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.
Democrats MASSIVELY UNDERSTATED their economic success, and people like you want to sit here and pretend that it was the opposite. No. I am going to correct it every time.
I swear, some people have zero awareness whatsoever of what Democrats are, instead uncritically accepting the caricatures presented by right wing media and the far left.
Understating or overstating didn't matter much; people didn't *feel* the economic success (because people are fucking dumb!) and you've got to go to war with the voters you've got. Once you're explaining (or worse scolding) you've already lost the plot.
Doesn't help here that Nutlick, Bessent, et al are really bad at explaining as well.
When they were asked how their personal finances were, or how their local economy was doing, they said, "good!"
When they were asked how the national economy was doing, they said "unbelievably horrible!"
They didn't FEEL it. They were TOLD IT. And one of the reasons they believed it is that nobody told them otherwise.
"If you're explaining, you're losing" is one of those classic Carville-retread bits on the list of Democratic electoral CW that we continue to believe is accurate for some reason, even though Donald Trump set the Republican CW on fire a decade ago to great success. "If you're explaining, you're losing" is something that has been taken as gospel by every single Democratic strategist on the road that brought us to this point. Somehow keeping it front-of-mind is going to be part of the solution?
You know what helps dumb people understand stuff? EXPLAINING IT TO THEM.
This is utter nonsense, but so wonderful as an example of the path of the Democrats Bourgeousie Inflations Splaining and the Cope of "If people don't believe our partisan political view, it's the fault of being Dupe of the Right Wing Media" and not at all that your views are wrong / misinformed / partisan themselves
In actual disaggregated data as like from St. Louis Fed, "People who are Good" is at even national aggregates immensely household income differentiated, and surprise surprise the college educated professional classes are quite A-Okay but non-college lower income levels do not report at all A-Okay. Disaggreation is key.
Yep, it's the economy stupid continues to be the lesson no one is willing to learn. With both parties, the politicians followed policies that exacerbated economic pain and ignored the concern from Americans. Inflation and pocketbook issues overwhelm everything else for many people.
The other stuff is important but it's really hard to get people to stop paying attention to their worsening economic situation.
What policies in particular did Democrats followed that “exacerbated economic pain”? The COVID checks may have been ill advised but were quite popular at the time and, at any rate, were not the singular factor in causing inflation, which was mostly due to supply chain problems in the wake of the pandemic. What Democrats failed to do was acknowledge the serious effects of inflation, especially in housing, on the average American in part because they were so fixated on the “soft landing” bringing the rate of inflation down without triggering a recession. This meant a great economy for those with equity investments (i.e. the upper middle class) and not so great for working people whose wage increases were eaten up by high rent + high grocery prices. Biden never managed to even come out with “I feel your pain” because he was too stubborn to acknowledge anything might be wrong, since that would have pointed to him resigning in favor of letting the party choose a younger candidate.
Trump, on the other hand, could have coasted along not changing much…if he’d stuck to a tax cut here and there and maybe changing the DEI standards for new hires, leaving most of the government alone, the economy would have continued to grow and he could have gotten credit for being a great manager. Instead he kept his promise (that voters assumed was campaign bullsh-t) to smash basically everything and remake it into his own vision of the Gilded Age.
Quite agreed on both paragraphs: re Biden as a general matter the first year of Biden policy (me as an economist and PE financier) I felt was "reasonable bet, bit risky for inflation but a reasonable bet to take so long as one is ready to quickly pivot if inflation starts to pickup." - of course multi-factors and risks so indeed multiple factors not just their policies.
However, Biden Admin (and apparently him personally) didn't pivot - the train-wreck there of denialism, hand-waiving and Prof'lclassSplaining bears a lot of similarity I think to the Immigration topic - in both instances they seem to walled themselves off and self-paralysed via proceduralism and letting the Groups hector them.
Trump - I myself in first weeks had thought - if he's just his usual lazy self he'll coast to reasonable popularity just attacking immigration and high visibility wokey silliness.
Apologies for being able to infer secondary meanings and unstated hypotheses. You would not have made the comment you did if you did not perceive there to be somebody who was consequentially reluctant to "stick the knife in him." Don't blow smoke up my ass and then call me the undergrad.
When did saying "your kids don't need toys" become a thing politicians say unprompted? That's at least two politicians who have said it publicly in about the past year. It's weird.
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.
It really doesn't. I mean, point me to the Democratic policy that was affected in any way by that kind of linguistic gyration. That's just stuff people yell about online. We are allowed to ignore them. We SHOULD ignore them.
Actually, scratch that. We should ATTACK AND MOCK them.
Bill Clinton got it.
I'm not sure if Democrats really get how meaningless all of this *gestures around wider political internet* really is. Twitter being mad at you means literally nothing.
In 2020 we had a choice of people running "to the left" and instead nominated Joe Biden, whose picture sits in the dictionary under "boring moderate" (also, it's a dictionary that was published in 1992.) Biden did a whole bunch of relatively moderate substantive things (plus some suprisingly nifty old-fashioned industrial policy stuff.) He pacified the lefties in his coalition by relegating all their demands into meaningless symbolic executive orders, so he could run an arrow-straight centrist policy on literally every issue of substance, including a centrist pivot on immigration policy that (quite cynically) got blocked by Trump.
And then he got crushed.
So if you're a centrist on Substack, what lesson are you going to take from that? That we picked literally the most moderate centrist available on the menu, and nobody was excited about it? Or are you going to assemble an alternative history where Joe Biden (JOE Fing BIDEN) was secretly a lefty shill "controlled by the groups", and voters' apathy about the most boring non-compelling Presidency in decades was actually the result of left wing extremism? I mean obviously you're going to go with the second thing.
"Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you" was literally the best-performing political ad since the fucking Daisy ad, man.
Why is hard for you to accept that most Americans fucking hate cultural leftism, and it's a drag on Democrats? That isn't something I'm advocating for - it's something I eventually had to admit to myself. Voters are not subtle about it.
Despite the opposite position being considered a cliché, "fiscally liberal, socially conservative" is the most common political outlook in America today. And that's because "socially conservative" means something really different than it did 25 years ago, because the definition of "socially liberal" got pulled way out over the horizon.
There's a lot more I could say about this but it doesn't feel remotely worth it.
It means checking the box at the DMV (because our party system is ridiculous). People that caved to the language policing were just weak in character and spirit.
If by college educated progressive donor class, you mean college-educated voters in that state, then yes. A college educated voter in Des Moines or Austin has similar views to one in Seattle or New York.
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.
It would be great if the Democrats really worked to nominate candidates that represent the opinions of their districts, regardless of the progressive wing. TN-7’s candidate was too left leaning to get elected. I found this article as ‘hopeful’ - it is critical to win the Senate. Would Mr. Emanuel return to run the DNC and recruit candidates?
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, such 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.
Both decent and religious will be hard to overcome with the base on a nationwide basis. You can get away with that in the south, but in a national primary?
What about if you do the actual data work and figure out the truth, then go ahead and write the nonsense article you wanted to write but just casually link to the numbers disproving your article halfway through? Does that do anything for you? It's the best they can do I guess
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).
If there's one thing I've learned from the past 30 years or so of mainstream American entertainment, it's that sassy black women who tell it like it is cannot fail, they can only be failed.
Stacey Abrams registered enough voters to make a solid showing in 2018, better than any statewide Georgia Democrat in a decade. However, even in Georgia, which has so think the second highest proportion of blacks in the country, base mobilization didn’t work. Kemp was going to be tough in 2022 no matter who won, he kept us free during Covid. I very nearly voted for Kemp in ‘22 but couldn’t quite do it.
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.
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.
Yes, if we just shut up and accept our crumbs given us to candidates OK'd by Murdoch, Bloomberg, and Walton-backed think tanks, there'd be no fighting.
Hurting Democrats generally by attacking other Democrats will just ensure its crumbs for everyone.
Here in Colorado there’s a progressive Democrat that’s going to try to primary Hickenlooper, one of the state’s more popular politicians. She will very likely lose but damage Hick in the process. Fortunately probably not enough that he won’t win the general easily. In that case it’s merely a waste of time, energy, and resources that could be better spent elsewhere, like capturing GoP House seats that are vulnerable.
Arguing over who has to start and who’s been doing the most makes me think this is just another Israel-Palestine issue, where people on both sides want to fight and don’t actually want to solve the problem. Fortunately, in this case, there is a clear alignment of interests, so if people wanted to stop fighting about who started the fighting, they can do it and make progress on those shared interests. Even if it means letting those awful people get away with pretending they didn’t start it and do the worst of it.
I would prefer if everyone would agree to not primary incumbents outside of special circumstances, like an incumbent doing something stupid that torpedos their chances of reelection. Primarying otherwise popular and successful politicians is bad on a number of levels IMO.
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)
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!
Yeah, if it was an internal conversation with her strategy/polling people, it would be fine. It's weird though that she decided to have that conversation in public instead of pivoting to why people would want to vote for her on the economy, etc.
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.
If I were to argue this a bit more, I would say what separates wokes from Zohran wasn’t the issue set, it’s the moral preening (or lack thereof). Woke politics was defined by the constant moral hectoring of anyone who disagrees, not just far left issue positioning. Zohran did the issue positioning without treating you as a bad person for dissenting. That’s why I think even if AOC never shifts on policy, there’s a lot she could learn learn from Zohran on how to engage skeptics on both culture and economics without turning every disagreement into a character test
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.
How did this get to be a liberal talking point? I just saw a lib friend on FB post something to the same effect a few weeks ago, that he would hate it if Dems started appealing to Trump voters. Because more people voting for Dems is bad somehow!
If somebody thinks what Trump voters believe and want is bad, why are you shocked they don't want the people they're voting for to screw them over to appease Trump voters?
It’s not shocking but Crockett was citing Zohran as an example as to what is possible when we turn out the base and don’t need Trump voters! Besides Texas obv being a red state, it’s funny she’s trying to use his campaign theory as to why u don’t need Trump voters when he explicitly started his campaign trying to court Trump voters based on specific policy proposals
Trump voters are not a monolith that are in lockstep on every issue. Some are full-blown MAGA true believers. Some are right-leaners that didn't care for Dem emphasis on "woke" issues. Some are old-school Republicans that haven't changed parties yet. I don't think Dems should try to win over anyone with a MAGA shirt, but there are tons of people that voted for Trump that are pretty uneasy about what he's doing.
Isn't it basically the reverse side of the coin with, "Republicans can refuse to moderate on their positions and get all their wishlist of tax cuts and spending cuts enacted" printed on the obverse?
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.
Electing MTG style lunatics like Crockett to the House is a big part of why the party reputation is trash. You can’t have a bunch of insane people fighting for camera time in the House and convince voters that the Senate candidate will act like a normal human being.
The witchcraft allegations against Christine O'Donnell were firmly rebutted! Would an actual witch release a TV commercial in which she clearly and unambiguously states, "I am not a witch"??? (The commercial in question for people too young to remember this being an actual issue in a U.S. Senate race:
Also, if you're too young to remember, "I am not a witch," you're probably too young to remember the demon sheep ad and the biggest "smiling while twisting the knife" political ad of all time, so enjoy these too, young people!
Wow I didn’t remember that Whitman ad! I even must have voted in that election (though I knew there wasn’t much worth paying attention to in that race, and was much more focused on city level issues in Los Angeles).
In my mind, Whitman's statement is one of the top ten biggest wholly unforced errors in American political advertising history. Like, it wasn't a secret that Jerry Brown had previously been governor of California, so why didn't anyone double check the timing on Whitman's statement in her own ad before she released it??? (And major kudos for Brown's team who put that ad out less than 24 hours after Whitman's aired, IIRC.)
I believe Walker indicated that he was committed to becoming a werewolf (source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/17/herschel-walker-republican-georgia-werewolf-vampire ), so I think the first question is whether he followed through with that, so we know who needs to be recruited - a werewolf or a vampire? (Also, who are the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon in this line-up?)
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
Look at Geoff Duncan's lack of polling success in GA to see how much normie Democrats want to vote for somebody who didn't realize banning abortion, massive tax cuts for rich people, and undoing the ACA was bad basically yesterday.
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.
"But what it DEFINITELY DOES NOT MEAN is that voters want to ban gas stoves, gas cars, or pay more for green electricity."
Depends on where you are. All three issues are majority-supported in California, mostly because the actual underlying policies and the resulting economics do not conform to the MAGA-brained ALL CAPS descriptions you offer above. Big tent means big tent. California politicians should not retreat on issues that are fundamentally correct and economically beneficial for Californians, they just shouldn't try to impose them on places that aren't ready for them ... yet.
Banning gas cars is not fundamentally correct. People will switch to EV's when they are the best option for them.
And trying to mandate it brings down the whole national party as Republicans can point to bad policies that that are unpopular with the rest of the country.
Banning gas cars would be amazing in every direction -- cheaper to operate for consumers, quieter, less polluting, etc. But that's not what the policy does. It puts a long lead on restricting sales of new ICEVs (much longer than anybody should still be selling them) in order to ensure that the market for them develops as fast as possible. What brings down the whole national party is people cowering in the corner and adopting MAGA framing about good policy.
The post is about determining "what voters want" by looking at priorities and tailoring messaging to it. The poster is proposing that "voters don't want" a bunch of things that many voters do want, so describes an ineffective strategy.
Outside of California are these policies going to win the Democratic party Senate seats? It’s not at all clear to me that pushing these policies nationally is an effective strategy. Whether many voters want this is not especially relevant. Do you want to win Senate seats or not?
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.
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.
Just worth noting that China has ~ an 80% unfavourability rating in the US. Again as I said down-thread, this is one of the few bipartisan consensus issues in the US.
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.
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.
This was also the issue with a lot of Dem communication on the ACA. When the first line is "look, we know it's not perfect, but..." you look weak. It drove me insane people wouldn't just lead with "the ACA is expanding coverage and lowering medical inflation."
Agree on Biden. The point is that China tariffs aren't stupid. China's insane currency manipulation is stupid (i.e., a former China central banker just published "From the perspective of purchasing power parity, the exchange rate wouldn’t be 1 to 7, it might be 1 to 5 or even 1 to 4. Some have calculated that if the exchange rate truly reflected purchasing power parity, one dollar would exchange for only about 3.5 yuan.”). And everyone agrees on this - so it's a lot harder to make a broader anti-tariff argument when increasingly high tariffs on China are the consensus response to their continued dumping.
Those of us who care most about tariffs are well aware of what Biden did when he was President, and also how little Democrats cared when those tariffs hurt people like me. But sure, just assume most Americans are ignorant and don't actually know anything about the issues they care about.
"most Americans are ignorant and don't actually know anything about the issues they care about."
As someone with an undergrad degree in economics, I would submit that the statement "most Americans are ignorant" is accurate with regard to tariffs, notwithstanding that there are *some* Americans who *do* "actually know anything about the issues they care about," including tariffs.
I absolutely do not assume most Americans are ignorant. I do think most don't analyze every issue deep into the weeds, and many probably never deeply incorporated into their thoughts about Biden that he continued Trump's tariffs, because they are Trump's signature issue.
I can probably cite and draw the charts for most of the post grad econ I learned about the inefficiency of tariffs, but I also understand that every issue has both economic and political tradeoffs.
Most people have now seen that tariffs are broadly bad economics, and they associate that with Trump. Whatever nuanced political and economic fight there is to be had about specific tariffs should rightly take place in the dirty horse trading of Congressional committees, and those fights need not be had ahead of time when the straightforward and true thing to say is Trump's ideas are dumb and bad and we're going to fix them.
The actual issue is while the specific Trump tariffs are unpopular, the concept of American nationalism, being tough on China, etc. is popular so it's difficult for a candidate in say Ohio or iowa to just say all tariffs are bad.
It should be very easy to say “we are in a competition with China. Trump decided to put tariffs on all our friends, and has been negotiating with China about whether they should be included. We think the obvious thing is to have free trade with the free world and high tariffs on China, as they try to steal our jobs and technology.”
I think the biggest risk in launching an attack on tariffs is that they may get struck down by the courts? And if that happens, you will be left talking about something that is a bit more difficult to keep relevant. Even if they are responsible for prices.
Easy peasie, "I told you Trump's tariffs were bad, now the Supreme Court has said they're not just bad, they're illegal. Trump doesn't know what he's doing, and what he tried to do was bad for you."
I don't know. I'm not so convinced people will believe democrats if they say, "look, he was trying to increase prices on you!" Decent chance it works they say "you can see your prices are up, it is the current admins fault." Honestly, they don't even have to say that, if prices go up, the current admin always gets the majority of the blame.
To that end, if the court saves Trump from himself here and strikes down the tariffs, there is a chance prices recover. In which case, I really don't know how the arguments will go.
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.
You can get prices of a few goods to come down if there has been bad competition and then you suddenly unleash good competition. But I don’t believe there has ever been a period of general price declines outside of a major depression.
Yes. Particular goods are like that. But general decline, as in deflation, doesn’t happen without a depression. There are always some sectors going down in price as productivity increases, while others go up in price due to the Baumol effect.
historically I believe you are correct. But then again, we've never really had a big change that reduced the regulatory burden and allowed for much greater supply.
So, I think putting aside the overreach of the Trump admin, in most cases, most parties "overinterpreting their victories." It's that part of winning a majority is you have political capital to blow on doing unpopular things for parts of your voting base.
Now, you can argue whether various unpopular policy decisions are worth it or not, but the point of a political party actually isn't just to pass things w/ 50%+ approval. It's to reflect the will of its voters.
Had a longer comment typed out but accidentally deleted it. Anyways.
I think for Biden you could say he tried to throw bones to his coalition. Trump on the other hand just does whatever he feels like and his sycophants try to derive meaning from it when there is none.
I'm not sure "blow your political capital and plow your approval rating in to the negatives in the first year because fuck it we're going to lose next time anyways" is a GREAT strategy but maybe it's the equilibrium we're stuck with.
But the thing is, it wasn't the bones to the coalition that actually killed Biden's approval rating. It was inflation, which was not effected that much by the add'l spending, as seen by the fact the US did better than the rest of the world (not that voters cared).
Sure, it hurt, but prices were 90% of why Biden was below 40%. Immigration, cultural issues, Gaza, etc. was the other 10%.
If Biden had not done that but instead pursued some deregulatory measures (he did do some good stuff around permitting), maybe inflation could have topped out at 6%, and he could plausibly say "hey, there was a pandemic and now there's a land war in Europe, we're working on it." I think that would have been plausible. But I don't buy that the stimulus didn't effect the inflation rate at all.
Granted, in this counterfactual, the tradeoff is higher unemployment and a slower recovery.
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.
It’s our education system. High school physics classes are chock full of frictionless inclined planes. Kids graduate thinking that slippery slopes are real.
Sad to say I agree. My wife lived in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. I remember the utopia of the early Internet, how information wanted to be free. It’s soul-crushing how poorly that turned out. Yep, we need to police the Internet. Build the wall.
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.
The case was about whether a satirical movie about Hillary could be regulated under campaign finance reform, right? This seems like it runs hard into first amendment issues.
I do think there are very many reasons why it would be good to rewrite the first amendment in a way that doesn’t protect advertisement - though I admit it’s very hard to see how to effectively write that policy that doesn’t create worse problems.
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.
We're not going to have meaningful free speech rights for much longer if we allow unrestricted money to control our elections. We're watching the US administration step in overtly to ensure that only friendly factions control our media companies. There aren't too many more steps beyond that.
The Russian government finds Americans who have those free speech rights to pass their propaganda along to the American public. Are you going to ban The Nation because their American ownership is clearly deferential to Russia?
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.
What happens in US politics affects the whole world, but most people don’t believe that gives the whole world the right to influence our elections with money.
Because the Supreme Court has defined away the meaning of political corruption, opening the door to the explicit purchasing of governance by the highest bidder. Trump is only the most recent and vivid example of this.
It absolutely does resemble it in some ways, even though it is different in others. The question is whether the resemblances or the differences are more legally or morally relevant.
They can voice their opinion all they want. Putin can voice his opinion as well. But I don’t think that political spending should be considered protected free speech if you can’t vote in the election.
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.
Yeah, social media made it easier to silence and punish dissent from the party line, and this did a lot of damage to Democratic prospects. And now the MAGAs are doing the same thing, and you see previously sensible Republicans going along with the current crazy rhetoric in much the same way sensible Democrats did in 2020.
It's kind of interesting that on a lot of these issues where people went lefty-nuts, it was the "anti Bernie Bro" faction who was most responsible, but on the "ACAB"/"Defund" issue I'd say the pro-Sanders people were the faction who was more responsible.
It's amazing how like 90% of the discourse during the primary from 2019-2020 was just a waste of everyone's time. Nobody ever thought any of the healthcare ideas discussed would ever pass. The 2008 primary was the most vicious I've lived through, but the debates never felt as pointless as 2020.
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.
She isn't a policy wonk if that's what you're asking, but I don't see how she stands out from the average politician in the degree to which she does or doesn't "believe anything." Like what does John Thune believe? Thune and people like him believe in restricting abortion, cutting taxes on the rich, and cutting programs like Medicaid. Some Republicans might be members of a specific party faction with specific views on select factional issues, but most are in the caucus mainstream and broadly middle-of-the-road-for-Republicans policy, the details of which they're flexible on as long as they land in the generally desired part of the L-R political spectrum. Harris is like the inverse of that. She supports abortion rights, she is a nonradical feminist, she wants the government to police discrimination against minorities, and she wants to have levels of progressive taxation and social spending that are on the high end of what we've had historically. Factionally she's to the left of the Party's center, but not on its far left, and is basically mainstream. Does she have specific signature spending programs that she's associated with? Not really.
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.
Just being from and identified with San Francisco or California has to be at least a -2 pt variable for any Democratic candidate nationally, which makes it a losing proposition for the foreseeable future. No Kamala, no Newsom, No Pelosi ... this is the just the price of party discipline, which is what the "smoke filled room" use to deliver.
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)
The Ming vase strategy was one of the dumbest parts of it. Starmer got away with it because his polling was through the roof (maybe not in British terms, but American pols would kill for 20 points!). Go do interviews everywhere, talk casual, embody the moderation that you're trying to run on at all times.
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.
She became a Senator and was one of, if not the most, partisan Democratic Senators during her tenure there. Maybe Harris is a San Francisco moderate, but nothing about her national political career suggests she's an American moderate.
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.
I really like Underwood and wish she was running, but she decided against it. Pritzker has been putting lots of support in favor of Julianna Stratton, the Lt Gov.
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.
Isn't Texas an open primary state? Doesn't that mean Republicans will do everything in their power -- including voting in the Democratic primary -- to ensure Crockett wins? I guess you give up the right to vote in the Republican run-off if there is one, but if you want to optimize Republican odds rather that Cornyn over Paxton, that's what you'd do.
Val Demings isn't comparable to Jasmine Crockett whatsoever besides their both being Black women. Demings is a serious person and former law enforcement officer, and didn't do stuff like say that Trump-voting Latinos had slave mentality. She just had the misfortune to be running against Marco Rubio, an entrenched incumbent, in a year when Ron DeSantis won by 20 (and conveniently refrained from signing a 6-week abortion ban in the dead of night until AFTER he won reelection).
If Democrats can't find a viable candidate to run against an appointed, not elected, incumbent in a potential wave year in Florida, then both state party and DSCC leadership need to resign in disgrace.
Sometimes I just want to scream: "You guys had 60, that's SIX-ZERO, seats in the Senate in 2009! Figure it out!" Everyone who will be voting in 2026 was alive when this happened. Like a third of the current Senate Dem caucus was ALREADY in the Senate when this happened. This isn't ancient history. Democratic Party disadvantage in the Senate is not written into the constitution. It's the result of choices and it's possible to make different choices. Losing is a choice. Make better choices.
I mean, what happened was a lot less people knew what their Senators did in office, a lot of older Democratic voters died off to be replaced by Republican voters, and people within those states changed their electoral choices after gaining knowledge of what other Democratic and Republican voters were like.
You could run exact clones of all of those 2006 red state Senators and they'd all lose by 5-10 points and ironically, they'd all do much better in many urban and suburban areas than they did in 2006 and they'd all do far worse in rural areas.
Mark Warner is basically the same guy he was when he won the Governor of Virginia nearly 20 years ago - despite this, he now wins Northern Virginia and loses SW VA by landslide numbers despite the exact opposite being true in 2005 or whatever.
I think that's a reasonable top-level summary of what happened and of course I agree you couldn't just copy and paste the 2006 red state senators to 2026 and win (bearing in mind that there are many more "red" states today than in 2006, which is sort of what I'm getting at). My point is merely that such a coalition is *possible* even in the modern era. There is clearly no world in which the Dems get to 60 seats in the Senate in 2026 or 2028 but who's to say they couldn't achieve that in 2036 if they become significantly more ecumenical in their approach and the Republicans continue down the dead end they are currently on?
No, because a majority of people in states like North Dakota, Arkansas, etc. do not want to be in coalition with The Other, whether the Other are black people, immigrants, LGBT people, etc. and it's now far more well-known that the Democratic Party is the party that is aligned with those people.
It's the same reason no Republican will likely win in Massachusetts, Hawaii, etc. despite their being GOP Governors in those states fairly recently.
It took until Obama's election for a majority of the population to continually correctly say Democrats were the party African-Americans voted for!
I don’t agree with that characterization of “most people” in North Dakota and Arkansas (though I’ve only briefly driven through the former but I doubt it’s much different than say, Montana, where I have spent time). Certainly there are incorrigible ideologues and partisans on both sides, as you concede by pointing out a republican isn’t going to get elected in Massachusetts or Hawaii anytime soon. Those people are not the majority makers though. What drives the ever-deeper partisan affiliation of most voters in those deep red or deep blue states is a perception that the other party is “against us and our way of life.” That’s the perception that Dems need to defuse in red states. Keeping in mind that millions of people enter and leave the electorate every two years, you don’t even have to change that many people’s minds. You just change the national perception and as new voters enter the electorate and old voters leave you can see huge swings in the partisan affiliation of a state over a decade or two. That’s my point about 2009. Such a thing is possible again but it will take a lot of time and discipline.
I mean, if your way of life is limiting women's right to choose, LGBT people's civil rights, deporting undocumented folks who aren't committing any more crimes, slashing the welfare state, and so on, I am against their way of life.
2009 was a watershed moment but it was not planned or controlled by anyone. 2008 was the GFC which caused great economic distress.
Obama's weak response to the GFC then led to an exodus of poor working class people from the Democratic party. Or maybe they were just racist.
At any rate, 2008 was seismic. If Trump crashes the economy so badly by 2027 that 2028 feels like another 2008 then a new-realignment might be possible and maybe Dems in that new paradigm will get to 60 by 2036, but it will not happen because Dems engineer it.
Who said anything about engineering it? Have you seen my handle?
No one could even engineer something that large. Just like in a market, the broader political shift will be the result of the agglomeration of choices by millions of people. If people like Matt and others can convince a critical mass of the elites in the Democratic party to make slightly different choices about the national positioning of the party on certain issues, then it's entirely possible that there could be a preference cascade toward the Dems that could lead to a significant Democratic majority somewhere down the road. My only point was this has happened, in quite recent memory.
Of course, man plans and God laughs, and exogenous events will always have their say in things. But Dems should try to control what they can control and not worry so much about what they can't.
Your point is totally valid and I basically agree with you in the short term. But we can't be blinded to the bigger picture by short term exigencies. Control of the Senate is inherently a long-term project under our constitutional system. The media environment may be "different now" but it's constantly changing and it will be different still in 10 years. Predicting exactly how that will interact with all the other currents of our culture is probably a fool's errand. Dems need to focus on what they can control, not what they can't (like media technology), which mainly means building a broad coalition that can appeal in enough parts of the country such that they aren't lamenting the "bad Senate map" every two years.
Dems should be talking about Trump buying a "soccer participation trophy" for himself. They should be running ads that "Trump says soccer is 'real football'", microtargeted to people who complain about Bad Bunny doing the Superbowl halftime show.
I feel like the Norwegian peace prize committee should announce next year that they’ve created a one-time “soccer prize” and award it to the woman from Venezuela who won the peace prize last year. (Or to JD Vance or something.)
Jasmine Crockett doesn't want to be a United States Senator. She doesn't even really want to be a member of the United States of Representatives, or she'd run for reelection to her safe seat.
Jasmine Crockett wants to be a star on MSNBC and TikTok. She's an unserious loudmouth screaming "Pay attention to MEEEEEEEE" at the American people in general and Texan voters in particular, and she should first be publicly rebuked and then be soundly ignored, forever and ever.
Let's hope the TX Democratic party has better sense than to elect that clown. That she is even popular on MSNBC is flabbergasting to me and I am no moderate.
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.
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.
That's not what Democrats did, but go off.
Democrats MASSIVELY UNDERSTATED their economic success, and people like you want to sit here and pretend that it was the opposite. No. I am going to correct it every time.
I swear, some people have zero awareness whatsoever of what Democrats are, instead uncritically accepting the caricatures presented by right wing media and the far left.
Understating or overstating didn't matter much; people didn't *feel* the economic success (because people are fucking dumb!) and you've got to go to war with the voters you've got. Once you're explaining (or worse scolding) you've already lost the plot.
Doesn't help here that Nutlick, Bessent, et al are really bad at explaining as well.
People didn't "feel" economic pain.
When they were asked how their personal finances were, or how their local economy was doing, they said, "good!"
When they were asked how the national economy was doing, they said "unbelievably horrible!"
They didn't FEEL it. They were TOLD IT. And one of the reasons they believed it is that nobody told them otherwise.
"If you're explaining, you're losing" is one of those classic Carville-retread bits on the list of Democratic electoral CW that we continue to believe is accurate for some reason, even though Donald Trump set the Republican CW on fire a decade ago to great success. "If you're explaining, you're losing" is something that has been taken as gospel by every single Democratic strategist on the road that brought us to this point. Somehow keeping it front-of-mind is going to be part of the solution?
You know what helps dumb people understand stuff? EXPLAINING IT TO THEM.
This is utter nonsense, but so wonderful as an example of the path of the Democrats Bourgeousie Inflations Splaining and the Cope of "If people don't believe our partisan political view, it's the fault of being Dupe of the Right Wing Media" and not at all that your views are wrong / misinformed / partisan themselves
In actual disaggregated data as like from St. Louis Fed, "People who are Good" is at even national aggregates immensely household income differentiated, and surprise surprise the college educated professional classes are quite A-Okay but non-college lower income levels do not report at all A-Okay. Disaggreation is key.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-overall-financial-well-being.htm#:~:text=the%20SurveyAcknowledgements-,Overall%20Financial%20Well%2DBeing,in%202021%20(figure%201).
Equally contemporary 2024 polling reflect (https://news.gallup.com/poll/644690/americans-continue-name-inflation-top-financial-problem.aspx#:~:text=Compared%20with%20last%20year%2C%20there,%25%20of%20upper%2Dincome%20adults.) high levels of personal economic situation anxiety with e.g. nearly 70% of lower income reporting worry that they won't have monthly bills coverage.
The partisan delusional spin you are pimping as "correction" is fundamentally bullshit and reflective of how Democrats managed to bungle 2024
But generally reflective of how party political partisans delude themselves
Lucky for Democrats the MAGA Trumpies are in the same process right now.
Yep, it's the economy stupid continues to be the lesson no one is willing to learn. With both parties, the politicians followed policies that exacerbated economic pain and ignored the concern from Americans. Inflation and pocketbook issues overwhelm everything else for many people.
The other stuff is important but it's really hard to get people to stop paying attention to their worsening economic situation.
What policies in particular did Democrats followed that “exacerbated economic pain”? The COVID checks may have been ill advised but were quite popular at the time and, at any rate, were not the singular factor in causing inflation, which was mostly due to supply chain problems in the wake of the pandemic. What Democrats failed to do was acknowledge the serious effects of inflation, especially in housing, on the average American in part because they were so fixated on the “soft landing” bringing the rate of inflation down without triggering a recession. This meant a great economy for those with equity investments (i.e. the upper middle class) and not so great for working people whose wage increases were eaten up by high rent + high grocery prices. Biden never managed to even come out with “I feel your pain” because he was too stubborn to acknowledge anything might be wrong, since that would have pointed to him resigning in favor of letting the party choose a younger candidate.
Trump, on the other hand, could have coasted along not changing much…if he’d stuck to a tax cut here and there and maybe changing the DEI standards for new hires, leaving most of the government alone, the economy would have continued to grow and he could have gotten credit for being a great manager. Instead he kept his promise (that voters assumed was campaign bullsh-t) to smash basically everything and remake it into his own vision of the Gilded Age.
Quite agreed on both paragraphs: re Biden as a general matter the first year of Biden policy (me as an economist and PE financier) I felt was "reasonable bet, bit risky for inflation but a reasonable bet to take so long as one is ready to quickly pivot if inflation starts to pickup." - of course multi-factors and risks so indeed multiple factors not just their policies.
However, Biden Admin (and apparently him personally) didn't pivot - the train-wreck there of denialism, hand-waiving and Prof'lclassSplaining bears a lot of similarity I think to the Immigration topic - in both instances they seem to walled themselves off and self-paralysed via proceduralism and letting the Groups hector them.
Trump - I myself in first weeks had thought - if he's just his usual lazy self he'll coast to reasonable popularity just attacking immigration and high visibility wokey silliness.
That didn't last long...
What else are they going to do? Not like they're going to systematically try to address affordability concerns through policy.
yes, yes, yes... For fuck's sake the man is handing out knifes to stick in him. Do it.
Who is saying that we shouldn't?
Most of the messaging about it will happen when it matters most, i.e. next year in late summer and fall.
Actions speak.
But nice illustration of the College Dorm habits of the Democrats.
(as nothing was said that someone was saying "shouldn't")
Apologies for being able to infer secondary meanings and unstated hypotheses. You would not have made the comment you did if you did not perceive there to be somebody who was consequentially reluctant to "stick the knife in him." Don't blow smoke up my ass and then call me the undergrad.
Oh another fine example of the tedious Lefty College Dorm Room habits.
You are a fine example of the Democrats fundamental problem.
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.
Trying to get the degrowther vote!
When did saying "your kids don't need toys" become a thing politicians say unprompted? That's at least two politicians who have said it publicly in about the past year. It's weird.
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.
Being a Democrat means constantly having to update your vocabulary - "unhoused," "cisgendered" etc
It really doesn't. I mean, point me to the Democratic policy that was affected in any way by that kind of linguistic gyration. That's just stuff people yell about online. We are allowed to ignore them. We SHOULD ignore them.
Actually, scratch that. We should ATTACK AND MOCK them.
Bill Clinton got it.
I'm not sure if Democrats really get how meaningless all of this *gestures around wider political internet* really is. Twitter being mad at you means literally nothing.
In 2020 we had a choice of people running "to the left" and instead nominated Joe Biden, whose picture sits in the dictionary under "boring moderate" (also, it's a dictionary that was published in 1992.) Biden did a whole bunch of relatively moderate substantive things (plus some suprisingly nifty old-fashioned industrial policy stuff.) He pacified the lefties in his coalition by relegating all their demands into meaningless symbolic executive orders, so he could run an arrow-straight centrist policy on literally every issue of substance, including a centrist pivot on immigration policy that (quite cynically) got blocked by Trump.
And then he got crushed.
So if you're a centrist on Substack, what lesson are you going to take from that? That we picked literally the most moderate centrist available on the menu, and nobody was excited about it? Or are you going to assemble an alternative history where Joe Biden (JOE Fing BIDEN) was secretly a lefty shill "controlled by the groups", and voters' apathy about the most boring non-compelling Presidency in decades was actually the result of left wing extremism? I mean obviously you're going to go with the second thing.
"Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you" was literally the best-performing political ad since the fucking Daisy ad, man.
Why is hard for you to accept that most Americans fucking hate cultural leftism, and it's a drag on Democrats? That isn't something I'm advocating for - it's something I eventually had to admit to myself. Voters are not subtle about it.
Despite the opposite position being considered a cliché, "fiscally liberal, socially conservative" is the most common political outlook in America today. And that's because "socially conservative" means something really different than it did 25 years ago, because the definition of "socially liberal" got pulled way out over the horizon.
There's a lot more I could say about this but it doesn't feel remotely worth it.
It means checking the box at the DMV (because our party system is ridiculous). People that caved to the language policing were just weak in character and spirit.
100%. It's the defining sickness of the Democratic activist bubble.
If by college educated progressive donor class, you mean college-educated voters in that state, then yes. A college educated voter in Des Moines or Austin has similar views to one in Seattle or New York.
Yes and no. 40%+ college educated voters voted for Trump. That percentage is probably lower in Washington and New York and higher in Iowa and Texas.
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.
Trump isn't making any mistakes at all. Trump just doesn't care. And why should he?
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.
It would be great if the Democrats really worked to nominate candidates that represent the opinions of their districts, regardless of the progressive wing. TN-7’s candidate was too left leaning to get elected. I found this article as ‘hopeful’ - it is critical to win the Senate. Would Mr. Emanuel return to run the DNC and recruit candidates?
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, such 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.
He's up for re-election to the Senate in 2028, so it seems like the Democrats might be better off for him to stay in Georgia.
Both decent and religious will be hard to overcome with the base on a nationwide basis. You can get away with that in the south, but in a national primary?
Data driven journalism needed over Story / Narrative / Vibes....
More stats people, more data, less "we interviewed fourteen people our journalist knows via Twitter"
What about if you do the actual data work and figure out the truth, then go ahead and write the nonsense article you wanted to write but just casually link to the numbers disproving your article halfway through? Does that do anything for you? It's the best they can do I guess
I guess we call that "lip service to data but lead journalist really wants his/her narrative"
There's plenty of stats and data-based articles. People click on the narrative & vibes based stuff.
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.
The first time, sure, but the second time?
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 Georgia cases were the ones that made the most legal sense”
Which only serves to show how ridiculous the NY cases were.
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.
If there's one thing I've learned from the past 30 years or so of mainstream American entertainment, it's that sassy black women who tell it like it is cannot fail, they can only be failed.
Stacey Abrams registered enough voters to make a solid showing in 2018, better than any statewide Georgia Democrat in a decade. However, even in Georgia, which has so think the second highest proportion of blacks in the country, base mobilization didn’t work. Kemp was going to be tough in 2022 no matter who won, he kept us free during Covid. I very nearly voted for Kemp in ‘22 but couldn’t quite do it.
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.
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.
Eugene Debs won 6% of the popular vote in Illinois in the 1912 presidential, so that's something to build on...
Penny farthings for all!
Yes, if we just shut up and accept our crumbs given us to candidates OK'd by Murdoch, Bloomberg, and Walton-backed think tanks, there'd be no fighting.
Hurting Democrats generally by attacking other Democrats will just ensure its crumbs for everyone.
Here in Colorado there’s a progressive Democrat that’s going to try to primary Hickenlooper, one of the state’s more popular politicians. She will very likely lose but damage Hick in the process. Fortunately probably not enough that he won’t win the general easily. In that case it’s merely a waste of time, energy, and resources that could be better spent elsewhere, like capturing GoP House seats that are vulnerable.
I prefer crumbs to Trump. We have Trump because my oppinion is not shared.
Arguing over who has to start and who’s been doing the most makes me think this is just another Israel-Palestine issue, where people on both sides want to fight and don’t actually want to solve the problem. Fortunately, in this case, there is a clear alignment of interests, so if people wanted to stop fighting about who started the fighting, they can do it and make progress on those shared interests. Even if it means letting those awful people get away with pretending they didn’t start it and do the worst of it.
I would prefer if everyone would agree to not primary incumbents outside of special circumstances, like an incumbent doing something stupid that torpedos their chances of reelection. Primarying otherwise popular and successful politicians is bad on a number of levels IMO.
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)
I think the problem is not enough infighting, and too much coalition management,
I’m being facetious, of course. Totally agree that “loser” is a word that doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
The politically correct term is "differently performing candidates".
https://theonion.com/dea-chief-winners-occasionally-use-drugs-1819564423/
DEA Chief: Winners Occasionally Use Drugs
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!
Yeah, if it was an internal conversation with her strategy/polling people, it would be fine. It's weird though that she decided to have that conversation in public instead of pivoting to why people would want to vote for her on the economy, etc.
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.
If I were to argue this a bit more, I would say what separates wokes from Zohran wasn’t the issue set, it’s the moral preening (or lack thereof). Woke politics was defined by the constant moral hectoring of anyone who disagrees, not just far left issue positioning. Zohran did the issue positioning without treating you as a bad person for dissenting. That’s why I think even if AOC never shifts on policy, there’s a lot she could learn learn from Zohran on how to engage skeptics on both culture and economics without turning every disagreement into a character test
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.
Mamdani is very woke on schools. He walked back the police stuff, but that was also a bunch of woke posturing.
How did this get to be a liberal talking point? I just saw a lib friend on FB post something to the same effect a few weeks ago, that he would hate it if Dems started appealing to Trump voters. Because more people voting for Dems is bad somehow!
If somebody thinks what Trump voters believe and want is bad, why are you shocked they don't want the people they're voting for to screw them over to appease Trump voters?
It’s not shocking but Crockett was citing Zohran as an example as to what is possible when we turn out the base and don’t need Trump voters! Besides Texas obv being a red state, it’s funny she’s trying to use his campaign theory as to why u don’t need Trump voters when he explicitly started his campaign trying to court Trump voters based on specific policy proposals
Trump voters are not a monolith that are in lockstep on every issue. Some are full-blown MAGA true believers. Some are right-leaners that didn't care for Dem emphasis on "woke" issues. Some are old-school Republicans that haven't changed parties yet. I don't think Dems should try to win over anyone with a MAGA shirt, but there are tons of people that voted for Trump that are pretty uneasy about what he's doing.
Isn't it basically the reverse side of the coin with, "Republicans can refuse to moderate on their positions and get all their wishlist of tax cuts and spending cuts enacted" printed on the obverse?
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.
It seems like NYC's ranked-choice voting would have yielded a better candidate in the TN primary
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.
Wasn't that the one the local Democrats were ratfucking as well?
Electing MTG style lunatics like Crockett to the House is a big part of why the party reputation is trash. You can’t have a bunch of insane people fighting for camera time in the House and convince voters that the Senate candidate will act like a normal human being.
Democrats want a Democratic Tea Party but forget that the Republican Tea Party nominated candidates like Sharon Angle.
Say what you will about Sharon Angle, at least there were no credible accusations that she had ever practiced witchcraft.
The witchcraft allegations against Christine O'Donnell were firmly rebutted! Would an actual witch release a TV commercial in which she clearly and unambiguously states, "I am not a witch"??? (The commercial in question for people too young to remember this being an actual issue in a U.S. Senate race:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxJyPsmEask )
Also, if you're too young to remember, "I am not a witch," you're probably too young to remember the demon sheep ad and the biggest "smiling while twisting the knife" political ad of all time, so enjoy these too, young people!
The demon sheep ad (which was actually part of a larger, marginally less insane, ad block, so here's just the demon sheep): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBlNVXMWe_w
The "Hey, should we check who was governor 30 years ago? Nah, we sent the interns home for the day" ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEPlZYp5-Pk
Wow..., could they not afford a dog?
Wow I didn’t remember that Whitman ad! I even must have voted in that election (though I knew there wasn’t much worth paying attention to in that race, and was much more focused on city level issues in Los Angeles).
In my mind, Whitman's statement is one of the top ten biggest wholly unforced errors in American political advertising history. Like, it wasn't a secret that Jerry Brown had previously been governor of California, so why didn't anyone double check the timing on Whitman's statement in her own ad before she released it??? (And major kudos for Brown's team who put that ad out less than 24 hours after Whitman's aired, IIRC.)
If Herschel Walker is a vampire, how long until we get GOP Monster Squad? We're already living in the Dark Universe.
I believe Walker indicated that he was committed to becoming a werewolf (source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/17/herschel-walker-republican-georgia-werewolf-vampire ), so I think the first question is whether he followed through with that, so we know who needs to be recruited - a werewolf or a vampire? (Also, who are the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon in this line-up?)
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
Look at Geoff Duncan's lack of polling success in GA to see how much normie Democrats want to vote for somebody who didn't realize banning abortion, massive tax cuts for rich people, and undoing the ACA was bad basically yesterday.
Well, if she landed on "defund the FBI," that would be both a Congressional issue and potentially MAGA-appealing...
(I'm joking. Mostly.)
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.
"But what it DEFINITELY DOES NOT MEAN is that voters want to ban gas stoves, gas cars, or pay more for green electricity."
Depends on where you are. All three issues are majority-supported in California, mostly because the actual underlying policies and the resulting economics do not conform to the MAGA-brained ALL CAPS descriptions you offer above. Big tent means big tent. California politicians should not retreat on issues that are fundamentally correct and economically beneficial for Californians, they just shouldn't try to impose them on places that aren't ready for them ... yet.
Banning gas cars is not fundamentally correct. People will switch to EV's when they are the best option for them.
And trying to mandate it brings down the whole national party as Republicans can point to bad policies that that are unpopular with the rest of the country.
Banning gas cars would be amazing in every direction -- cheaper to operate for consumers, quieter, less polluting, etc. But that's not what the policy does. It puts a long lead on restricting sales of new ICEVs (much longer than anybody should still be selling them) in order to ensure that the market for them develops as fast as possible. What brings down the whole national party is people cowering in the corner and adopting MAGA framing about good policy.
And if consumers want to purchase EV's more power to them. They shouldn't be forced to. They should be able to decide what's best for them.
The post is about winning Senate seats. Unless you are worried about California Senate seats, this seems irrelevant to the topic.
The post is about determining "what voters want" by looking at priorities and tailoring messaging to it. The poster is proposing that "voters don't want" a bunch of things that many voters do want, so describes an ineffective strategy.
Outside of California are these policies going to win the Democratic party Senate seats? It’s not at all clear to me that pushing these policies nationally is an effective strategy. Whether many voters want this is not especially relevant. Do you want to win Senate seats or not?
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.
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.
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.
"righties hating China/foreigners in general"
Just worth noting that China has ~ an 80% unfavourability rating in the US. Again as I said down-thread, this is one of the few bipartisan consensus issues in the US.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/07/15/views-of-china-and-xi-jinping-2025/
EDIT: And well earned too. They are "making trade impossible": https://archive.is/noI9H
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.
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.
This was also the issue with a lot of Dem communication on the ACA. When the first line is "look, we know it's not perfect, but..." you look weak. It drove me insane people wouldn't just lead with "the ACA is expanding coverage and lowering medical inflation."
Hack Gap in action.
Agree on Biden. The point is that China tariffs aren't stupid. China's insane currency manipulation is stupid (i.e., a former China central banker just published "From the perspective of purchasing power parity, the exchange rate wouldn’t be 1 to 7, it might be 1 to 5 or even 1 to 4. Some have calculated that if the exchange rate truly reflected purchasing power parity, one dollar would exchange for only about 3.5 yuan.”). And everyone agrees on this - so it's a lot harder to make a broader anti-tariff argument when increasingly high tariffs on China are the consensus response to their continued dumping.
https://archive.is/sJYF2
Those of us who care most about tariffs are well aware of what Biden did when he was President, and also how little Democrats cared when those tariffs hurt people like me. But sure, just assume most Americans are ignorant and don't actually know anything about the issues they care about.
"most Americans are ignorant and don't actually know anything about the issues they care about."
As someone with an undergrad degree in economics, I would submit that the statement "most Americans are ignorant" is accurate with regard to tariffs, notwithstanding that there are *some* Americans who *do* "actually know anything about the issues they care about," including tariffs.
I absolutely do not assume most Americans are ignorant. I do think most don't analyze every issue deep into the weeds, and many probably never deeply incorporated into their thoughts about Biden that he continued Trump's tariffs, because they are Trump's signature issue.
I can probably cite and draw the charts for most of the post grad econ I learned about the inefficiency of tariffs, but I also understand that every issue has both economic and political tradeoffs.
Most people have now seen that tariffs are broadly bad economics, and they associate that with Trump. Whatever nuanced political and economic fight there is to be had about specific tariffs should rightly take place in the dirty horse trading of Congressional committees, and those fights need not be had ahead of time when the straightforward and true thing to say is Trump's ideas are dumb and bad and we're going to fix them.
One big problem is the average voter thinks tariffs are good.
The actual issue is while the specific Trump tariffs are unpopular, the concept of American nationalism, being tough on China, etc. is popular so it's difficult for a candidate in say Ohio or iowa to just say all tariffs are bad.
It should be very easy to say “we are in a competition with China. Trump decided to put tariffs on all our friends, and has been negotiating with China about whether they should be included. We think the obvious thing is to have free trade with the free world and high tariffs on China, as they try to steal our jobs and technology.”
Right. I don't know why everyone deleted Obama's Midwest playbook. He talked about this constantly:
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/obama-says-china-must-stop-manipulating-currency-idUSTRE49S7FQ/
I think the biggest risk in launching an attack on tariffs is that they may get struck down by the courts? And if that happens, you will be left talking about something that is a bit more difficult to keep relevant. Even if they are responsible for prices.
Easy peasie, "I told you Trump's tariffs were bad, now the Supreme Court has said they're not just bad, they're illegal. Trump doesn't know what he's doing, and what he tried to do was bad for you."
I don't know. I'm not so convinced people will believe democrats if they say, "look, he was trying to increase prices on you!" Decent chance it works they say "you can see your prices are up, it is the current admins fault." Honestly, they don't even have to say that, if prices go up, the current admin always gets the majority of the blame.
To that end, if the court saves Trump from himself here and strikes down the tariffs, there is a chance prices recover. In which case, I really don't know how the arguments will go.
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.
You can get prices of a few goods to come down if there has been bad competition and then you suddenly unleash good competition. But I don’t believe there has ever been a period of general price declines outside of a major depression.
I submit that prices decline all the time in many areas. They decline in commodities, they decline in electronics.
And I think a key tenet of this blog is that if we built a LOT more housing prices would decline there as well.
Yes. Particular goods are like that. But general decline, as in deflation, doesn’t happen without a depression. There are always some sectors going down in price as productivity increases, while others go up in price due to the Baumol effect.
historically I believe you are correct. But then again, we've never really had a big change that reduced the regulatory burden and allowed for much greater supply.
Yeah his policies haven't matched the agenda. But even if they had, I think he may have sold voters and impossible vision.
So, I think putting aside the overreach of the Trump admin, in most cases, most parties "overinterpreting their victories." It's that part of winning a majority is you have political capital to blow on doing unpopular things for parts of your voting base.
Now, you can argue whether various unpopular policy decisions are worth it or not, but the point of a political party actually isn't just to pass things w/ 50%+ approval. It's to reflect the will of its voters.
Had a longer comment typed out but accidentally deleted it. Anyways.
I think for Biden you could say he tried to throw bones to his coalition. Trump on the other hand just does whatever he feels like and his sycophants try to derive meaning from it when there is none.
I'm not sure "blow your political capital and plow your approval rating in to the negatives in the first year because fuck it we're going to lose next time anyways" is a GREAT strategy but maybe it's the equilibrium we're stuck with.
But the thing is, it wasn't the bones to the coalition that actually killed Biden's approval rating. It was inflation, which was not effected that much by the add'l spending, as seen by the fact the US did better than the rest of the world (not that voters cared).
Sure, it hurt, but prices were 90% of why Biden was below 40%. Immigration, cultural issues, Gaza, etc. was the other 10%.
Ehh... The St. Louis Fed estimated that the ARP added 2.6% to inflation by February 2022.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2022/12/22/demand-supply-imbalance-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-the-role-of-fiscal-policy
If Biden had not done that but instead pursued some deregulatory measures (he did do some good stuff around permitting), maybe inflation could have topped out at 6%, and he could plausibly say "hey, there was a pandemic and now there's a land war in Europe, we're working on it." I think that would have been plausible. But I don't buy that the stimulus didn't effect the inflation rate at all.
Granted, in this counterfactual, the tradeoff is higher unemployment and a slower recovery.
Biden's bid approval slide started before inflation with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan
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.
It’s our education system. High school physics classes are chock full of frictionless inclined planes. Kids graduate thinking that slippery slopes are real.
The Russian government is free to sent representatives to march in Skokie wearing big FSB/KGB armbands and holding Trump signs.
Don’t think they won’t do it. There are still some prisoners left in Russian jails.
At the very least America should have a Great Firewall like China does
Sad to say I agree. My wife lived in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. I remember the utopia of the early Internet, how information wanted to be free. It’s soul-crushing how poorly that turned out. Yep, we need to police the Internet. Build the wall.
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.
The terms "own," "independent" and "unaffiliated" are doing Atlas levels of work here. The whole premise of Citizens United is factually fraudulent.
The case was about whether a satirical movie about Hillary could be regulated under campaign finance reform, right? This seems like it runs hard into first amendment issues.
I do think there are very many reasons why it would be good to rewrite the first amendment in a way that doesn’t protect advertisement - though I admit it’s very hard to see how to effectively write that policy that doesn’t create worse problems.
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.
We're not going to have meaningful free speech rights for much longer if we allow unrestricted money to control our elections. We're watching the US administration step in overtly to ensure that only friendly factions control our media companies. There aren't too many more steps beyond that.
The Russian government finds Americans who have those free speech rights to pass their propaganda along to the American public. Are you going to ban The Nation because their American ownership is clearly deferential to Russia?
Don’t give me any ideas.
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.
What happens in US politics affects the whole world, but most people don’t believe that gives the whole world the right to influence our elections with money.
Because the Supreme Court has defined away the meaning of political corruption, opening the door to the explicit purchasing of governance by the highest bidder. Trump is only the most recent and vivid example of this.
“Is this not the same ethical setup as Russians mounting a social media campaign for an American presidential candidate?”
Let’s see: Doe an influence campaign mounted by a hostile foreign dictator resemble an American citizen exercising his First Amendment rights?
It absolutely does resemble it in some ways, even though it is different in others. The question is whether the resemblances or the differences are more legally or morally relevant.
"It absolutely does resemble it in some ways"
As Astroturf resembles grass.
Are you sure it’s not as trees resemble grass?
I think it’s a settled question.
Do you propose that people who aren't from Wisconsin should be forbidden from giving their opinions on what happens in Wisconsin politics?
"That's exactly what those goshdarn Minnesotans would say!"
They can voice their opinion all they want. Putin can voice his opinion as well. But I don’t think that political spending should be considered protected free speech if you can’t vote in the election.
Well, not quite the same as Russian interference. Being an adversary nation and all that.
I chose Russia as the example because it’s plausible that it has already happened. But the principle applies equally well to Canada.
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.
Yeah, social media made it easier to silence and punish dissent from the party line, and this did a lot of damage to Democratic prospects. And now the MAGAs are doing the same thing, and you see previously sensible Republicans going along with the current crazy rhetoric in much the same way sensible Democrats did in 2020.
Everyone needs to learn to ignore Twitter.
It's kind of interesting that on a lot of these issues where people went lefty-nuts, it was the "anti Bernie Bro" faction who was most responsible, but on the "ACAB"/"Defund" issue I'd say the pro-Sanders people were the faction who was more responsible.
Sanders campaign in 2016 basically coopted all the woke zeitgeist platform in 2020. I was a completely different beast.
It's amazing how like 90% of the discourse during the primary from 2019-2020 was just a waste of everyone's time. Nobody ever thought any of the healthcare ideas discussed would ever pass. The 2008 primary was the most vicious I've lived through, but the debates never felt as pointless as 2020.
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.
She isn't a policy wonk if that's what you're asking, but I don't see how she stands out from the average politician in the degree to which she does or doesn't "believe anything." Like what does John Thune believe? Thune and people like him believe in restricting abortion, cutting taxes on the rich, and cutting programs like Medicaid. Some Republicans might be members of a specific party faction with specific views on select factional issues, but most are in the caucus mainstream and broadly middle-of-the-road-for-Republicans policy, the details of which they're flexible on as long as they land in the generally desired part of the L-R political spectrum. Harris is like the inverse of that. She supports abortion rights, she is a nonradical feminist, she wants the government to police discrimination against minorities, and she wants to have levels of progressive taxation and social spending that are on the high end of what we've had historically. Factionally she's to the left of the Party's center, but not on its far left, and is basically mainstream. Does she have specific signature spending programs that she's associated with? Not really.
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.
Just being from and identified with San Francisco or California has to be at least a -2 pt variable for any Democratic candidate nationally, which makes it a losing proposition for the foreseeable future. No Kamala, no Newsom, No Pelosi ... this is the just the price of party discipline, which is what the "smoke filled room" use to deliver.
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)
The Ming vase strategy was one of the dumbest parts of it. Starmer got away with it because his polling was through the roof (maybe not in British terms, but American pols would kill for 20 points!). Go do interviews everywhere, talk casual, embody the moderation that you're trying to run on at all times.
Yes agree- the safe walled garden, don't do impure venues (Rogan) etc.
Pity I was at first encouraged and thought Harris showed some potential - but by September is was all reversion to play safe, play internal.
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.
Often she sounded like a blithering idiot. Or am I being too critical?
TOO SOON
She became a Senator and was one of, if not the most, partisan Democratic Senators during her tenure there. Maybe Harris is a San Francisco moderate, but nothing about her national political career suggests she's an American moderate.
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.
Is it going to be Underwood? She seems pretty impressive.
I really like Underwood and wish she was running, but she decided against it. Pritzker has been putting lots of support in favor of Julianna Stratton, the Lt Gov.
Can that black woman speak like a normal human?
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.
Isn't Texas an open primary state? Doesn't that mean Republicans will do everything in their power -- including voting in the Democratic primary -- to ensure Crockett wins? I guess you give up the right to vote in the Republican run-off if there is one, but if you want to optimize Republican odds rather that Cornyn over Paxton, that's what you'd do.
I mean I could argue we nominated that version of a candidate in Florida for Senate and they lost just as badly as Crockett likely will.
Val Demings isn't comparable to Jasmine Crockett whatsoever besides their both being Black women. Demings is a serious person and former law enforcement officer, and didn't do stuff like say that Trump-voting Latinos had slave mentality. She just had the misfortune to be running against Marco Rubio, an entrenched incumbent, in a year when Ron DeSantis won by 20 (and conveniently refrained from signing a 6-week abortion ban in the dead of night until AFTER he won reelection).
“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.
Democrats need to study their grammar.
My feeling about Florida is that Dems should care about down ballot effects by actually running someone. This is completely ridiculous to hear.
If Democrats can't find a viable candidate to run against an appointed, not elected, incumbent in a potential wave year in Florida, then both state party and DSCC leadership need to resign in disgrace.
The Maine primary is a walking corpse running against a nazi tattooed lunatic. The DSCC should have already resigned in disgrace.
Sometimes I just want to scream: "You guys had 60, that's SIX-ZERO, seats in the Senate in 2009! Figure it out!" Everyone who will be voting in 2026 was alive when this happened. Like a third of the current Senate Dem caucus was ALREADY in the Senate when this happened. This isn't ancient history. Democratic Party disadvantage in the Senate is not written into the constitution. It's the result of choices and it's possible to make different choices. Losing is a choice. Make better choices.
I mean, what happened was a lot less people knew what their Senators did in office, a lot of older Democratic voters died off to be replaced by Republican voters, and people within those states changed their electoral choices after gaining knowledge of what other Democratic and Republican voters were like.
You could run exact clones of all of those 2006 red state Senators and they'd all lose by 5-10 points and ironically, they'd all do much better in many urban and suburban areas than they did in 2006 and they'd all do far worse in rural areas.
Mark Warner is basically the same guy he was when he won the Governor of Virginia nearly 20 years ago - despite this, he now wins Northern Virginia and loses SW VA by landslide numbers despite the exact opposite being true in 2005 or whatever.
I think that's a reasonable top-level summary of what happened and of course I agree you couldn't just copy and paste the 2006 red state senators to 2026 and win (bearing in mind that there are many more "red" states today than in 2006, which is sort of what I'm getting at). My point is merely that such a coalition is *possible* even in the modern era. There is clearly no world in which the Dems get to 60 seats in the Senate in 2026 or 2028 but who's to say they couldn't achieve that in 2036 if they become significantly more ecumenical in their approach and the Republicans continue down the dead end they are currently on?
No, because a majority of people in states like North Dakota, Arkansas, etc. do not want to be in coalition with The Other, whether the Other are black people, immigrants, LGBT people, etc. and it's now far more well-known that the Democratic Party is the party that is aligned with those people.
It's the same reason no Republican will likely win in Massachusetts, Hawaii, etc. despite their being GOP Governors in those states fairly recently.
It took until Obama's election for a majority of the population to continually correctly say Democrats were the party African-Americans voted for!
I don’t agree with that characterization of “most people” in North Dakota and Arkansas (though I’ve only briefly driven through the former but I doubt it’s much different than say, Montana, where I have spent time). Certainly there are incorrigible ideologues and partisans on both sides, as you concede by pointing out a republican isn’t going to get elected in Massachusetts or Hawaii anytime soon. Those people are not the majority makers though. What drives the ever-deeper partisan affiliation of most voters in those deep red or deep blue states is a perception that the other party is “against us and our way of life.” That’s the perception that Dems need to defuse in red states. Keeping in mind that millions of people enter and leave the electorate every two years, you don’t even have to change that many people’s minds. You just change the national perception and as new voters enter the electorate and old voters leave you can see huge swings in the partisan affiliation of a state over a decade or two. That’s my point about 2009. Such a thing is possible again but it will take a lot of time and discipline.
I mean, if your way of life is limiting women's right to choose, LGBT people's civil rights, deporting undocumented folks who aren't committing any more crimes, slashing the welfare state, and so on, I am against their way of life.
Then you should not run for Senate in Arkansas, my friend :)
2009 was a watershed moment but it was not planned or controlled by anyone. 2008 was the GFC which caused great economic distress.
Obama's weak response to the GFC then led to an exodus of poor working class people from the Democratic party. Or maybe they were just racist.
At any rate, 2008 was seismic. If Trump crashes the economy so badly by 2027 that 2028 feels like another 2008 then a new-realignment might be possible and maybe Dems in that new paradigm will get to 60 by 2036, but it will not happen because Dems engineer it.
Who said anything about engineering it? Have you seen my handle?
No one could even engineer something that large. Just like in a market, the broader political shift will be the result of the agglomeration of choices by millions of people. If people like Matt and others can convince a critical mass of the elites in the Democratic party to make slightly different choices about the national positioning of the party on certain issues, then it's entirely possible that there could be a preference cascade toward the Dems that could lead to a significant Democratic majority somewhere down the road. My only point was this has happened, in quite recent memory.
Of course, man plans and God laughs, and exogenous events will always have their say in things. But Dems should try to control what they can control and not worry so much about what they can't.
The Facebook feed was barely 2 years old in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Facebook)
The media environment is entirely different now, and you can’t run a local campaign any more the way you could then.
Your point is totally valid and I basically agree with you in the short term. But we can't be blinded to the bigger picture by short term exigencies. Control of the Senate is inherently a long-term project under our constitutional system. The media environment may be "different now" but it's constantly changing and it will be different still in 10 years. Predicting exactly how that will interact with all the other currents of our culture is probably a fool's errand. Dems need to focus on what they can control, not what they can't (like media technology), which mainly means building a broad coalition that can appeal in enough parts of the country such that they aren't lamenting the "bad Senate map" every two years.
Dems should be talking about Trump buying a "soccer participation trophy" for himself. They should be running ads that "Trump says soccer is 'real football'", microtargeted to people who complain about Bad Bunny doing the Superbowl halftime show.
I feel like the Norwegian peace prize committee should announce next year that they’ve created a one-time “soccer prize” and award it to the woman from Venezuela who won the peace prize last year. (Or to JD Vance or something.)
Jasmine Crockett doesn't want to be a United States Senator. She doesn't even really want to be a member of the United States of Representatives, or she'd run for reelection to her safe seat.
Jasmine Crockett wants to be a star on MSNBC and TikTok. She's an unserious loudmouth screaming "Pay attention to MEEEEEEEE" at the American people in general and Texan voters in particular, and she should first be publicly rebuked and then be soundly ignored, forever and ever.
"If you are not on TV, you are not governing." - Matt Gaetz
Let's hope the TX Democratic party has better sense than to elect that clown. That she is even popular on MSNBC is flabbergasting to me and I am no moderate.
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.