly driven by white people in the suburbs. But they wrote the story anyway!
I'm a broken record on this, but the fact that more people aren't talking about Warnock as a potential 2028 candidate seems nuts. "Decent religious man who can win in the South" seems like a good candidate.
Just like there's this deep-rooted belief in the Republican party about busloads of illegal immigrants going from polling place to polling place and they'd win in a landslide if that stopped, fuck you if you ask for evidence, Democrats believe that there's massive voter suppression and if only it stopped they would win in a landslide.
Seems to me similar to the virtual worship heaped on the GA DA, Fani Willis, for essentially activist-identarian grounds when anyone with a modicum of legal experience and not engaged in deeply partisan motivated reasoning quickly saw that the strategy was hugely legal stretch to outright overreach (and so questionable judgment - rapidly confirmed by her special prosecutor arrangement) - but no it was on Lefty LEft all celebration of powerful black woman.
Essentially the massive overweight to Identity First & Activist Posuring (or perhaps "elite liberal arts college campus idea of politics based on activism") leading to massive bad judgement.
Of course Mamdani shows one can be not plain vanilla and have actual real political skills for appeal to more than just Proggies (not said as a fan of Mamdani as such, but recognising natural political skill)
For Fani Willis? nah, you’re thinking about NYC and Letitia James, not Atlanta. The Georgia cases were the ones that made the most legal sense. The ones in NYC were the ones that were legal sophistry.
The GA case using rackeetering and the structuring of that. Unneccessary where indeed the foundational case w/o the rachet up of rackeetering etc. could and would have proceeded more cleanly.
The James approach on Trump Org while pushing civil law was competently executed (as her trail court and appelate results have shown). Wise to do? eh.... but competently executed under NY law and in legal process (and civil not criminal so another game).
Ah, but people who are disadvantaged in some way (preferably multiple ways) are the real winners in the eyes of the party. So you have to be a loser to be a winner.
Counterpoint: anyone who can't put together a plan to address the rampant infighting within the party should also be branded a loser, because that has been an anchor for at least a decade now, arguably costing the 2016 election for example.
Calling people losers is a step in the wrong direction IMO. Better to start with what look to me like needless provocations of the left like the support for Schumer, or Andrew Cuomo, or not giving AOC the committee position she wanted earlier this year.
No, I think "needless provocatoins" really indicate "massive over entitlement of the Lefty Left who whine and bitch that their power grabs are not celebrated'"
So pound sand.
(no that I like either of Schumer or Cuomo but such characterisations of "needless provocations" just reflects the Proggie Left massive over-entitlement given they're goddamn albatrosses)
It has to start with the lefty faction stop trying to take over the party, particularly via primarying moderate incumbents. It’s the left side of the Democratic party that has promoted fighting inside the tent more than anyone, and they really ought to give it a rest.
Behn won a 4-way primary with 28% of the vote, and I think the other candidates were all to her right. So I think it is likely that campaigning failure by centrist Dems put her on the ballot.
Republicans have also done a good job killing themselves with this in some high profile ways (Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, arguably Kari Lake though that one may be a little more complicated).
My pet theory is that the last decade of politics can be summed up as everyone learning the wrong lesson from 2016, by mistaking its flukiness for the new normal.
Presumably ideological capture in a extremely-low-visibility / extremely-low participation primary where probably Showing Up was the win. A guess but seems likely, it was performantive nonsense by Lefty Left but useful illustration point on multiple issues (of which the faux democracy of primaries).
Because any non-idealogue in a district that Republicans win by 25% is a Republican. Like if you are idealogicalyl a pragmatic government centrist Democrat who wants to be in the house you should either move where you live, or be a Republican for the sake of your political career. It's not 0 people, but it's not a lot. So then of that handful of non-idealogue Democrats from Republican +25 TN districts you still need them to be good candidates in the more traditional ways (charisma, no scandals, credentials, etc.). We might be talking about 1 or 2 people in the district, but it could also be 0.
In a senate race (in most states....)there is a larger population to pull from at least.
I don't think this is true as a framing (and the note above re 4 way primary apparently says that's probably confirmed not true - it looks like a split vote) - the apostate Rs from old school party are floating around
I just can’t get over Crockett saying she doesn’t need Trump voters! Zohran in deep blue nyc tried so hard to court Trump voters even tho he won mostly by juicing Dem turnout. Crockett doesn’t even pretend….
It’s just so funny to me bc besides Texas being red, tho Zohran was super woke he didnt seem to hate ppl who disagreed & actively courted Trump voters. Crocketts doing the opp: dismissive, condescending & openly says theres no need for Trump voters lol
Except, to defend Porter (which is not something I normally would do!), ignoring Trump voters was a far more plausible strategy in California than Texas!
Him and Cuomo both have a bunch of socially progressive stuff that would absolutely stand out to the median US voter, it just wasn't a live issue between the two of them in an NYC mayoral race. A classic example of this was when Cuomo tried to slam Mamdani on allowing prostitutes to walk on the street, but that was due to a bill Cuomo signed.
Mamdani generally dumping the wokey cultural stuff w even repudiation contrasts with his hedging on his socialist policies. In general my sense is he is very Lefty socialist in real terms but wokey was more time-period pander. Note I said "more" rather than black and white not.
On-target as usual. While you implicitly identify the issues about the Democrats that drive me crazy, you avoid making explicit pronouncements, either out of conviction or courtesy, so I'll say it: The Democrats lost to Mr. Trump because Democratic leaders have made the party widely despised. They have failed to distance themselves from issues that alienate them from the vast majority of the public (gender-affirming care for minors? open borders? defund the police? DEI everywhere?). The Blue Rose diagram shows that Climate, Environment, and Abortion are issues that most voters don't really care about, yet they seems to dominate the Democratic message. Most Democratic taste-makers seem to find notions like 2-parent families and patriotism embarrassing at best. Maybe the party really needs a civil war? I'm glad to remain polite, so long as my progressive friends don't cede yet another election to the Republicans to maintain their unbroken record of counterproductive virtue signalling.
The same polls shows the public agrees with Democrats on environment, abortion, and climate so focusing on those things. There were no police defundings or open borders—one of my friends’ parents couldn’t come to his wedding because they were denied a visa in 2023 so “open borders” claim seems pretty offensive. Those are all right-wing media fabrications resulting from the fact that Democrats allowed Musk to buy Twitter and didn’t try to block it the way Trump used regulatory powers to gain control over TikTok, Paramount, etc.
"The same polls shows the public agrees with Democrats on environment, abortion, and climate so focusing on those things."
Yes but what does that agreement mean. Does agreement mean that voters "say" they care about the environment sure. It can even mean voters "say" they care about climate change. But what it DEFINITELY DOES NOT MEAN is that voters want to ban gas stoves, gas cars, or pay more for green electricity.
Dems have a slightly stronger position on abortion (though voters are still against late term abortion). But abortion while being one of Dems better issues still just isn't moving that many votes. Which is why abortion by itself on the ballot can win in places like Kansas, but Dems still lose.
Absolutely zero of that would've mattered if somehow you had 2019 prices in 2024... when economics are perceived as bad the salience of things that are merely annoying increases.
I'm not a political scientist, but I don't know on what basis you express this certainty. Certainly the economy matters more, sometimes and for some people. But people often vote against their (narrowly-defined) economic interest, usually in favor of "cultural" issues. Otherwise, why would wealthy progressives tend to oppose Republican tax cuts on the upper brackets?
But producing 2019 prices in 2024 was impossible. Not "being annoying" cost nothing. And not being hostile to fossil fuel productionand transportation projects was just pro-growth, regardless of politics.
This all highlights for me how weird and wrong it is that we allow national money to influence state elections. Why do Elon Musk and Slow Boring readers get a say (via the “speech” of their political spending) in a Wisconsin judicial race? Is this not the same ethical setup as Russians mounting a social media campaign for an American presidential candidate? I would love to see more widespread discontent about this, with the long-term goal of prohibiting people who can’t vote in an election from spending on it. (Maybe this could have the side effect of curbing corporate campaign spending, as they can’t vote in any election.)
It’s a pretty dangerous slippery slope. Because the principle becomes “foreigners don’t have free speech” and that leads to Trump taking over TikTok, people threatening to investigate AIPAC, CAIR, etc. for coordinating with foreigners, foreign journalists jailed when they visit the US, and Americans still ending up in kind of an epistemic bubble. Not to mention we can see from other countries how this principle would justify lots of authoritarianism like Orban shutting down foreign universities.
The Russian government is very bad but so were the neo-Nazis who marched in Skokie but free speech protected them.
I rarely find slippery-slope arguments to be persuasive. Anyway in this case it seems pretty easy to draw a bright line. If you're physically here, then you have all the free speech rights no matter how much you love Putinism. If you're in Moscow, then you don't.
No matter how much it has been validated in court, it remains extremely weird to me to consider *donating money to people* to be an example of 'free speech rights' that in some way trumps campaign finance considerations.
It is constitutional to restrict donating money directly to a candidate. There are a number of provisions that do exactly that.
But the First Amendment does protect your right to spend your own money to spread a political message. That’s what CU was about - the right for people unaffiliated with a campaign to make independent expenditures advocating for or against candidates.
That’s also why groups like the ACLU were on the side of CU - they are third parties that spend their own money to spread political messages.
I think that is the wrong way to look at it, donating isn't a protected right, but there is no way to stop money buying a candidate favourable speech without having a censorship system.
They don’t have a say, they can just try to persuade the people who do have a say. On top of that the Wisconsin judicial race impacts gerrymandering which impacts the laws that everyone else has to follow—no state is an island.
On Crockett, I agree with the majority viewpoint here that she's a very bad candidate who, if nominated, would not only seal a loss in TX-Sen but incrementally hurt Democrats across the country. But her candidacy isn't all bad in that it's also an opportunity. If a moderate Dem (or a "moderate Dem") manages to beat her in the primary, then that will send a positive message across the country and make the entire Party look incrementally better to the electorate. I don't know whether or not this Talarico guy is the best candidate, but it almost doesn't matter. The best thing about him is that he's Not-Crockett, which is enabled by Crockett's presence in the race.
I'd also observe that it's both bad and odd that there are so many black moderates in the Party as a whole as shown by polling data, but so few who've run as candidates in high-profile races (there's Eric Adams, but he's, let's say, sui generis for a few different reasons). Much more should be done to cultivate and encourage black, and especially black woman, candidates who are ideologically and biographically well-situated to win outside of deep blue districts. (Moderate black woman who used to work at the CIA would be the absolute sweet spot.) It is understandable why a loyal black woman Democratic primary voter, who might not be all that far to the left herself, would find it aggravating to hear "we can't nominate *this* black woman candidate because she's unelectable" over and over again.
What about a Black women, who had a track record of moderate politics and served as California's AG during a tough on crime period and proudly touted herself as the state's "top cop?"
I think Harris's problem is that she didn't follow the Obama strategy and tried to out-Bern all of the primary candidates in that insane 2019 primary. Then she got all that prog-excess foisted on her by the Biden administration.
She may have been smart on crime but picked the wrong time to be stupid on politics.
2020 was such a damn easy needle to thread "Cops should be held accountable when they do bad shit, but police are good actually and we should fund them!"
It wasn’t easy back then. There was an army of people with excessive free time accepting any contrarian opposition to Trump. Social media and mainstream media promoted such nonsense.
Sober and banal normal opinions were treated as fascistic racism.
Even before that, she never did all well in California elections relative to partisanship. She had one of the furthest-left voting records in the Senate. And I think for whatever reason she just isn't good at affirmatively projecting any kind of specific positive persona. She isn't bad at "set pieces" - I thought her speeches were good and her debate performance was good (although her interviews were not so good). Overall she did much better in her abbreviated campaign last year than I expected her to, so credit where due. But I kind of feel like she's the type of politician who's all tactics with no strategy.
At best she wasn't ready. She was presumably positioning herself for '20 in the Senate and presuming it would be a progressive year, as she had one of the furthest left voting records, as you say (although moderate in CA just also might not translate to moderate in the US overall). She stupidly ran away from her own record and tried to position herself on the progressive vs moderate lane. And her inability to do well in interviews made her seem like she didn't really believe in anything (except for abortion right, which she could talk about). I don't think she built up the confidence and experience enough (and lacked the natural gifts Obama had), and so came across as uninterested in policy and not sure of her own ideas, so fake. No one trusted her to be a moderate. Plus, she was poisoned by all the issues with the unpopular Biden admin. Given all that, it shows what a terrible candidate Trump is that it was so close.
Well I think what we saw with Harris was that Bio needs to be matched with Retail Politics skill.
Which she didn't have - demonstrated on 2 rounds. I mean not devoid of real charisma* but not well endowed with campaigning cunning. (contrast Mamdani, Obama)
(* versus Hillary who should have not tried to copy her husband but seen her own path as a Baker or a Kissinger)
I think people are a bit too critical of Harris,she isn't particularly talented but she was brought down by Biden and the things she and most other Dems said in 2020. Her 2024 campaign was perfectly good.
Her 2024 campaign was not perfectly good. It started out fine and then blinkeredly limped back to being Biden-Light including the deluded banging on about Democracy rather than engaging on inflation - and taking an opp to break w Biden.
It was okay but not great or even perfectly good. (however I grant that in short time it showed that there was a base to be better, but a base that wasn't taken/exploited)
Massive pivot, throw Biden under the bus, differentiate herself saying inflationary mistakes were made, show a break w her unpopular patron. Not making any differentiation was doom.
What you want is several versions of that resume running in different places. Some might lack the finishing touch that makes a winning candidate, but enough will have the base pleasing demographics to combine with the crossover appealing resume to get some real wins. And actually change the profile of who can be a winning politician.
Not that IL matters as we are pretty solid D at this point, of course, but IL's Dem candidate is likely to fit that model (at least if Pritzker gets his way in who wins the nomination). Less someone to appeal to Rs, as she won't really have to, but certainly not a Crockett type.
Sure, I don't disagree (although she's still too far to the left for Texas) but I don't think that changes the analysis. Moderation is a political style as well as a policy stance. And it's not like most black woman Democrats are like her. To crib the popular turn of phrase, Crockett is more like the white woman's idea of what a sassy black woman sounds like.
Yeah I think that's right. If you're mad at Trump, nominating somebody who talks the most shit is your move. I don't blame the Democrats for wanting that, I just don't think it's going to go well for them.
December 2025, too early to tell, but my first glance at the data seems to indicate that the general contours of public opinion right now are LIFO. The people who gave Trump a shot in 2024 (younger voters, a lot of Hispanics) are having second thoughts. So what that could mean potentially is a Sun Belt reversion. So 2026 could be a better chance to win in states like Florida and Texas than there's been in a long time. Democrats just flipped the mayorality in Miami. It's not a state of nature that Republicans just win Florida by 14 points forever now. Things can flip back and forth. But I'm getting 2022 vibes again from both sides of the aisle.
On the Republican side, they think that Trump's victory last year (and it was mostly just his, he ran ahead of the rest of the party) was a "mandate" to do all kinds of goofy shit with immigration, trade, and foreign policy, when really, most people were just pissed off about inflation. I don't think the average voter is outraged by some of the administration's actions (I wish they were, the Venezuelan boat strike is serious), but rather, it shows the GOP taking their eye off the ball. Prices haven't come down, they were never going to without a recession, people are realizing they've been sold a bill of goods, and JD Vance is over here arguing about whether you should be mad that your neighbor doesn't speak English. JD, shut up! Nobody cares! This is like Joe Biden thinking he was the next FDR rather than the guy voters installed to get off the Trump train.
Oh the Democratic side however, I think they're so pissed off they're going to nominate the people who yell the loudest and blow some winnable races with candidates like Jasmine Crockett in Texas and Graham Platner in Maine. I don't really have any suggestions for how to avoid this, it's a collective action problem. As long as people can vote in primaries, this is what we're stuck with.
TLDR; both parties will keep overinterpreting their victories until the heat death of the universe.
"Prices haven't come down, they were never going to without a recession"
I disagree on this one. I think you can get prices to come down if you focus on increasing supply and competition and then letting the market work.
So if Trump had spent all his time pushing for deregulation and letting people build (instead of tariffs), then maybe he would have started to bend the cost curve a bit.
Tying the corruption to cost of living seems like a clear play for Dems. It helps connect inflation to Trump, it combines a Dem base concern with a normie voter concern and it has a lot of truth to it.
So far I think Ossof is the only one I have heard doing it. They just need to find one or two particular examples and go all Benghazi over it. Bonus points if its a semi-non public deal to investigate.
There are some really good attack ads waiting here.
All the zigzagging of tariff announcements was great news for Wall Street, who could sell derivatives and trade on it and sell risk avoidance to Main Street.
Can I sound the alarm here that Democrat candidates all over the landscape seem disturbingly reticent to attack the tariffs even though it should be a slam dunk attack line? If "affordability" really is the most important issue for voters, you would think this would be the easiest place in the world for Dem candidates to make hay.
I'll give some grace here and note that primaries haven't even occurred yet and its entirely possibly that in a general election Dem candidates will have a lot more messaging attacking tariffs. But the lack of talk on this issue seems disturbing to me if reports are correct that a lot of this is because large swaths of the Democratic establishment are still in thrall to more traditional unions such as Teamsters, Longshoremen, UAW and other unions that still represent more traditional blue collar industries. At least the UAW head had the grace to support for Biden, but in repeating myself from the other day, do Democratic candidates not understand that the actual union members of these groups have become pretty MAGA? Not to mention the Teamsters which as an organization is all in on Trump. Like I'm sorry, the playbook of increase tariffs to reindustrialize America is now 45 years old at this point (See Ted Kennedy's primary campaign). Can Dem candidates please at least try to recognize that you're typical blue collar worker isn't a dude working in a steel mill but a mom working at Wal-Mart or an Amazon warehouse.
I'll even allow for the fact that particular Congressional candidates may be running in particular districts where the biggest employer really still might be a local steel mill or car parts manufacturer. I'm am absolutely fine with particularly Congressional candidates breaking with the party in particularly tough races. But to have no national message at all seems bizarre. Like it doesn't even have to be full repudiation of tariffs (although that's my ideal). A message centered around the "Mad King" way these tariffs were (and are) being implemented and the astonishing corruption with which Trump is granting exceptions in exchange for bribes should be an easy home run. "I believe in protecting the American worker. But my opponent supports a man who changes his mind on a whim and takes literal bribes in deciding what tariff levels should be. My opponent is not trying to protect you, he's trying to protect Silicon Valley billionaires and a man only interested in lining his own pockets. Meanwhile, you're all paying the price at the grocery store this week." I'm not even a particularly skilled comms person by any means and I think I came up with a decent enough campaign message.
Getting the marginal voter to understand the actual economic case against tariffs seems like a pretty tall order. There are just so many appealing-to-dumb-people talking points in the opposite direction (righties hating China/foreigners in general, residual fetishization of manufacturing jobs, lefties hating big business, the vague notion that NAFTA was bad).
I think the way to do it is to correctly point out how affordability is getting worse and worse under Trump without really elaborating on how tariffs are a part of that.
I don't think you need to make a detailed economic case against tariffs. You just say tariffs cost you money on everything you buy. Even my very unpolitical, non economics savvy kids understand that already.
If you get pushed about the alleged job aspects you just say show me the factory that moved from China back here to my district --- there isn't one. You can even add, what's really going on is companies here are just charging you more --- and pocketing the profits, not giving you a raise.
I think it's a tougher needle to thread because Trump I's tariffs on China were extended and then expanded by Biden to the point were they've become a bi-partisan consensus issue. This makes the tariff counter-attack really narrow because you can only focus on how fucking stupid the tariffs are against our allies but still need to concede they're required vs. China to neutralize their ~ 50% currency manipulation which is just a gigantic global dumping scheme.
EDIT: And we as Democrats better still be against dumping. If we go full UChicago Libertarian we're fucked.
I don't think many people actually associate tariffs with Biden. You can just say these are Trump's tariffs and they're stupid. Democrats often fall into the trap of caveating everything, "well of course some tariffs make sense, and I understand blah, blah" Just stop after they're Trump's, they're stupid, they cost you money. If you get in power you can deal with subtlety and nuance.
Democrats are never going to make a concerted attack on tariffs because deep down, Democrats believe tariffs hurt Business and Business deserves to be hurt.
Re: Florida needing an autopsy. How much of the shift right is due to migration of conservatives from places like the northeast? If Dems held steady with Hispanic voters would Florida still be in play despite the Village-ization of parts of that state?
Huh. That had never occurred to me before, but it sounds quite plausible. Also correlated with age, perhaps, as older, less-progressive Democrats move south and young ones remain.
Is there a cohort/replacement effect with liberal retirees dying off? It seems like in the 90s approximately all nice liberal New Deal grandparents lived in Florida (source: 2 of mine did), but sadly most of them have passed away. Of course you still get snowbirds and retirees, but my sense is that they're less heavily from blue states these days.
Since 2016, lots of pastors have realized that their congregation is in church for an hour on Sunday but Fox News is on their TVs 20+ hours a week. They have been primed to equate Christianity with Republicans for decades and now Hegseth and crew have cynically used a veneer of Christianity to take over the GOP with culture war grievances.
“… need to portray themselves as a political party that is obsessed with health care, the cost of living, and economic growth. That means prioritizing those issues in a real way when faced with a tradeoff on climate change and the environment.”
Hopefully with health care and the cost of living in ways that do not undermine (increased spending not paid for with increased taxes) economic growth. And climate change done right (not the way many “environmentalists” want to do it) IS an economic growth issue.
It is interesting to see Matt make a run at actual persuasion rather than just mocking/ yelling at lefties (see the closing paragraphs of this piece) Something I've wanted to see him do for a long time.
Indeed this got my attention when I saw 9pts miss, by a Lefty-Left candidate in that kind of district: 'If Democrats can put up 13 points of overperformance in a meaningfully contested House race with a candidate who is terribly positioned to win crossover voters, that suggests Republicans are in deep trouble.'
The chart on movement of Trust re Cost of Living is quite meaningful so @ ' I think the moral of this story is pretty clear: Democrats — not just those in tough races, but as many Democrats as possible — need to portray themselves as a political party that is obsessed with health care, the cost of living, and economic growth. That means prioritizing those issues in a real way when faced with a tradeoff on climate change and the environment.'
Seems spot on.
Being mad about Democracy should mean being serious about reflecting on what it takes to win in said democracy, not intellectualising about it but taking lessons on what's needed to flip votes to get the power to protect democracy. The 1930s showed similar lessons, masses don't value democracy as democracy [good or bad they don't overall] they value pocket-book issues.
Trump's speech yesterday where he went off the rails apparently - flipping back to immigration and anti-foreigners rambling when he was supposed to talk Affordability (i.e. pocketbook issues) shows the vulnerability - he's got no 2nd script really and under stress he retreats to where he sees accolades. Suggests rather strongly that like the Biden Admin / Proggy Left of Biden era, Trumpies are going to make the mistake of thinking that they can emphasize Their Points and ignore / downplay / argue away Cost-of-Living.
I believe the word Trump is using for the affordability issue is "scam." Which, I mean, the attack ads just write themselves on that one.
yes, yes, yes... For fuck's sake the man is handing out knifes to stick in him. Do it.
Amazing that Republicans are doing "don't believe your eyes on what stuff costs" less than 2 years after Democrats pied themselves in the face with it.
It’s amazing that these were his talking points during his affordability tour.
"You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils,"
"You always need steel. You don't need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don't need 37 dolls. So, we're doing things right.
The hardest thing for people to understand is that Trump is only a competitive force in a world where the Democrats for the life of them can't just nominate some bubbas who think Medicaid expansion is a good idea. Sadly we inhabit that world.
We can nominate someone who thinks Medicaid expansion is good, but then the college educated progressive donor class lumps in a bunch of constantly changing unrelated agenda items that only serve to signal how "Good and Smart" they are.
100%. It's the defining sickness of the Democratic activist bubble.
or Mary-Janes (if that's the bubba equiv) like MTG...
yes... it's just madness.
Trump is positively giving them a knife to stick in his damn side - Cost of Living. For God's sake knife him.
Per Trump's word's "Affordability is a scam." Trump is making the same mistake Biden and company made. That is, communicating over and over that his priorities are everything but voters' priorities.
BINGO. Positively handing out the knife to use.
This was essentially my Sunday mailbag question I asked of Matt. My hunch was that he would respond something to the effect of “we shouldn’t read too much into the tea leaves of an uncompetitive red district”, so I’m a bit pleasantly surprised to read this piece.
Here's a simple way to put it: Democrats should want winners, and anyone who can't put together a plan to win should be branded as losers. They can try to say that they're losing for a great cause, suc as staying ideologically pure, but they're still losers. Call out the losers as such, set them aside, and put some people in that can be winners.
The fact that Stacey Abrams was the subject of endless praise within the party will always be bewildering to me. She lost and then declared the election illegitimate and refused to accept the results. She then ran again and lost badly. Any healthy party would throw out the election denying losers instead of running them again and putting them on every podcast.
Is it really bewildering, though? I think we know the feel-good story itch that the Stacey Abrams story almost scratched.
Abrams's story looks a lot better when GA was perceived as a very red state, but Democrats won the last three Senate elections there, with pretty middle-of-the-party-style Democrats. Biden won it in 2020. Now that we know that GA is winnable, her lack of wins are less impressive.
To me it is bewildering. If you want to get inspired by a black democrat winning state-wide in Georgia, Warnock won in 2020. Instead of giving him any of the fanfare or credit, the media and party apparatus chose to pretend Abrams organizing drove those wins. Which was mostly not true. In the NY Times version of this ridiculous story, they admit halfway through that the Georgia senate wins were mostly driven by white people in the suburbs. But they wrote the story anyway!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/us/politics/georgia-democrats-black-women.html
I'm a broken record on this, but the fact that more people aren't talking about Warnock as a potential 2028 candidate seems nuts. "Decent religious man who can win in the South" seems like a good candidate.
Data driven journalism needed over Story / Narrative / Vibes....
More stats people, more data, less "we interviewed fourteen people our journalist knows via Twitter"
The first time, sure, but the second time?
Just like there's this deep-rooted belief in the Republican party about busloads of illegal immigrants going from polling place to polling place and they'd win in a landslide if that stopped, fuck you if you ask for evidence, Democrats believe that there's massive voter suppression and if only it stopped they would win in a landslide.
Seems to me similar to the virtual worship heaped on the GA DA, Fani Willis, for essentially activist-identarian grounds when anyone with a modicum of legal experience and not engaged in deeply partisan motivated reasoning quickly saw that the strategy was hugely legal stretch to outright overreach (and so questionable judgment - rapidly confirmed by her special prosecutor arrangement) - but no it was on Lefty LEft all celebration of powerful black woman.
Essentially the massive overweight to Identity First & Activist Posuring (or perhaps "elite liberal arts college campus idea of politics based on activism") leading to massive bad judgement.
Of course Mamdani shows one can be not plain vanilla and have actual real political skills for appeal to more than just Proggies (not said as a fan of Mamdani as such, but recognising natural political skill)
For Fani Willis? nah, you’re thinking about NYC and Letitia James, not Atlanta. The Georgia cases were the ones that made the most legal sense. The ones in NYC were the ones that were legal sophistry.
No I am thinking of GA.
The GA case using rackeetering and the structuring of that. Unneccessary where indeed the foundational case w/o the rachet up of rackeetering etc. could and would have proceeded more cleanly.
The James approach on Trump Org while pushing civil law was competently executed (as her trail court and appelate results have shown). Wise to do? eh.... but competently executed under NY law and in legal process (and civil not criminal so another game).
If you're in a lot of online spaces where people were worshipping Willis, you need to log off.
Ah, but people who are disadvantaged in some way (preferably multiple ways) are the real winners in the eyes of the party. So you have to be a loser to be a winner.
Counterpoint: anyone who can't put together a plan to address the rampant infighting within the party should also be branded a loser, because that has been an anchor for at least a decade now, arguably costing the 2016 election for example.
Calling people losers is a step in the wrong direction IMO. Better to start with what look to me like needless provocations of the left like the support for Schumer, or Andrew Cuomo, or not giving AOC the committee position she wanted earlier this year.
No, I think "needless provocatoins" really indicate "massive over entitlement of the Lefty Left who whine and bitch that their power grabs are not celebrated'"
So pound sand.
(no that I like either of Schumer or Cuomo but such characterisations of "needless provocations" just reflects the Proggie Left massive over-entitlement given they're goddamn albatrosses)
It has to start with the lefty faction stop trying to take over the party, particularly via primarying moderate incumbents. It’s the left side of the Democratic party that has promoted fighting inside the tent more than anyone, and they really ought to give it a rest.
And a lot of it has its roots in believing middle America truly wants to elect a socialist.
I think the problem is not enough infighting, and too much coalition management,
https://theonion.com/dea-chief-winners-occasionally-use-drugs-1819564423/
DEA Chief: Winners Occasionally Use Drugs
The problem seem to be that in too many places Democrats have a structural propensity to "blow it."
I love Jasmine Crocket in the House (very partial to her East Texas accent), but it's insane to consider her a good Senate candidate.
How on earth did the Tennesee House seat attract a defund the police person? That's not even a Congessional issue!
Behn won a 4-way primary with 28% of the vote, and I think the other candidates were all to her right. So I think it is likely that campaigning failure by centrist Dems put her on the ballot.
The New York mayoral primary all over again.
Ah... that's unfortunate.
She pulled off the Bernout strategy!
This is a two-way structural propensity. That's how the Republicans ended up with Doug Mastriano as a statewide candidate in 2022.
Republicans have also done a good job killing themselves with this in some high profile ways (Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, arguably Kari Lake though that one may be a little more complicated).
My pet theory is that the last decade of politics can be summed up as everyone learning the wrong lesson from 2016, by mistaking its flukiness for the new normal.
Presumably ideological capture in a extremely-low-visibility / extremely-low participation primary where probably Showing Up was the win. A guess but seems likely, it was performantive nonsense by Lefty Left but useful illustration point on multiple issues (of which the faux democracy of primaries).
Because any non-idealogue in a district that Republicans win by 25% is a Republican. Like if you are idealogicalyl a pragmatic government centrist Democrat who wants to be in the house you should either move where you live, or be a Republican for the sake of your political career. It's not 0 people, but it's not a lot. So then of that handful of non-idealogue Democrats from Republican +25 TN districts you still need them to be good candidates in the more traditional ways (charisma, no scandals, credentials, etc.). We might be talking about 1 or 2 people in the district, but it could also be 0.
In a senate race (in most states....)there is a larger population to pull from at least.
I don't think this is true as a framing (and the note above re 4 way primary apparently says that's probably confirmed not true - it looks like a split vote) - the apostate Rs from old school party are floating around
Democrats want a Democratic Tea Party but forget that the Republican Tea Party nominated candidates like Sharon Angle.
Well, if she landed on "defund the FBI," that would be both a Congressional issue and potentially MAGA-appealing...
(I'm joking. Mostly.)
I just can’t get over Crockett saying she doesn’t need Trump voters! Zohran in deep blue nyc tried so hard to court Trump voters even tho he won mostly by juicing Dem turnout. Crockett doesn’t even pretend….
It’s just so funny to me bc besides Texas being red, tho Zohran was super woke he didnt seem to hate ppl who disagreed & actively courted Trump voters. Crocketts doing the opp: dismissive, condescending & openly says theres no need for Trump voters lol
Apparently she went to the Katie Porter School of Political Persuasion.
Except, to defend Porter (which is not something I normally would do!), ignoring Trump voters was a far more plausible strategy in California than Texas!
Mamdani is more very Lefty than Woke, not really synonyms, he's Socialist more than cultural left.
Him and Cuomo both have a bunch of socially progressive stuff that would absolutely stand out to the median US voter, it just wasn't a live issue between the two of them in an NYC mayoral race. A classic example of this was when Cuomo tried to slam Mamdani on allowing prostitutes to walk on the street, but that was due to a bill Cuomo signed.
Mamdani generally dumping the wokey cultural stuff w even repudiation contrasts with his hedging on his socialist policies. In general my sense is he is very Lefty socialist in real terms but wokey was more time-period pander. Note I said "more" rather than black and white not.
On-target as usual. While you implicitly identify the issues about the Democrats that drive me crazy, you avoid making explicit pronouncements, either out of conviction or courtesy, so I'll say it: The Democrats lost to Mr. Trump because Democratic leaders have made the party widely despised. They have failed to distance themselves from issues that alienate them from the vast majority of the public (gender-affirming care for minors? open borders? defund the police? DEI everywhere?). The Blue Rose diagram shows that Climate, Environment, and Abortion are issues that most voters don't really care about, yet they seems to dominate the Democratic message. Most Democratic taste-makers seem to find notions like 2-parent families and patriotism embarrassing at best. Maybe the party really needs a civil war? I'm glad to remain polite, so long as my progressive friends don't cede yet another election to the Republicans to maintain their unbroken record of counterproductive virtue signalling.
The same polls shows the public agrees with Democrats on environment, abortion, and climate so focusing on those things. There were no police defundings or open borders—one of my friends’ parents couldn’t come to his wedding because they were denied a visa in 2023 so “open borders” claim seems pretty offensive. Those are all right-wing media fabrications resulting from the fact that Democrats allowed Musk to buy Twitter and didn’t try to block it the way Trump used regulatory powers to gain control over TikTok, Paramount, etc.
OPen borders claim isn't in the least offensive, the fact a friend got a visa denied is irrelevant.
The complaint had substance, Biden lost due to this - egghead parsing to try to parse away the popular meaning leads the failure of 24.
And you elide the inconvenient positioning - strong-care versus not strong. Climate doesn't have strong-care versus Pocket-book that does.
i would simply not lie about the state of the border
"The same polls shows the public agrees with Democrats on environment, abortion, and climate so focusing on those things."
Yes but what does that agreement mean. Does agreement mean that voters "say" they care about the environment sure. It can even mean voters "say" they care about climate change. But what it DEFINITELY DOES NOT MEAN is that voters want to ban gas stoves, gas cars, or pay more for green electricity.
Dems have a slightly stronger position on abortion (though voters are still against late term abortion). But abortion while being one of Dems better issues still just isn't moving that many votes. Which is why abortion by itself on the ballot can win in places like Kansas, but Dems still lose.
Absolutely zero of that would've mattered if somehow you had 2019 prices in 2024... when economics are perceived as bad the salience of things that are merely annoying increases.
Yes, the economy matters. But I think "cultural" issues also matter.
They both matter.
Economy always matters more.
In relative terms, your culture-war vulnerabilities matter more than usual when you're in power, and less than usual when the other side is in power.
I'm not a political scientist, but I don't know on what basis you express this certainty. Certainly the economy matters more, sometimes and for some people. But people often vote against their (narrowly-defined) economic interest, usually in favor of "cultural" issues. Otherwise, why would wealthy progressives tend to oppose Republican tax cuts on the upper brackets?
yes precisely - framing as binary effects is dumb, self-deluding.
But producing 2019 prices in 2024 was impossible. Not "being annoying" cost nothing. And not being hostile to fossil fuel productionand transportation projects was just pro-growth, regardless of politics.
This all highlights for me how weird and wrong it is that we allow national money to influence state elections. Why do Elon Musk and Slow Boring readers get a say (via the “speech” of their political spending) in a Wisconsin judicial race? Is this not the same ethical setup as Russians mounting a social media campaign for an American presidential candidate? I would love to see more widespread discontent about this, with the long-term goal of prohibiting people who can’t vote in an election from spending on it. (Maybe this could have the side effect of curbing corporate campaign spending, as they can’t vote in any election.)
Because we have free speech rights in the United States of America, and the Russian government does not.
Although I've seen takes that argue that the Russian government does have free speech rights in the United States!
It’s a pretty dangerous slippery slope. Because the principle becomes “foreigners don’t have free speech” and that leads to Trump taking over TikTok, people threatening to investigate AIPAC, CAIR, etc. for coordinating with foreigners, foreign journalists jailed when they visit the US, and Americans still ending up in kind of an epistemic bubble. Not to mention we can see from other countries how this principle would justify lots of authoritarianism like Orban shutting down foreign universities.
The Russian government is very bad but so were the neo-Nazis who marched in Skokie but free speech protected them.
I rarely find slippery-slope arguments to be persuasive. Anyway in this case it seems pretty easy to draw a bright line. If you're physically here, then you have all the free speech rights no matter how much you love Putinism. If you're in Moscow, then you don't.
At the very least America should have a Great Firewall like China does
No matter how much it has been validated in court, it remains extremely weird to me to consider *donating money to people* to be an example of 'free speech rights' that in some way trumps campaign finance considerations.
It is constitutional to restrict donating money directly to a candidate. There are a number of provisions that do exactly that.
But the First Amendment does protect your right to spend your own money to spread a political message. That’s what CU was about - the right for people unaffiliated with a campaign to make independent expenditures advocating for or against candidates.
That’s also why groups like the ACLU were on the side of CU - they are third parties that spend their own money to spread political messages.
I think that is the wrong way to look at it, donating isn't a protected right, but there is no way to stop money buying a candidate favourable speech without having a censorship system.
They don’t have a say, they can just try to persuade the people who do have a say. On top of that the Wisconsin judicial race impacts gerrymandering which impacts the laws that everyone else has to follow—no state is an island.
Well, not quite the same as Russian interference. Being an adversary nation and all that.
On Crockett, I agree with the majority viewpoint here that she's a very bad candidate who, if nominated, would not only seal a loss in TX-Sen but incrementally hurt Democrats across the country. But her candidacy isn't all bad in that it's also an opportunity. If a moderate Dem (or a "moderate Dem") manages to beat her in the primary, then that will send a positive message across the country and make the entire Party look incrementally better to the electorate. I don't know whether or not this Talarico guy is the best candidate, but it almost doesn't matter. The best thing about him is that he's Not-Crockett, which is enabled by Crockett's presence in the race.
I'd also observe that it's both bad and odd that there are so many black moderates in the Party as a whole as shown by polling data, but so few who've run as candidates in high-profile races (there's Eric Adams, but he's, let's say, sui generis for a few different reasons). Much more should be done to cultivate and encourage black, and especially black woman, candidates who are ideologically and biographically well-situated to win outside of deep blue districts. (Moderate black woman who used to work at the CIA would be the absolute sweet spot.) It is understandable why a loyal black woman Democratic primary voter, who might not be all that far to the left herself, would find it aggravating to hear "we can't nominate *this* black woman candidate because she's unelectable" over and over again.
What about a Black women, who had a track record of moderate politics and served as California's AG during a tough on crime period and proudly touted herself as the state's "top cop?"
I think Harris's problem is that she didn't follow the Obama strategy and tried to out-Bern all of the primary candidates in that insane 2019 primary. Then she got all that prog-excess foisted on her by the Biden administration.
It's like she got Nickelodeon Slimed.
She may have been smart on crime but picked the wrong time to be stupid on politics.
2020 was such a damn easy needle to thread "Cops should be held accountable when they do bad shit, but police are good actually and we should fund them!"
It wasn’t easy back then. There was an army of people with excessive free time accepting any contrarian opposition to Trump. Social media and mainstream media promoted such nonsense.
Sober and banal normal opinions were treated as fascistic racism.
It was stupid.
Mr. Yglesias literally lost his job for pointing out that not ACAB.
Even before that, she never did all well in California elections relative to partisanship. She had one of the furthest-left voting records in the Senate. And I think for whatever reason she just isn't good at affirmatively projecting any kind of specific positive persona. She isn't bad at "set pieces" - I thought her speeches were good and her debate performance was good (although her interviews were not so good). Overall she did much better in her abbreviated campaign last year than I expected her to, so credit where due. But I kind of feel like she's the type of politician who's all tactics with no strategy.
Does she even believe anything? She strikes me as a sort of non entity in terms of political philosophy.
Well believe anything isn't the point. Trump barely believes anything except his own narcicism.
Muddle along, that's the problem - she doesn't have the talent to be a brilliant chamleon.
Trump is a tariff true believer for sure.
At best she wasn't ready. She was presumably positioning herself for '20 in the Senate and presuming it would be a progressive year, as she had one of the furthest left voting records, as you say (although moderate in CA just also might not translate to moderate in the US overall). She stupidly ran away from her own record and tried to position herself on the progressive vs moderate lane. And her inability to do well in interviews made her seem like she didn't really believe in anything (except for abortion right, which she could talk about). I don't think she built up the confidence and experience enough (and lacked the natural gifts Obama had), and so came across as uninterested in policy and not sure of her own ideas, so fake. No one trusted her to be a moderate. Plus, she was poisoned by all the issues with the unpopular Biden admin. Given all that, it shows what a terrible candidate Trump is that it was so close.
She was ideal for a tough love for asylum seekers strategy.
Too bad she wasn’t able to throw Biden and White House staffed with people stuck in their Ivy/Little Ivy bubble under the bus.
lol
Well I think what we saw with Harris was that Bio needs to be matched with Retail Politics skill.
Which she didn't have - demonstrated on 2 rounds. I mean not devoid of real charisma* but not well endowed with campaigning cunning. (contrast Mamdani, Obama)
(* versus Hillary who should have not tried to copy her husband but seen her own path as a Baker or a Kissinger)
I think people are a bit too critical of Harris,she isn't particularly talented but she was brought down by Biden and the things she and most other Dems said in 2020. Her 2024 campaign was perfectly good.
Her 2024 campaign was not perfectly good. It started out fine and then blinkeredly limped back to being Biden-Light including the deluded banging on about Democracy rather than engaging on inflation - and taking an opp to break w Biden.
It was okay but not great or even perfectly good. (however I grant that in short time it showed that there was a base to be better, but a base that wasn't taken/exploited)
As the vice-president in a high inflation administration, I really don't see what she could have said on inflation.
It wasn't a flawless campaign, but I don't think any of the mistakes or anything about it reduced her vote share by more than 0.1%.
Massive pivot, throw Biden under the bus, differentiate herself saying inflationary mistakes were made, show a break w her unpopular patron. Not making any differentiation was doom.
Not go for Walz, take Shapiro or similar.
TOO SOON
What you want is several versions of that resume running in different places. Some might lack the finishing touch that makes a winning candidate, but enough will have the base pleasing demographics to combine with the crossover appealing resume to get some real wins. And actually change the profile of who can be a winning politician.
Not that IL matters as we are pretty solid D at this point, of course, but IL's Dem candidate is likely to fit that model (at least if Pritzker gets his way in who wins the nomination). Less someone to appeal to Rs, as she won't really have to, but certainly not a Crockett type.
Crockett's problem isn't so much ideological extremism, it's just clownish behavior on her part.
Sure, I don't disagree (although she's still too far to the left for Texas) but I don't think that changes the analysis. Moderation is a political style as well as a policy stance. And it's not like most black woman Democrats are like her. To crib the popular turn of phrase, Crockett is more like the white woman's idea of what a sassy black woman sounds like.
Yeah I think that's right. If you're mad at Trump, nominating somebody who talks the most shit is your move. I don't blame the Democrats for wanting that, I just don't think it's going to go well for them.
Yeah I’m seeing a lot of left-wing people attack her for being pro-AIPAC and crypto, I don’t really see her as a “left” candidate.
I really want to vote in the Republican primary to vote Cornyn over Paxton.
But if Crockett vs Talarico is closer, I might have to do that, because Talarico is more likely to beat Paxton.
December 2025, too early to tell, but my first glance at the data seems to indicate that the general contours of public opinion right now are LIFO. The people who gave Trump a shot in 2024 (younger voters, a lot of Hispanics) are having second thoughts. So what that could mean potentially is a Sun Belt reversion. So 2026 could be a better chance to win in states like Florida and Texas than there's been in a long time. Democrats just flipped the mayorality in Miami. It's not a state of nature that Republicans just win Florida by 14 points forever now. Things can flip back and forth. But I'm getting 2022 vibes again from both sides of the aisle.
On the Republican side, they think that Trump's victory last year (and it was mostly just his, he ran ahead of the rest of the party) was a "mandate" to do all kinds of goofy shit with immigration, trade, and foreign policy, when really, most people were just pissed off about inflation. I don't think the average voter is outraged by some of the administration's actions (I wish they were, the Venezuelan boat strike is serious), but rather, it shows the GOP taking their eye off the ball. Prices haven't come down, they were never going to without a recession, people are realizing they've been sold a bill of goods, and JD Vance is over here arguing about whether you should be mad that your neighbor doesn't speak English. JD, shut up! Nobody cares! This is like Joe Biden thinking he was the next FDR rather than the guy voters installed to get off the Trump train.
Oh the Democratic side however, I think they're so pissed off they're going to nominate the people who yell the loudest and blow some winnable races with candidates like Jasmine Crockett in Texas and Graham Platner in Maine. I don't really have any suggestions for how to avoid this, it's a collective action problem. As long as people can vote in primaries, this is what we're stuck with.
TLDR; both parties will keep overinterpreting their victories until the heat death of the universe.
Overall good comment but
"Prices haven't come down, they were never going to without a recession"
I disagree on this one. I think you can get prices to come down if you focus on increasing supply and competition and then letting the market work.
So if Trump had spent all his time pushing for deregulation and letting people build (instead of tariffs), then maybe he would have started to bend the cost curve a bit.
Tying the corruption to cost of living seems like a clear play for Dems. It helps connect inflation to Trump, it combines a Dem base concern with a normie voter concern and it has a lot of truth to it.
So far I think Ossof is the only one I have heard doing it. They just need to find one or two particular examples and go all Benghazi over it. Bonus points if its a semi-non public deal to investigate.
They have all the evidence of people insider trading Trump tariff announcements, and trading in companies the US government was taking stakes in too.
There are some really good attack ads waiting here.
All the zigzagging of tariff announcements was great news for Wall Street, who could sell derivatives and trade on it and sell risk avoidance to Main Street.
“If Democrats do four points better than Harris did and we end up talking about Maine, that is a failure and they are not doing good enough.”
Superman does good. Democrats need to do well!
I hated how Democrats would talk in perfectly correct grammar and then insert the phrase “good-paying jobs”. It felt so jarring and fake.
Can I sound the alarm here that Democrat candidates all over the landscape seem disturbingly reticent to attack the tariffs even though it should be a slam dunk attack line? If "affordability" really is the most important issue for voters, you would think this would be the easiest place in the world for Dem candidates to make hay.
I'll give some grace here and note that primaries haven't even occurred yet and its entirely possibly that in a general election Dem candidates will have a lot more messaging attacking tariffs. But the lack of talk on this issue seems disturbing to me if reports are correct that a lot of this is because large swaths of the Democratic establishment are still in thrall to more traditional unions such as Teamsters, Longshoremen, UAW and other unions that still represent more traditional blue collar industries. At least the UAW head had the grace to support for Biden, but in repeating myself from the other day, do Democratic candidates not understand that the actual union members of these groups have become pretty MAGA? Not to mention the Teamsters which as an organization is all in on Trump. Like I'm sorry, the playbook of increase tariffs to reindustrialize America is now 45 years old at this point (See Ted Kennedy's primary campaign). Can Dem candidates please at least try to recognize that you're typical blue collar worker isn't a dude working in a steel mill but a mom working at Wal-Mart or an Amazon warehouse.
I'll even allow for the fact that particular Congressional candidates may be running in particular districts where the biggest employer really still might be a local steel mill or car parts manufacturer. I'm am absolutely fine with particularly Congressional candidates breaking with the party in particularly tough races. But to have no national message at all seems bizarre. Like it doesn't even have to be full repudiation of tariffs (although that's my ideal). A message centered around the "Mad King" way these tariffs were (and are) being implemented and the astonishing corruption with which Trump is granting exceptions in exchange for bribes should be an easy home run. "I believe in protecting the American worker. But my opponent supports a man who changes his mind on a whim and takes literal bribes in deciding what tariff levels should be. My opponent is not trying to protect you, he's trying to protect Silicon Valley billionaires and a man only interested in lining his own pockets. Meanwhile, you're all paying the price at the grocery store this week." I'm not even a particularly skilled comms person by any means and I think I came up with a decent enough campaign message.
Getting the marginal voter to understand the actual economic case against tariffs seems like a pretty tall order. There are just so many appealing-to-dumb-people talking points in the opposite direction (righties hating China/foreigners in general, residual fetishization of manufacturing jobs, lefties hating big business, the vague notion that NAFTA was bad).
I think the way to do it is to correctly point out how affordability is getting worse and worse under Trump without really elaborating on how tariffs are a part of that.
I don't think you need to make a detailed economic case against tariffs. You just say tariffs cost you money on everything you buy. Even my very unpolitical, non economics savvy kids understand that already.
If you get pushed about the alleged job aspects you just say show me the factory that moved from China back here to my district --- there isn't one. You can even add, what's really going on is companies here are just charging you more --- and pocketing the profits, not giving you a raise.
The beauty is it's all true.
I think it's a tougher needle to thread because Trump I's tariffs on China were extended and then expanded by Biden to the point were they've become a bi-partisan consensus issue. This makes the tariff counter-attack really narrow because you can only focus on how fucking stupid the tariffs are against our allies but still need to concede they're required vs. China to neutralize their ~ 50% currency manipulation which is just a gigantic global dumping scheme.
EDIT: And we as Democrats better still be against dumping. If we go full UChicago Libertarian we're fucked.
I don't think many people actually associate tariffs with Biden. You can just say these are Trump's tariffs and they're stupid. Democrats often fall into the trap of caveating everything, "well of course some tariffs make sense, and I understand blah, blah" Just stop after they're Trump's, they're stupid, they cost you money. If you get in power you can deal with subtlety and nuance.
Democrats are never going to make a concerted attack on tariffs because deep down, Democrats believe tariffs hurt Business and Business deserves to be hurt.
My feeling about Florida is that Dems should care about down ballot effects by actually running someone. This is completely ridiculous to hear.
Re: Florida needing an autopsy. How much of the shift right is due to migration of conservatives from places like the northeast? If Dems held steady with Hispanic voters would Florida still be in play despite the Village-ization of parts of that state?
But Dems made gains with boomers in 2024 and bled out Gen Z
Huh. That had never occurred to me before, but it sounds quite plausible. Also correlated with age, perhaps, as older, less-progressive Democrats move south and young ones remain.
Who would be a good organization to do this autopsy? Can we assign it to them?
Is there a cohort/replacement effect with liberal retirees dying off? It seems like in the 90s approximately all nice liberal New Deal grandparents lived in Florida (source: 2 of mine did), but sadly most of them have passed away. Of course you still get snowbirds and retirees, but my sense is that they're less heavily from blue states these days.
Since 2016, lots of pastors have realized that their congregation is in church for an hour on Sunday but Fox News is on their TVs 20+ hours a week. They have been primed to equate Christianity with Republicans for decades and now Hegseth and crew have cynically used a veneer of Christianity to take over the GOP with culture war grievances.
You understand that not that many people actually watch Fox News right? They get a couple million viewers a night.
“… need to portray themselves as a political party that is obsessed with health care, the cost of living, and economic growth. That means prioritizing those issues in a real way when faced with a tradeoff on climate change and the environment.”
Hopefully with health care and the cost of living in ways that do not undermine (increased spending not paid for with increased taxes) economic growth. And climate change done right (not the way many “environmentalists” want to do it) IS an economic growth issue.
It is interesting to see Matt make a run at actual persuasion rather than just mocking/ yelling at lefties (see the closing paragraphs of this piece) Something I've wanted to see him do for a long time.