I tapped out on commenting on this morning's thread, and I'll start reading the comments now after this, but I spent that time thinking long and hard how this happened, and talking with some smart minds that I trust. I put together this "[#] points" style comment that I'll now post. It might go beyond 10 later if I think of more. If anything ends up being off, apologies, but obviously I'm in a bad mood like I imagine most Slow Borers are.
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1. There are no more excuses anymore. Not even an electoral/popular vote split. Trump and the GOP won this thing fair and square without question. Democrats have got to significantly change their policy and politics advocacy going forward.
2. The top lesson that Democrats need to learn is to never, ever inflate again. If they want a larger welfare state, they have to get the pay fors nailed down, with ever nail secure. And no, you can't get the pay fors by just soaking the rich.
3. There also needs to be an acknowledgement that we're likely entering a post-discrimination society. I want to be careful here: it's obviously not a *non-discrimination* society, humans are who they are. But Jim Crow was over half a century ago. Title IX was about half a century ago. The late 20th century wave of Latin American immigration has had at least one generation go by, with assimilation on the way. Most people just don't have living memories of the bad old times. The Emerging Demographic Majority is dead and buried--and as Matt said before, that's a good thing for society as a whole.
4. Cut off education polarization now. Stop fetishizing academic higher education as something that everyone needs. Work on helping youths become employable as young as feasible when they become adults, with a wide array of paths available to do so.
5. It's quite clear to me now that Ezra Klein was dead on correct on the Democrats needing to have held a rigorous nomination at the DNC among multiple contenders. Perhaps the Democrats still lose, but lose less, which could have had major consequences on the Congressional races. In any case, for the future the 2028 Democratic presidental primary needs to be a complete blank slate--no connections to Clinton or Biden teams.
6. I had the quadrants of Harris/Trump and close/decisive baked into my expectations, so I could anticipate a decisive Trump win. What I totally missed is that if that 25% did happen, that it would imperil much more than Tester and Brown--Casey, Slotkin, Baldwin, Rosen all in trouble, even if some of them could.
7. Related: I'm setting the over under on both Alito and Thomas announcing their retirements on July 15, 2025.
8. Whether the Democrats win the House is now the biggest question. If they don't, then it's just a matter of helplessly hoping that Trump's worst economic policies don't get enacted. From tariffs to deportation to TCJA renewal (potentially with SALT coming back) to IRS enforcement to tax exemptions on tips/overtime/Social Security, the only question is just how much inflationary damage they'll do, and how much they'll get punished for it in the future.
9. I am very, very worried for hard working, good people who could be forced to leave this country. If it does happen, hopefully there's an inverse Elian Gonzalez style media frenzy that exposes the inhumanity of what would happen, if people can't be sold on the economic costs.
10. On foreign policy, my potential hot take is that regardless of Trump or Harris winning, little would have changed in Israel's war with Hamas and Hezbollah. Ukraine, on the other hand...I'm mildly bullish on it not being completely conquered, but much more bearish on getting the current lost territory back. Zelensky's going to have some tough decisions to make. I also think Matt has it correct when he tweeted "The EU's GDP is *nine times* larger than Russia's, it would not actually require Europe to spend a large share of GDP on the military to have robust autonomous defense capabilities — but they would need to be serious about what they spend on, coordination, etc".
Unpopular opinion, in a 2 party system with high polarization, control swings between parties on a pretty regular schedule. Thermostatic public opinion, etc. etc. It's you win, then I win, then you win, then I win, forever. Things like Democrats winning the Presidency 4 terms in a row, or holding the House for most of the 20th century, are long gone in the rearview mirror. If anything, being an incumbent seems to be a bit of a disadvantage now.
If the Democrats change literally nothing and run the exact same type of campaign in 2028, they're already the favorites. I mean, I agree some of the changes you're proposing are good policy and good ideas in and of themselves. But it's a your turn-my turn system now
This seems important. Every election, the winners "learn" that they are totally right and the American people are on their team and the losers "learn" that they did everything wrong and need to change course. But since we don't have a good model for quantifying the swinging pendulum and controlling for it, those take-aways are pretty unreliable - not just *what* we should learn from the election but whether we can learn *anything* from it.
The your turn/my turn thing has mostly happened in two-term increments, so Trump's 2020 loss and Biden's 2024 loss may be examples of disruptions to the "turn" system. Then again, maybe it's just the start of 1-term turns, which I don't think is an improvement.
Or maybe it's just a fluke that's entirely explained by a global pandemic (on both ends, with Trump's pandemic "response" being a main cause of his 2020 loss and post-2020 general voter grumpiness being a main cause of Democrats' 2024 loss.)
But if you consider the House, the your turn/my turn happens very consistently 2 years after a president is elected (Clinton 1994, Obama 2010, Trump 2018, etc). You definitely don’t need to wait 8 years.
yes. Matt and Brian actually talked about this on the podcast maybe a month ago. There is no guardrail in a 2 party system, any major nominee is at least a live underdog. And the ongoing viability of the system depends on the elites in one of the parties being willing to tank their own nominee if it's a threat to the system.
This is why I was saying literally decades ago that the Democrats would do well to try to pump up the Libertarians as a credible third party even if it risks the Republicans doing the same thing with the Greens -- the strategy would be to try to bleed thermostatic anti-establishment votes into a third party instead of concentrating them into one opposition party.
At the same time, perhaps politics has tightened so much that the era of consecutive terms basically died with Obama and won't return until the next major paradigm shift.
For instance, I could see Latinos thermostatically flipping in 2028, and I could see Dems thermostatically going back to a turnout theory for 2028, and that maybe swinging enough votes for a victory.
But for my money, I'm pre-registering the take that the left is going to demand a Sanders-like figure, and may well get their way. One only has to peruse FdB's smirking takes today to see this "we told you so" dynamic taking shape.
What I'd ACTUALLY like to see, though, is a thorough house-cleaning in the whole party. Every single leader who presided over the last four years needs to be made to hang their heads in shame for failing the nation like this. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but Biden could've kept to his 1-term pledge. He could've handled inflation and immigration sooner. We could have allowed a primary where candidates disavowed him for those failures because they were simply responding to the imperative to show they could win a general election by empathizing with voters. Biden could've aggressively prosecuted Trump over J6 instead of lamely allowing them to accuse him of a witch hunt anyways.
The point is, we need a massive change in the Democratic party's entire firmament and power structures. Everyone who failed us needs to be viewed with utter, unforgiving suspicion. We can't just "run it back" with the same old cretins and busybodies.
For my money, the left's demand for a Sanders-like figure basically requires that the right continue nominating Trump-like figures who mainstream Democrats are terrified of in order to keep them in line.
Also for my money, there is no Trumpism without Trump and we will likely learn that in 2028.
I actually suspect the Progressive wing of the party takes a big hit outside of abortion rights (I noted in a half glass full post that if AG Ken Paxton tried to reinstitute some version of the Comstack Act it would insanely unpopular to say the least).
I'm actually a slight defender of Sanders just like Matt. I think he did show that a) in 2016 the cries of "we can't afford it" around M4A were kind of garbage in a era of low interest rates and low inflation (different story now) b) the neoliberal consensus did need to be shaken up.
Having said all that, I think the Sanders candidacy has ended up being pretty big net negative for reasons that aren't even necessarily his fault. But a clear signal went out too many people that the future was in go left and then left some more on everything. This was what the young people wanted and where the action is. I really think you can trace stuff like "defund" or "math is racist" to Sanders' unexpected success (never mind that his strong showing was really more of a canary in the coal mine that Hilary was not a strong candidate as much as anything).
Most acutely of all, it's really clear the positions Harris took in 2019 to appeal to this supposed growing progressive movement was an albatross. Given how close final margins are likely to be, it may have made the difference if she hadn't staked out such far left positions. Point being, far left prospective I really think are going to be super discredited right now.
What scares me is that they still own most of the levers of power within the party. And they’re NOT the gerontocracy, so they may not end up being the bete noire of the party mainstream amid the upcoming cycle of recriminations and what’s probably going to be a generational turnover.
I’m working on an opinion for tonight’s thread, but the core is basically that I think we need someone who’s willing to go full YIMBY. Repudiate everyone else in the party, and make the case that we’re already most of the way to losing a generation of young men to fascism because NIMBYs destroyed several generations’ worth of traditionally male construction jobs while impoverishing the rest of us with a housing-driven cost disease crisis.
Also, I think abortion simply wasn't the turnout driver Dems thought it was. It'll probably continue to lead their winning issues in midterms, but Harris flogged abortion hard and came up short in the general.
Personally, I also lay a good chunk of historical blame at the feet of Boomer/Xer pro-choicers who spent the last 50 years purging the Dems of anyone who tried to be remotely competitive in rural areas by being pro-life. They made it the party's third rail, and presided over the party basically voluntarily evacuating its entire political apparatus from a large chunk of the country. This is unforgiveable, and in my darker moments I think leaders like Cecile Richards should be reviled in the future for having actively harmed the party and ultimately undermined their own cause.
So a lot of the problem with abortion as a turnout driver is that voters have shown that when you let them get the parts of the Democratic agenda that they like in piecemeal fashion through ballot measures, they're more than willing to vote for that and then also vote Republican.
Has to be someone who says "this system is broken." All the comments on here are thought out and intelligent, but the only thing the country agrees on (it seems to me) is that everything is f***ed, and only one of them was saying it (even if his basic plan will result in it getting f***ed even more). So he won.
I’m part of the country and I don’t agree that everything is f***ed. I think we had been on a nice several century long trajectory of improvement, and there’s a long way to go, but breaking things isn’t going to help.
Agree, but if things are improving and you have the strongest economy in the world, and YET, a majority of the people think that everything is fucked, then something IS fucked. Maybe the citizenry are a bunch of babies or maybe they are perceiving something that I am missing, but either way it is fucked.
Interesting, so who the fuck do status quo voters even support in this paradigm? If I don't think the system is fucked, do I just check out and let the idiots on the left and right fuck it even harder?
"Fucked" is an extremely broad brush. Is the entire system fucked, or is that only in the funhouse version of reality that only exists online and in people's minds? Not the reality on the ground where we remain the most prosperous people on the planet.
Disagreeing on issues is one thing, but disagreeing on objective reality, or rather, caving to someone else's false reality is a dangerous bridge to cross.
Weighing against the likelihood of Latinos thermostatically flipping in future cycles is the observation that, over generations, ethnic groups have sorted more so by ideology and less so by ethnic identity, as they assimilate, intermarry, etc.
True. I think that my theory was working UNDER this sort of deracialized logic, where Latinos might just flip ANYWAYS because they were backlashing against Trump on more ideological/economic grounds, not because they felt any particular sort of racial solidarity.
I don't disagree about "overhaul", but it's hard to see how this happens. The overwhelming majority of elected Democrats will be returned to office, and none of the incentives for "coalition building" will change.
Democrats have won five straight presidential elections before. Republicans have won six straight before. Both have had long dominances in Congress. I'm not saying that's going to happen again soon, but I'm also not going to say that it won't.
It's funny. The story understandably is the "big" Trump victory given this is likely the largest popular vote margin for a GOP candidate since 1988. And yet once all California votes are counted it seems likely that his margin going to be 1% victory which in the grand scheme of things is a very narrow victory.
To your point, it wouldn't take all that much of shift left in the electorate for a Democrat to win.
I think because of what happened from 1980 to 1992 there is this hope from both parties that you can craft a permanent majority. Rove clearly thought there could be one in 2000-2004. Than because of Ruy Teixeira Democrats were convinced they had a permanent majority coming.
My point, there are going to be a lot of hot takes about this massive earthquake and how this is some sign of Trumpism is here to stay when in reality if inflation had come to current levels 6 months sooner Harris is probably president right now. I think both parties could probably use some humility and understand that a) in close electorate, you're ability to effect big policy change without endangering your governing majority is limited b) shifts in the electorate are not permanent. Swing voters shift votes for reasons very contingent on the issues of the moment (in 2008 it was the start of great recession. Today it's inflation and immigration) and not usually because they've become fully convinced of one side's entire policy platform (although obviously it happens).
I keep noting this but Trump is an extraordinarily unique figure. Which means even more than previous political errors trying to discern where the voting public will turn in 2 years or 4 years is going be a mug's game. Trump very clearly had a unique ability to inspire rural and working class voters who don't normally vote to come out and vote. Do we think a different GOP candidate in 2028 has that ability? I mean maybe but lordy I wouldn't bet on it.
Somewhat, but the Senate for the next few years has lots of vulnerable Democrat incumbents and very few Republicans, from what I've seen. The Senate is going to stay Republican for a while barring a bigger realignment than the usual swings you're talking about.
Generally agree with all of these comments, but I will push back on point 4. The primary issue I have with higher education is that as selectivity of state schools has gone up, the perverse self-sorting function of the institution has become supercharged. If you want to depolarize education, you need to change the fundamental concept of how it is supplied, not how it is demanded. When the average person in Manitowoc rightly understands that UW Madison is not interested in teaching them or their family, that is when the polarization occurs.
Agree (an Ivy college professor) - the best thing the selective colleges could do is double or triple in size and introduce a lottery into their admissions system (within a pool of high-scorers). Change the metric of prestige from their rate of rejection to their proportion of Pell grants.
I was proposing it for the highly selective schools (private, plus public Ivies) - to make them larger and less exclusive . The model being something like Penn State. Would that take away opportunities for anyone?
I’m curious why you say lotteries are susceptible to corruption.
Important to view this *specific* example with the cultural context of many UW branch campuses closing in recent years due to collapsing enrollment at those campuses (which I have no idea how to fix).
The closing branches were a bit weird. They were originally two-year colleges where you could transfer to four-year colleges after the two years. They were created back in the day to handle an influx of boomers, and I think they just kind of outlived their usefulness. Between four-year campuses expanding and college-age population shrinking, there didn't seem to be much demand for them.
Well, yeah, that's exactly the problem. There *isn't* demand for them, not revealed demand anyway.
But you can understand why locals in Richland Center are not interested in your excuses for why their generation was able to get started in college living in mom and dad's house, but their children either miss higher ed entirely, or strike out on their adulthood in far-off distant Eau Claire, likely never to return.
If there were under 100 students at the campus, then there aren't many residents of Richland Center who are concerned about their children moving away. Plus, moving away was part of the point. The schools didn't offer four-year degrees; they were feeders for four-year schools. To get a four-year degree, they had to move away. (For the record, Platteville is significantly closer than Eau Claire.)
My point is that the schools were a quick fix for *the baby boom* in the 1960s, and it's actually kind of weird that they lasted as long as they did. There's no mystery, and there's nothing to fix.
I just picked Eau Claire because I like the name Eau Claire and the metro's future seems safer along the 94 corridor. I don't know if I think Platteville qua Platteville looks like a great place to be in twenty years (or now).
edit: although I saw today that the main Leinie's brewery in Chippewa Falls is set to close :(
It is. But UW-Platteville Richland Center went from an attendance of ~550 in 2014 to 64 when the incipient closure was announced in 2022. What the hell are you doing with a "college campus" of under 100 students?
The move toward online classes is a really bad thing in general but it's basically death to satellite campuses that literally only existed so that nontraditional students didn't have to drive an hour or so to school.
These branches were declining in attendance for a long time. In fact, that's why they were branches. They were originally stand-alone institutions but were merged with nearby UW schools in 2018 because their enrollment was too low to justify independent administration.
I've been banging the drum for awhile that if places like Harvard or Yale want to be seen as bastions of openness and progressive ideals they need to actually put their money where the mouth is and accept way way more students. The fact that enrollment hasn't expanded and places like Harvard still do legacy admissions tells me when push comes to shove they're more interested in being elite colleges over and above any commitment to progressive values.
I know Gladwell has taken a hit to his reputation (Some of it deserved in my opinion), but thought he laid out this case well in his "Revisionist history" podcast comparing McGill and Harvard.
"When the average person in Manitowoc rightly understands that UW Madison is not interested in teaching them or their family, that is when the polarization occurs."
I'm curious if the recent change to top N% admission to the UW system [1] will affect this. IIUC, the University of Texas does something similar. Maybe it helps?
I grew up in Texas and graduated from a competitive magnet HS in the early days of the top 10% system. I don't think it helped anything. Here are some of my impressions:
-Top x% systems harm students at competitive high schools. I knew people who deliberately went to less-competitive high schools to maximize their chances of getting into UT-Austin.
-I went to Texas A&M, a decent university with a solid engineering program. I saw the top 10% program led to a lot of unprepared students being admitted then getting absolutely wrecked their first semester with a 0.8 GPA or so.
-UT-Austin got absolutely swamped by admittees under the top 10% program, and the program was made more restrictive just for UT-Austin. Texas A&M was swamped too, but A&M grew its student body rather than become significantly more selective.
-Some private high schools gamed the system by submitting different top 10% lists to different universities.
-The Texas top 10% rule benefitted the University of Oklahoma and Louisiana State University, which absorbed a lot of smart Texas students from competitive high schools.
Ultimately, I think (one of the) problems of top x% systems is that there's only room for so many students at the most desirable state university, be it UT-Austin, UC-Berkeley, or UW-Madison.
EDIT: I wanted to add that the impacts of top x% systems are great evidence that higher education really is more about signaling and fun than about learning. There's no real difference between the material covered at UT-Austin and UT-Arlington, but one of these schools looks better than the other on a resume.
That opens up a question as to whether you could set an absolute standard (ie "you must achieve this level of knowledge and understanding to enter") rather than a relative standard ("you must be in the top 50,000 applicants to enter") and require the university to expand to let in anyone who is qualified.
Over time, the university will have to expand (population increases, the Flynn Effect means that people get more intelligent and also high school education improves), but that should be possible to plan for provided the university is prepared to spend on some surplus capacity as an insurance policy against a particularly academically strong year.
In Texas it leads to heavy self-sorting of students between Austin and College Station (though with the one moderating influence that a lot of people who grow up in Houston choose the closer suburban campus rather than the farther urban one - but for the ranch kids coming from far west Texas, College Station is no more inconvenient than Austin, and much more friendly to their gigantic truck).
For better or worse, I think Democrats may be able to recover without making significant changes (EDIT: or even making bad changes): as MY has noted here and elsewhere, a lot of Trump's stated policies are inflationary (tax cuts, tariffs, deportations, etc.). Not all of the policies will be implemented, but even a subset could cause significant inflation, and Republicans would pay the price for it --- just as Democrats paid yesterday.
This is true but banking on Republicans self-imploding shouldn't be the goal. The goal should be performing well enough to defeat a competent opponent. Democrats just lost to an incompetent one, albeit against a very difficult economic backdrop.
"The goal should be performing well enough to defeat a competent opponent."
I agree, but it may be difficult to figure out what performs well. If Democrats run on message X in 2026 and emerge victorious against a background of Trump-induced inflation, Democrats need to be really careful not to take this a strong signal that message X is a winner. Republicans may be making this mistake as we type.
One of the challenges is that the Democratic Party does better against relatively competent Republicans (elder Bush, Dole, McCain, Romney) than it does against the less competent but more culturally populist candidates (younger Bush, Trump). There's a good chance that if the Republicans had been nominating people like Jeb or Brian Sandoval, the Democrats may have run better against them without the backdrop of cultural backlash.
Also throughout the (Western, democratic) world the democratic system is being flooded with demagoguery about migration which mainstream parties have long barely paid lip service to.
This phenomenon makes me incredibly conspiratorial.
For example, I find it fascinating that the nonpolitical reddit subs that I read have been positively flooded for the last couple of weeks with random people boosting Palestinian rights/Green Party/shitty economy messages, and I'm extremely skeptical that this is going to persist going forward.
The scale and scope of internet-based ratfuckery seems shockingly underexamined, IMHO.
*If* Trump does what he's talked about doing, I expect that his admin will be deeply unpopular and will lead to a 2018-style backlash. Voters wanted the 2018 economy back, not a global trade war. But only time will tell.
But will the Democrats learn ANYTHING from this defeat when faced with the opportunity of a backlash in the theoretical future? I'd put in a person shrugging emoji but I'm not on my phone.
So help me God if the lessons learned from the post-mortem somehow comes out as "we need more activism and community organizing" I am going to become the Unabomber.
In a comment somewhere on SB within the past several weeks, I suggested that a plausible outcome of a Trump defeat of Harris would not be any sort of introspection on the left, but instead, "the Toxic Masculinity siren getting dialed to 11," if young men voting for Trump was shown to be a significant contributing factor to Harris losing.
That sounds like betting that Democrats will recover by letting Trump hang himself with his own rope. That is probably a good bet in the short term, but questionable in the long term.
Well, one could make the argument that True Let Trump Wreck Himself has never been tried - the Dems and some moderates were able to block most of his unpopular legislative agenda, and when his Covid bungling (combined with the bad luck of the pandemic, obviously) could have plunged the U.S. into a historic depression, Pelosi and the Dems worked with Mnuchin to save the economy and deliver historic Keynesian stimulus and welfare to the voters, which they loved.
To be clear, I’m glad democrats did those things because politics is about helping people, not f***ing the other side. But without those actions I think there’s a significant chance Trump gets wiped out so decisively in 2020 that even the MAGA cult would have been swayed against voting for him again.
I guess I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. To do it you'd have needed enough Democratic support for them to be at minimum part owners of it. That would also involve turning on their constituents in ways I'm not sure are possible (and certainly wouldn't he desirable).
It would not be a good idea and would involve turning on their constituents for sure but it wouldn’t require much in practice at all. GOP will have the votes to repeal Obamacare via reconciliation. Last time around there was a huge #resist push on the Collinses and McCains of the world , not to mention the Manchins, to hold the line and not let it happen. This time Schumer / senate Dems / the leaders of the Democratic Party could avoid the full court press and just let the GOP take it out with their own votes.
Same deal if/when there’s a major economic collapse, like 2008 or 2020, both times in which a Dem Congress passed legislation with significant future downside that prevented a full on catastrophe. They could just … not? It seems unlikely the Superdole of 2020 would have happened without active democratic design and advocacy, it didn’t even require them owning a Trump policy. In 2008 it would have been incredibly easy to demagogue against the idea of TARP and bailing out Detroit and just let the bottom fall out.
Yep, that's the key about point 8: just how far will they go, and how much mess will they make for themselves and the country? It's going to be nerve wracking to learn that over the next years.
I would be cautious about this because the Republicans have decisively captured the media at all levels. Bezos bending the knee to Trump, Musk controlling Twitter, Sinclair owning regional news networks, Murdoch with Fox and WSJ, Joe Rogan/Tim Pool/Nick Fuentes etc dominating the online space. Even in TikTok, the supposedly more progressive commenters are bashing Democrats long before they even mention a Republican.
If Trump's policies cause an inflation surge, the Republicans will find it easy to lay it at the feet of the Democrats.
This is great and I agree with all of these, but I'm a little concerned that point 2 is going to overshadow everything else. There are signs that it's going to become the all-purpose excuse people use to avoid introspection. On the other hand, I agree on the merits: inflation _was_ a really big part of the story.
I do feel bad that the inflation that was triggered was done so amidst a highly unknowable situation in the pandemic. Without foresight, it easily could have been a deflationary recession instead. But unfortunately, that doesn't matter as it's clear not enough people care about how it happened--just that it happened and they're pissed. That's the lesson that has to be learned regardless.
Back to evan bear's earlier comment today that when your local pro sports team is performing below your expectations, the peanut gallery demands that the general manager fire the head coach. It doesn't matter whether it was their fault, it doesn't matter if you don't know what the next guy will do, you still gotta fire that bum.
The reality is that it has long been the case that Presidents get both credit and blame for stuff that happens on their watch regardless of the level of control they have. That is particularly true of the economy - an area where the Executive branch doesn't have a lot of independent authority.
What I think might be new or unique (to my top-level mailblag question sadly buried below) is how little of the voting public had ever experienced actual substantial inflation--you can sell me on the idea that Biden/Harris got hit unusually badly because of the aging out of this cultural memory.
Exactly - some buffoon at the NYTimes was going on about voters experiencing historic inflation. It hit 20% in 1946, 10% in 1952 and then 1972, 75…. And we won’t even get into the revolution or civil war inflation.
I think the deflationary recession may have been more popular. Obama had a low-inflation severe recession with too little stimulus and got reelected handily.
People hate high prices and they’re willing to vote to end democracy over it, message received though it may be too late to matter.
Recessions could indeed be better times if you're not one of the unlucky ducks that lost your job. Higher variance than inflation, which none of us can escape.
The idea of the Misery Index is that +1% unemployment is worth the same as +1% inflation.
This seems crazy to me, as the suffering of unemployment is real and the suffering of inflation is nominal, but maybe it’s an accurate heuristic for political purposes?
I think inflation is worse. Not that a brief inflationary episode is more damaging; I continue to think people are wrong about this. But it affects everyone, whereas if you're employed and not actively looking for a new job, unemployment doesn't affect you much.
Inflation is electorally worse because it affects everyone and not just the unfortunate. But unemployment seems to be worse for human flourishing, because it’s really, really, really bad for the people it hits, while inflation is basically just a big annoyance when it’s around 10% or lower.
There were many unknowable things during the pandemic, but was inflation was one of them? Look at the graph for M2 [1], what did people expect to happen? I made a similar comment on SB a long time (years?) ago. People here and elsewhere have done midwit contortions to explain why that giant jump in M2 wouldn't cause inflation (I expect more below this very comment), but it did! Who woulda thunk?
That's not to say that giving people cash during the pandemic was automatically a bad thing. People lost their jobs, and it was good that they didn't starve (although the fact that pandemic financial assistance *increased* the wages of many should have raised more left-wing eyebrows --- instead of being met with cheers). But if you sail into an iceberg field to rescue people, you should be on the lookout for icebergs --- ready to take evasive action and get out of there ASAP once the job is done.
I think if we had really sharp foresight, the correct path forward would have been to employ the ~5% of people in jobs that just couldn't safely be done during a pandemic in pandemic mitigation jobs--testers, contract tracers, couriers of physical goods to help people stay physically apart, and so on. That staves off mass unemployment without inflating the money supply toward everyone.
That again, requires said sharp foresight, to say nothing about the politics needed to pull it off.
Standing up the training infrastructure for such an effort would be quite the accomplishment, to the extent some modest-functioners in the customer service industry would even be net contributors for some of those tasks.
I just reopened a spreadsheet I made during the depths of the pandemic (since, like all of us, I had way too much time to kill) where I got BLS data of how many people were employed in which jobs, and categorized them as to how they could operate. The breakdown was something like half of the jobs had to keep going no matter what, another quarter could be done remotely, another fifth could be done outdoors, and the remaining 5% were just up shit creek that needed to work other jobs mitigating the pandemic
A couple other ideas that I also categorized in this was also repurposing college students to pandemic mitigating jobs too by leveraging federal funding and student loans, and to commandeer hotels for comfortable quarantine locations, since people should have not been traveling.
Lots of pure fantasy in this of course, but again, hard not to dream of better things during that horrible time.
It's not completely clear to me whether you mean unknowable to policymakers or unknowable to voters, but I have a STEM PhD and I haven't the foggiest idea what M2 is.
MX (M1, M2, etc.) are various measures of how much money exists. M2 is generally regarded as an indicator for inflation. If you print a bunch of money (Money Printer Go Brrr style [1]), you shouldn't be surprised when inflation follows.
I mean, in hindsight I do think there's a lot of truth to the idea that this cake was baked right around the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal (when the slant of media coverage of the Biden administration completely flipped for reasons that the media is very mad that you're asking them about) and inflation was a piece of the puzzle, but I said all along that switching the nominee wasn't actually going to make a difference because many of Biden's liabilities were not specific to Biden and would be transferred to any Democrat.
Well, the polls were pretty good overall, I think. And Biden was doing *much* worse in the polls. Given how close this ended up being in various states, the losses would probably have been much larger. Imagine Trump winning New Jersey, 59 Republican senators...
I don't really understand how you are going to reduce educational polarization, I know Matt goes on about the people running the party but what are the issues normie college educated Democrats are going to be willing to compromise on? Note that RAISING taxes is now strongly negatively polarized where low education voters/areas will vote against progressive tax increases or larger government programs. It's not like the "What's the Matter With Kansas" days where the social issues were outweighing economic issues... economic issues are literally reverse polarized on education (highly educated voters vote for higher taxes and larger benefits)
The only path I see is that DJT eventually passes from the land of the living, his unique gravitas and hold over low-propensity voters cannot be replicated, and the relatively few educated elite who remain in the GOP gradually turn back the knob of heterodox, frankly stupid stuff like crushing tariffs and isolationism.
But that's not a plan, that's a combination of a calendar and several unrelated hopes.
The thing is, Trump's liabilities are what keeps the party from turning in on itself.
I'd expect a Pres Vance to still go along with his own ideological obsessions, some of them involving tariffs (he'd probably govern pretty close to Biden on this one actually), and various other culture-war grievances.
But Vance doesn't have a "IDGAF" attitude about how he presents himself. He's not erratically incompetent, he has an actual agenda. Whatever a Pres Vance decided on, would become the party's basic platform going forward, and would start to ossify among that elite into an orthodoxy the way Reaganism did 40 years ago.
So, it's not like the elite would EXACTLY be turning back the knob away from the heterodox; it's just that the heterodoxy would become the new orthodoxy without Trump constantly disrupting and chaotically redefining it. Even a "competent Trump" figure (like Vance) who could do the demagogy while still having an agenda, would not disrupt that agenda in order to keep doing the demagogy, because although he'd understand the demagogy as vital to his political survival, he'd have too much baseline psychological inhibition to let himself be erratic enough to keep the heterodoxy fresh the way Trump does.
And if the heterodoxy is going to tend towards ossifying into orthodoxy, then that orthodoxy will come to feel boring and stop keeping new voters churning into his coalition. An orthodoxy can be attacked and organized to counter against.
I'm all about YIMBY housing policy. That said, check the data for NYC from yesterday (graph on Nate Silver's Substack: https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-story-of-trumps-win-was-foretold). The Republican share of the vote there has been increasing steadily since 2016.
It's hard. As a society we've overemphasized a college degree in most every way possible. A lot of this is a cultural problem that is difficult to reverse.
I get what you are trying to say here but on the other hand how do you think your conversation with the average upper middle class (but not a political superfan, so just authentically invested in abortion, medicaid, etc) voter is going to go? Do you think you're going to be able to make a persuasive case they should moderate on their issues or lean more into RFK jr. style crankery?
The trump camp is full of fucking buffoons and led by a huge idiot and honestly that's part of the appeal. Do you think that's a cultural problem with college-educated voters?
#10 second half is almost the most worrying to me.
I find the lackadaisical European attitudes toward defense and smug free-riding incredibly frustrating, but I worry that they will mess things up terribly in the event of a rapid US exit. It's going to be difficult to thread the needle between "Don't worry, they'll stay east of the Oder" and "We should probably also be ready to defeat our EU neighbors."
Throughout history preventing a unified continental European military has been a top strategic priority of the UK, and I worry that they may play spoiler.
I'm less concerned with the EU's relationship with Russia (which I think has little effective combat power at this point), and more concerned with their relationship with China. This has been memory-holed, but at the very end of Trump's last term the EU was very close to signing a huge free trade deal with China, and they only pulled out because the Chinese were dumb enough to let a small sanctions dispute spiral out of control. Macron and Merkel were enthusiastically for it.
An EU that (rightly) sees the US as a highly unreliable partner is going to be very motivated to join Pax Sinica. That's the real global shift that will start to mark the end of US hegemony
One mitigating factor is that Russia's absolutely destroyed so many of their resources by getting stalemated in this war. Even if they do conquer Ukraine, they are not going to be in good position to push further for a very long time.
If ever, given the demographics of Russia. IIRC the Communist Bloc was well ahead of the West in terms of sub-replacement fertility rates (in part due to their own errors, i.e. China's one-child policy) and doesn't have immigration to backstop it.
If Russia defeats Ukraine, all of Ukraine's resources will be folded into Russia's portfolio. That has been the protocol for a long time. It is similar to how Russia is starting to struggle with sufficient manpower to continue meatwave assaults and is now getting troops from North Korea and continuing apace.
"4. Cut off education polarization now. Stop fetishizing academic higher education as something that everyone needs. Work on helping youths become employable as young as feasible when they become adults, with a wide array of paths available to do so."
I don't think that higher education is "fetishized" - if anything I see a trend (especially among the young) in disparaging the value of higher education. I despair that we cannot see the value in educating more engineers, health providers, and scientists (among many other important professions that require college degrees) in our own country. We need a major overhaul in higher education, how it is provided and paid for, for sure, and I'm not saying that every college degree is equivalent. But I see a general turn against any college degree as elitist and unnecessary, and I think that is going to massively set us behind competing countries such as China and India that are educating tons of innovators (given their population advantage, they simply can have far more engineers, scientists, and healthcare professionals). And then the US just imports educated people from other countries to work these jobs (again, not against smart people immigrating to our country, there is a lot of benefit all around there, but I don't see why we seem determined to denigrate higher education for our own citizens instead of recognizing all of the future-facing jobs that DO and WILL require higher education and figuring out how to get more people those degrees and jobs).
So I go to college and I get a degree and then I earn more money. Are my higher earnings a result of:
1. Human capital – College taught me new things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, leveraging this additional knowledge makes me a more productive employee, I capture part of my increased productivity with higher wages.
2. Signaling – I got into a selective college and successfully graduated, employers can conclude I am reasonably smart and hardworking and will preferentially hire me over others they know nothing about.
3. Credentialism – My employer has an HR department which wants hiring decisions to be “transparent”. The hiring manager will be hassled if they hire someone other than the most educated candidate, so they are tempted to hire the candidate with the most credentials, regardless of whether they think they’re well suited for the job.
If the answer is human capital, then higher education is a societal good which we should be encouraging. If the answer is signaling, well, that means it is serving some purpose, but we probably can find some less wasteful way for employers to find out who is smart and hardworking. If the answer is credentialism, then more higher education is pure waste in service of zero-sum competition and should be discouraged as much as possible.
In the background is the fact that we're currently going through a crisis of crashing fertility rates, which means we should take a very hard look at any policies that are going to delay the onset of productive work and subsequent family formation.
The answer to that question probably heavily depends on what degree you got, from what school, and what job you are applying to. Do I think that a person with an engineering degree from an accredited state school has higher human capital for a civil engineering position than a high school graduate? Absolutely I do, and they should be compensated accordingly. I'm not going to dig into every possible example, there are cases that probably fall into each category and many that are a combination. Regardless, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater and paint every college degree as 2s and 3s.
I like future engineers taking rigorous engineering classes too, but that’s a small part of the current US higher education industry as a whole. My view is that right now, the marginal person choosing to go to university and get a degree is learning very little that will improve their future productivity.
So, whatever private benefits the marginal student gains from going to college are outweighed by the social costs, so this isn’t something we should be encouraging or subsidizing, at least not to the extent we currently are.
But I think the solution to that problem is not to denigrate college as a whole, but to initiate more efforts and dialogue around encouraging and enabling (including financially) enrollment (and graduation) in majors most conducive to building a stronger and more innovative US workforce. I think we should incentivize more people to go into those fields, not just say “well college is useless and too expensive anyways!” and then just fill in the gaps with people educated in other countries.
I know this is a slightly different argument but the overall context of the thread is trying to reduce educational polarization... would it be good for our politics to induce educational polarization by having fewer people with college educations in the electorate? Are people without college educations more likely to have correct political views?
I don’t see why reducing the share of voters with degrees will induce more education polarization? My instinct is that the opposite would be more likely.
(I’d guess: Fewer educated voters -> They’re not important as a voting bloc -> Their views just don’t get incorporated into party platforms -> Education in itself depolarizes)
Look, I don't think you need a higher education to be Candace Owens. I hate to say this, but liberal artists don't need to go to college. But what about in medicine? Engineering? hard sciences that improve the world? Education is really important. I don't want my surgeon getting his degree from the department of memes.
But you just listed the reasonable majors. 40 years ago, when I was a philosophy major, we studied Mill and Kant and Locke and a few continental dead white guys, and it was a true discipline. Now the humanities are much mushier and largely shaped by colonizer/colonized dichotomy. I'm extremely sad about that. But when the only plausible majors are STEM, you do start to wonder if traditional universities are as valuable as they used to be.
With all due respect, I think that is truthy folklore if what you are talking about are humanities programs at selective colleges/universities and state flagships. Speaking as a father of two recent English majors, a philosophy major and a history major. There are sub-topics and some classes that bend to leftier-than-thou rhetoric but my casual observation would be that lots of substance and critical thinking remains in the humanities and at least some social sciences.
I hope you're right. I'm dismayed by the course listings at my own alma mater, but my own alma mater was always a little earthy-crunchy-lefty. It's just gotten worse, apparently, and of course I've gotten older. Not crankier, though; I was always cranky.
Yeah, granted that the mushier leftier-than-thou stuff is much less the province of "traditional" humanities/social sciences departments (like, well, English, philosophy, and history) and much, much more about "gender studies" and that sort of crap that largely didn't exist 30 years ago.
There's a trend among the young (largely encouraged by their parents) of disparaging education in general, not just higher education. There's a reason why school vouchers are getting pushed every-fucking-where and homeschooling is exploding.
Ukraine is in deep trouble. Elon and Trump are having secret discussions with Putin and now they are both in power. There is also the open question of the US functionally pulling out of NATO once Trump is in power, since Trump and Vance are not on board with it.
"Musk and Putin have spoken repeatedly about personal matters, business and geopolitics, The Journal reported Thursday, citing multiple current and former officials in the U.S., Europe and Russia." That's not one anonymous source.
The statement by Steven Cheung isn't a strict denial. It's more of a character attack on Woodward: "Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, derided the reporting as “made up stories” and said the book is a work of fiction that could double as toilet paper.
“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung said in a statement.
He added: “President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue. Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality.”
The second paragraph isn't a denial. The first paragraph is a statement of made-up stories but doesn't specifically say Trump isn't talking to Putin.
Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, derided the reporting as “made up stories” and said the book is a work of fiction that could double as toilet paper.
“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung said in a statement.
This is directly from the article you linked, maybe you should read the articles first?
The reason Ukraine has been struggling is because they have not been given *enough* aid. It's unclear how the Trump/Vance plan to terminate aid would rectify that.
To be fair, Ukraine also made some bad decisions of their own (delayed mobilization, not building fortifications, etc.), but yeah, when North Korea is (arguably) a better ally than the United States, that's a bad situation!
Harris is on record as being less concerned with escalation than Biden. By the way, Ken, if Republicans win the House, they will own it all, and you won't have the national Democratic party to kick around. You'll have to engage with what the Republicans actually do as opposed to always turning it back on the Democrats.
I think it's telling that, according to most reporting, Russia's preferred president was Biden [1], who is predictable and timid. It's possible that Harris would do more of the same, but there are reasons to believe that Harris would take more risks. At a minimum, getting rid of Jake Sullivan would likely be an improvement.
Item 4 is so wrong. Absolutely no one in the Democratic party is fetishizing higher education. Democrats have been including more encouragement for trade school and community college and apprenticeship programs since at least Obama. There's very little 'top-down' pressure to remove - sure the government can remove requirements for college degrees for its own jobs where possible, but beyond that, this an organic phenomenon.
The world is more competitive and college offers a competitive edge in getting good, high-paying jobs. That's why more people are going to college. There is nothing more complicated to it, and no lever that Democrats can pull to stop that.
So if your prescription for The Democratic Party is 'they should encourage fewer people to go to college', I think that's simply an unworkable idea.
I think this is overstated. Washington D.C. is run by Democrats. They recently started requiring that new police officers have at least 60 hours of college credit. They recently imposed a requirement that childcare workers in the district have associates degrees. So not everyone in the party has got the anti-college memo.
Re: “the world is more competitive” – This part is actually a policy choice too, not an inevitable law of nature. We chose to lower marginal tax rates, which means we have more income inequality, which makes competition for higher incomes more intense. We chose to negotiate free trade agreements premised on the idea that we should export tech, intellectual property, and consulting and financial services and import manufactured goods. We chose to require a bunch of paperwork and/or lawsuits for every new construction or resource extraction project in this country.
It's obviously always going to be unknowable, I will very much cede that. A candidate completely free of the Biden administration might have very well still lost, but losing less matters, especially with 6 year Senate terms at stake.
It was close because they nominated Trump. Any other normal R nominee, and Biden probably would not have even bothered stepping aside because it would have been known that the race was just unwinnable. Polling would have been like 52-48 for Rs the whole way with a normie nominee.
Yeah, I think Niki Haley was like +10 over Biden in head-to-head polling earlier this year. You need to take that with a grain of salt of course but seems like the only reason there was any chance at all for Dems this cycle was that they were running against Trump
Yup, while this was still a very solid Trump victory, it seems very likely that "generic Republican" would have completely run the table. Trump is historically unpopular, which I expect is something many voters will rediscover once he actually takes office.
This is why I'm scared to engage TOO much with my questions about turnout. I don't want to end up looking like Karl Rove asking where the "missing white voters" are.
But at the same time, we definitely need to explain the massive drop in Dem turnout. It's easy enough to understand that Trump kept his coalition the same size. It's harder to explain precisely how Dems lost as many as 10M people -- ON NET. Which means they actually lost a LOT more than the perhaps 1M or so they probably gained from people who flipped on Trump over J6.
Agree - 5 seems pretty hard to resolve. There was so little time to find a new candidate. If there had been a short nasty fight, that one who won the nomination would still have lost the election, and we would all be wishing they had just passed the baton painlessly to Harris.
I'll push back on 2 and advise that the lesson needs to be that you really need to look at underlying economic conditions when figuring out whether spending priorities make sense or not. Periods of extreme low inflation and high unemployment is actually a very good time to spend money and yes expand the welfare state. But outside of this paradigm, there are real limitations to this strategy.
I feel like we are in agreement here--the only mitigating factor is the stress and the uncertainty that the pandemic caused that I mentioned downthread. If a recession happens, then yes money printer go brrrr, but otherwise Democrats need to observe TANSTAAFL hardcore.
Pretty good points, but I think 2 is off. The economy was objectively worse under Obama, with lower growth and employment. Trump tax cuts and Biden stimulus made things a lot better.
I think people are just delusional. Yeah eggs went up by $0.50, but it's easy to find a job, and the value of your home and 401k are booming. I've had conversations with family that are claiming unemployment has skyrocketed when it's obviously not true.
I think that's a pretty good list. I'd just add that Democrats need to rebalance what is popular among the ideologues who have an outsized voice in the party vs. public opinion.
On your SCOTUS point, I could see Alito retiring next year, but I'd expect Thomas to stick around until June 20, 2028, when he'll pass William O. Douglas as the longest serving Justice in history. With the 2026 Senate map looking as bad as it does for Democrats, he could retire at the conclusion of that term leaving plenty of time for Trump (or Vance) to replace him before the 2028 election.
Andrew Sullivan this Friday: "Of course Harris lost, because she's an incompetent hack who is too far to the left! She should have pivoted to the center more convincingly!"
Freddie de Boer today or tomorrow: "Of course Harris lost, because she's a soulless shill who is too close to the center! She should have tacked to the left! Something something capitalism imperialism uniparty bad!"
What's funny is that, before he deleted a lot of his old blog (hence: not findable now), Freddie made what I thought was a really incisive point, which is that part of the nature of wokeness is that you treat it as a given that the country is virulently racist, everything-phobic, etc., but you also treat it as unthinkable that you would soften any of your expectations as far as what is achievable in the current political moment. The quote was something like, "[Progressives] talk endlessly about how badly they're losing, but do it in the superior voice of someone who's running up the score." I think it's a good point, but I think it applies on economic issues just as much!
I think the truth that Freddie will never see as a leftist and that Sullivan seems to only get in the vaguest of ways is that the voting population anchors at something like 1. socially 'inchoate, vaguely populist, left of the Evangelicals but way, way to the right of Freddie and the average progressive pundit' and 2. economically 'interventionist so long as it doesn't cause other problems that are annoying to me [like, but not limited to, inflation and high interest rates].'
There's no secret army of leftists to take over the Democrats from the axis of Clintonites and cultural liberals in charge now, nor is there a principled mass of small-l liberal conservatives looking to turn the electoral balance for either party.
Scott Alexander supported Harris, but there’s a sadly large contingent of Trumpy, right-wing dudebros among the ACX commenters, with a nice big dash of sexism for spice. I just don’t have the heart to read the “yay Trump” and “cry feminist libturd, cry” comments I’m sure I would find there.
Gotcha. I think if anything you’re far underrating the quality of the commentariat there; maybe Hanania’s audience or something matches that description but the right-wingers I’ve interacted with on ACX have uniformly been much better-behaved.
Post-election: the time when everybody in the losing party gets to pretend if the party were just more like them, they'd have won. Because we all know our positions are the only ones that will win and work!
In that spirit, I'll note that Harris failed to propose banning trucks with high grills and didn't pledge to ensure every school dismantled their parking lots while implementing bike buses. Obviously, she was doomed to lose!
Money quote from TFA: "Doing a better job of making California and New York growth-oriented jurisdictions will naturally make Democrats seem less like a party for rich snobs who don’t mind high taxes and bad services because they’re insulated from the struggles of daily life. "
I think if they can solve that, everything else would follow nicely.
While I am also not holding my breath, I completely agree. As an ex-Californian, I am furious with my home state and it’s leaders’ total disregard for normal people that want to buy homes and raise families.
I mean it's very clearly an alliance of convenience: Trump needed Musk to boost his chances of winning the election (both through donations and social media boosting) and Musk needed Trump to avoid facing criminal charges/civil penalties/lost government contracts under a Harris administration.
I do think we can blame some of Trump’s win on Elon buying Twitter. I hardly ever open Twitter, but a Trump ad would hit me first thing every time I did, and I’d even get trump ads as notifications! Pair that with every comment thread on Facebook/youtube/whatever being full of Trumpy bots and trolls and the bad guys just were able to plant brain worms better
Kendall was at least half competent through all the drugs and bipolarness. He ran large chunks of the company for Logan and had a pretty reasonable expectation at the outset to get the nod.
Don Jr. has never had a successful enterprise that wasn't grafting off his own father's graft, and even most of those he's failed at. Ivanka's the smart one, which means Jared probably ends up being the Tom in this scenario. I would be a LOT less surprised by a post-Trump Jared-Carlson-Vance triumvirate fighting over control of the party, than by Don Jr. occupying Jared's spot on that roster.
(Mailbag question) why is Mexico the only country where the incumbent's party/chosen successor won resoundingly this year? Why are they the only country where, in an era of high inflation, the incumbents are popular? (Or did Mexico not have particularly high inflation?) Sheinbaum not only won the presidency there, but AMLO/Sheinbaum's party I believe has a supermajority. Could we be learning something from crafty ol' AMLO?
As someone from Europe married to a Mexican and living there: it's a class/inequality issue, and there's not a ton to learn for more-equal/richer countries.
Mexico is effectively two societies and cultures that almost exclusively interact as employer-employee: the (small, well off to very rich, European-looking) elite and the (vast majority, very poor to pretty well off, indigenous/mixed) working class. There's not a ton in between, and very few working class people manage to participate in elite society effectively.
What happened from a high level is that after ~80 years of 1-2 elite ("neoliberal", center-right/right) parties winning consistently without significant improvement to working class lives (relative to the excesses of the elite), they finally "realized" they outnumbered the elites and voted in one of their own, who spoke in their language, to their concerns, and implemented some targeted short-term-good long-term-bad measures they saw the benefits of.
The economy may still be bad, violence may still be high, and politicians may still be shady, but that's the way it's always been. If someone's going to screw us, let it at least be one of us. They're not going to give up on their newly-gained vote so easily.
The more interesting elections in the coming decades (Mexico has presidential elections every 6 years) will be the Morena primaries, and potentially against future working class opposition parties.
Yeah, pretty much -- Mexico is pretty instructive for the rest of Latin America but might as well be on a different planet than Europe in this respect.
"they finally "realized" they outnumbered the elites and voted in one of their own, who spoke in their language, to their concerns, and implemented some targeted short-term-good long-term-bad measures they saw the benefits of"
"However, AMLO is turning out to be a fiscal hawk in times of crisis – to an extreme that few would have imagined. Mexico has insisted on avoiding, as much as possible, any increase in debt issuance. As a first course of action, the government announced the combination of stabilization fund usage and hefty payroll cuts for upper-level government bureaucrats."
It's interesting because its written in 2020 and the sub-head points towards this hawkishness being a problem given COVID-19. Ironic that a lefty was the one that swam against the conventional-wisdom and ended up being one of the only incumbents to save his party because of it (if indeed this is the case).
Mexico isn't the only country; it seems to be much more specifically a first-world issue.
One big difference is that the Mexican opposition (and much of the opposition across Latin America) can't demagogue on migration, which is only a minor annoyance to voters since migrants are only passing through Mexico. Whereas the right wing has very successfully demagogued the issue across the developed world.
For my job, I happened to spend time last week touring some factories in the same area in NC where Trump held his final rally last Saturday. Talking to owners and workers about their #1 issue was eye-opening: How many times did you hear Biden or Harris express concern about how Section 321 of the U.S. Tariff Act creates unfair competition for U.S. manufacturers because of the de minimis exemption? (For that matter, how many times has Matt Yglesias written about it?) Under the rule, goods under $800 are imported duty-free, including from China. It's very easy for Temu and other vendors to package and ship items that fall just under the $800, including large items like mattresses. There have been recent layoffs in NC, MI, WI, and GA from many of all kinds of industries that point to this exact problem, along with what is seen as a lack of CBP, USTR, and Dept. of Commerce enforcement of rules of origin for USMCA, CAFTA-DR, and other deals-- which reflects on the Administration that manages those agencies. I talked with textile companies that had shifted their manufacturing focus, only to be undermined once again, and were laying off workers heading into the holidays. I'm an economist, a free trader. My point is what I heard last week was nothing but frustration that nobody in the White House (or Congress) seemed to care about their #1 issue. There was only one candidate (two counting Vance) pledging to do *something* about this, willing to come speak to factories and not just hold large rallies in Charlotte. (Mecklenburg County was already heavily for Harris.) I've met enough socially conservative people who preferred Harris personally and professionally, but "it's the economy, stupid"-- **their** economy. I think the Democrats missed an opportunity to peel off a lot of voters in NC by addressing a simple issue like de minimis-- a pledge to close that loophole would have gone a long way. Just picking a Midwesterner to be a VP candidate to speak their language seems condescending when he's not addressing the #1 issue that workers blame for their problems.
This is pretty insightful. I know there was some investigations on Temu and other drop shippers abusing the de minimis exemption to dump goods in the US but have not seen anything recently about it. I did notice a tick down in Temu spam though.
It’s the same in the Midwest. I wrote to my rep and senator about the de minimum exemption a few months ago and no response. Both were Republicans. Trump is the exception to the rule among Republicans. You have certainly started to see some shift with Rubio, Hawley, and Vance among others, but the Republican institutions are still the party of nationless capital and big business. There will be a huge opportunity for Democrats to take advantage of the inevitable Republican shift but there are frankly too many technocrats in the Democratic Party and not enough instinctual populists.
Mailbag thought/question: Accepting that global conditions put the incumbent at a massive disadvantage, I can't stop thinking about the ways in which the right has taken over both the political and "apolitical" media ecosystems, especially for men. You look at podcast charts, and it's either explicitly right or right-coded products at the top: Rogan, Shapiro, Theo Von, Lex Fridman. And then you look to other spaces that are, in theory, "apolitical" - streaming, video games - and nearly everything now has a right-leaning tilt. It's striking, and I think entirely part of the Democrats' inability to defend and advance their positioning with large constituencies. To pose a question... how does this change? While Politix and Ezra Klein Show are great, it would seem the key goal has to be to claim territory in more regular cultural media environments. Genuinely think there is a massive need for center-left "bro" media personalities and channels.
I think "gaming culture" overall is pretty "lib-coded" still, particularly when it comes to stuff like LGBT inclusivity. The incel gamergate /v/ 4chan stuff is real, but I would still view it as very much so the "counter-culture" within gaming.
Part of the issue, IMO, is that gaming spaces sometimes skew *too* far left, like borderline Marxist level, which can be pretty alienating to normal people in the same way that chud stuff is. When you just want to read a review of a video game but the person is talking about "late stage capitalism", it can be a big turnoff.
You could think of it as another manifestation of leftists capturing the discourse in unproductive ways.
Or when the newest Harry Potter game came out a few years ago, I saw some reviewer for a gaming site gave it 0/10 without even playing it because they deemed it problematic.
Yes, then it went on to make a billion dollars. Big disconnects between the gaming media and gamers (and it's not like a Harry Potter game is going to naturally attract a ton of alt right types, so this isn't all a 'gamergate' thing)
There's a big split here between video games writing and video games culture. Video game writing/journalism is certainly that way, which stems from the fact that it's probably the most precarious form of journalism out there.
I don't know who the big streamers are voting for, but I would bet that 90% of Gen Z only engages with gaming content that way, and all the kick streamers and a lot of the bigger twitch streamers are super trump-coded at least.
I think this sells it short. Yes the game is insane, but it's an exquisitely crafted novel/puzzlebox where everyone is insane. (except for detective Kim Kitsuragi, who's the real hero.) And I think it works.
I read about the creator's politics later, and while I sincerely disagree, I feel like I now more completely understand the game. Disco Elysium was written by a depressed Estonian Communist wrestling with how much the USSR fucked Estonia and the rest of Eastern Europe. But since he's a good writer, this cognitive dissonance becomes great set dressing for a murder mystery. Your mileage may vary.
There are lots of apolitical podcasts with hosts with normie UMC left-leaning views. Unfortunately this means that whenever they veer into political content it is of the "everything is terrible, no one can afford anything" type
Yeah this is the real dichotomy -- it's explicitly right-wing content vs. antipolitical content. Right-leaning Zoomers get constant messages to vote for Trump; left-leaning Zoomers get constant messages to not vote for Democrats until they adopt Palestinian nationalism as a policy plank.
It's not just extreme Israel/Palestine or Marxist stuff, it's banal stuff like left-leaning gaming content creators complaining that no one can afford $70 video games (a 16% nominal increase since $60 became the norm in 2006) even though nominal median income is up 60% over the same period
That's a big part of the issue for sure. If you encounter left-wing content in gaming spaces, there's a decent chance it's literal Marxists talking about how US society needs to be broken down and rebuilt. It's exhausting if you just want to talk or read about games.
An example of *good* left-of-center content in gaming spaces is the general pro-LGBT attitude that is pretty prolific these days. It's a fundamentally positive, inclusive message that's easy to explain and justify ("don't be a dick").
For this to work you need to exclude essentially all popular music and mainstream film/tv though. The right has Kid Rock and Yellowstone and that's about it.
Yeah; if anything, Taylor Swift is a bigger deal than any pop musician of the 1990s/2000s (granted, a lot of this is simple staying power and reinvention, but it *seems* like she's bigger than Britney Spears ever was.)
You probably have to go back to 1980s Madonna/Michael Jackson to get someone as big as Taylor Swift (less obvious to me whether Beyonce is as big). Certainly not Britney Spears/Lady Gaga/Katy Perry/etc.
I watch a decent amount of lifting content. The big youtubers don't seem outspokenly right wing, but there's a young-male-trolling vibe (jokes about sex that you wouldn't make in a professional context) that has massively polarized post 2016. Idk how to solve it, just an observation
It would be wild to go back in time to 2004 and try to explain to someone that the Republicans are coded as the leave-me-alone-I-say-what-I-want party, and the Democrats are the moralistic finger waggers.
In 2024, as a (non-evangelical/mainline) Protestant, I feel much more awkward/out of place in progressive/Democratic spaces than I did in 2004 and Democrats (and *especially* progressives) will spend exactly zero time pondering that this is a problem for them.
Can attest to this. Many progressive spaces now are anti religion/militantly secular. I think much of this comes from religious broadsides against queer and non-gender conforming people in general over the past 40 years.
(1) they're militantly anti-religion even when the religion in question has been queer-accepting for years
(2) the militant anti-religion stance somehow doesn't apply to Islam, which is far more anti-queer than any Protestant denomination (unless you're counting, like, the Westboro Baptist Church as a denomination)
Agree but I think Republicans claimed even that gray area - saying “we’re the party that says it’s cool to make sex jokes” while the libs are all woke scolds. So even if those videos aren’t discretely promoting one side, Republican messaging and cultural positioning has made it so that those who think that stuff is funny feel they’re at home with the right. And I do think that stuff is largely fine and liberals need to relax.
Yeah, I think this phenomenon is much more the symptom than the underlying disease -- e.g. young men's alienation isn't because they watch Andrew Tate, but them watching Andrew Tate is a symptom of the problem.
Joe Rogan was a huge Bernie supporter! How on earth do you think he is right-coded? He's maybe anti-woke coded, but if that is enough to make something right-coded, that's on the woke people for driving everyone else away.
“The pitiless machine’s impulse is to duck whatever can be ducked, rather than be caught punching left.”
This is exactly why it took me so long to get on board with the Democrats and why so many other people struggle to trust the Democratic Party. Actions speak louder than words—and people assume that when you go to great pains not to disavow lunatic extremists, and try your best not to be seen talking about them, that you quietly agree with them and are just trying to keep it under wraps until you can get into power.
And that inconsistency really does harm any effort to take the high ground against Republican extremism. Less involved voters on neither side just conclude that both parties are crazy. They’re not (at least not equally), but it would be a lot easier to make the case if there were any meaningful distinction in how the parties treat their nutjob extremists. It doesn’t really matter to less involved swing voters that one side is actively cynically using their extremists to gain power and the other one just lacks the backbone to stuff their nerds back into a locker. From the outside it looks the same, even if it’s not. (Plus, from a leadership standpoint, I’m not sure that “we’re afraid to stand up to our loons” is a better look than “we’re using them to get power.” I would be very leery of the ambitions for power expressed in the latter statement, but would be alarmed at a more fundamental level by the cowardice of the former.)
When I spent time looking at various Trump supporters making their case in the past month or so, an overwhelming theme I saw was the belief that a Harris Presidency would do things like:
* Do cancel culture super hard
* Reinstate masking/lockdowns and go super hard on mandatory vaccines
* Double down on DEI
* Outlaw fracking
* Have the most permissive possible immigration policy
And like, I think that is all more-or-less wrong. Probably Harris wouldn't have done any of those things, and I think that in fact the Democratic party has been trying to quietly distance itself from all of those excesses. But the key term there is QUIETLY, and I think what was needed was some amount of a hard break and reset.
>Actions speak louder than words—and people assume that when you go to great pains not to disavow lunatic extremists, and try your best not to be seen talking about them, that you quietly agree with them and are just trying to keep it under wraps until you can get into power.
"that you quietly agree with them and are just trying to keep it under wraps until you can get into power."
as a center left Republican that's definitely what I think. Then when Harris talks about packing the supreme court, or trans gender illegal aliens in prison getting sex changes on tax payer dime, it confirms it for me.
When I was slogging through my workout early this morning, I kept thinking "the boring is slow, the boards are hard, the boring is slow, the boards are hard" etc etc
Seeing as the House is obviously not going to pass something on its own volition, it would require a discharge petition. I believe there have only been 2 successful discharge petitions in American history. So, tough odds
Perhaps if the tariff was sufficiently large and across the board, a bright liberal lawyer could convince SCOTUS that it was functionally indistinguishable from a VAT and thus outside of executive branch powers.
I am not the right person to criticize the Democratic Party. I am not a Democrat. I do not share Matt's New Deal concerns about the welfare state. I am all for securing the border, I am more hawkish on foreign policy. I identify as a Pro-Life Conservative who prefers the government be as small as necessary for our daily lives to function. My vote only became available for Democrats because Republicans nominated the worst possible nominee for President, and then proceeded to defend that choice through thick and thin for what will now become 12 miserable years of ghastly fights. I was, and am, prepared to accept all manner of policy disagreement to see Trump go down. Honestly, one hope I had for 2024 was finally being able to feel like I had a choice again, sadly with the return of Trump it's not.
So personally, my concern about the Democratic Party is entirely based on its ability to defeat Trump. I thought in 2022 Biden was the better choice. I was wrong, I was skeptical that Harris was the right choice but I also feared what would happen if the party kicked off an internal fight months before the election. In hindsight from here: I am unsure any of that mattered that much. This election would have been a landslide had ANYONE but Trump been the Republican nominee.
I don't know how bad a Trump second term will be, my fear is it will be incredibly bad. I personally think he'll at least try to find a way to run in 2028. I don't care if he says this is his last election, I don't believe him. I think the GOP will oblige him, and I don't know who will be able to stop him. More importantly, I think he'll keep taking a wrecking ball to the guardrails surrounding our democracy. Guardrails don't exist to constantly take a ton of heat: they exist to keep politics in the middle lane. I fear a few more body blows will break them, or cause them to break next time (and with Trump's success there will be a next time).
I will conclude with this: Democrats made zero effort to bring people like me into their campaign. They saw our disgust at Trump and took us for granted, and plenty of Democrats adamantly said that their party should offer voters like me: nothing. Exactly nothing, they expected me to go along with them for free. And sure, I agreed with them (that's why I was in the tent in the first place) but I always felt this attitude was stupid and misplaced. Surely moderating more would have brought more voters into the tent.
But Democrats did not want a bigger tent, they wanted more power, and weren't willing to compromise to get there, and I think that cost them. If they want to win next time, they either need to get lucky or they need to moderate. I suspect they'll just wait to get lucky, Lord knows politicians hate hard choices.
Respectfully, Harris caught a lot of flack from the left (seriously a ton) for going hard at pro-Democracy former Republicans with her campaign and putting folks like Cheney in prominent surrogate roles. There's a strong argument to be made that her prioritization of this group led to a lack of dramatic new policy proposals that would signal a clearer break with Biden.
I do think Harris ran a strong campaign focused on a bigger tent over policy advancement, so I don't think it's fair to knock the party on that. I am genuinely curious, though, what someone like you would have liked to see - or alternatively, what you think could have lowered Trump's margins among traditional Republican voters.
To me: the fact that the Left attacked Harris for just CAMPAIGNING with Liz Cheney is what Matt is writing about, and that to me is the point.
What would I have liked from Harris? Several things:
-She could have emphasized how the US needs to advance economic priorities via trade, and how rewriting and reinforcing our agreements will help Labor and consumers lower costs and provide markets for export.
-She could have talked more about how American investment in industry will both create manufacturing jobs while increasing our military capability.
-She could have pivoted more on abortion to "safe, legal, and rare"
-She could have acknowledged fears that just accepting someone at their word on gender can lead to problems, so we need to police this more so there's a fair playing field in women's sport, prisons, and the like.
-She could have pivoted towards more deregulation, to free up land for oil drilling and solar panels alike.
There are plenty of things she could have done on the big picture level. But the problem isn't Harris: nobody in the Democratic Party was willing to do this, even Biden.
I am not claiming that any of this changes the result, I am simply agreeing with Matt's observation that Democrats were quite unwilling to cave on hard policy unless they had no choice. Even Sherrod Brown was unwilling to do it.
Even some symbolic gestures to separate herself from the far-left might have helped, like cracking wise about pronouns, or arguing for clearing homeless encampments. She could have argued going hard on immigration from a liberal perspective - arguing to aggressively go after companies that hire undocumented workers.
I think we share almost the exact same set of priorities except for public lands use, but I largely agree. No one in the center-right genuinely thought Kamala wanted anything to do with them – but I’m not sure exactly how effective outreach would have worked without alienating the Left more.
Very much agreed. I’m not even sure Democrats now have a Bill Clinton type who could genuinely win enough “normie” voters to not have to worry about marginal coalition fracturing on the left flank. Ugh.
I just want to go back to a 2012. I would take a Romney-influenced GOP a million times over this disaster. We’ll see what happens.
On one hand, I think this is true: "But Democrats did not want a bigger tent, they wanted more power, and weren't willing to compromise to get there, and I think that cost them." This is like MY writing about how the dems say Trump is a democracy crisis but play their hand like it's chance to shoot the moon." And I think "the Dems have effectively made the tent too small" is true and a fair critique.
The flip side is: I don't know if the tent could be made big enough to cover the entire left (the normies and the wing nuts) and bring in a small government pro life hawk. It's just a big reach.
Still, "they didn't come close" is fair - more is more sometimes. I feel for you - I don't think anyone in the system cares about small government or fiscal restraint anymore; one of my co-workers has the exact same views and there's nothing out there for him.
Possibly, and I have little patience or tolerance for the moronic fools on the Left who are (still) CONVINCED if ONLY Harris had promised the Bernie-Sanders-Revolution-all-would-be-well. As if Donald Trump did not just do a far better job getting out the vote than Bernie ever did. The irony of Trump being: The Freedom Caucus has done a MUCH better job winning swing districts than the Squad. My utter disgust at the (non-AOC) members of the Squad, who could not even bring themselves to ENDORSE Kamala Harris is quite high.
Again: I am not the right person to critique the Democratic Party because I do not think most of their voters really want me in their tent. They'll take my vote when they can, but only if it's free. I was not blind to this compromise: I welcomed it, and sniped from the sidelines praying they'd make the right choices to win. They did not.
Which is not to say I think this election is all on the stupidity of the Democratic Party. I don't blame Biden for pushing for full employment. The American economy is quite strong, in large part due to how Biden reacted. He did not get credit for it, but that's because economics are bloody hard. There's plenty of Monday morning (well, we're way past Monday but regardless) quarterbacking on his decisions, but if you look at the results they're pretty good. I don't think he could have prevented inflation no matter what pundits say. But just because the election is not a complete repudiation of all the Democratic Party stands for, the election revolving around inflation does not absolve them either.
I'm sorry that's just not true. They campaigned with Liz Cheney. Every damn ad I saw was "vote your conscience". They ignored Palestine because they didn't want to upset conservatives and ran on an unabashedly pro-center ideology. 15 million people stayed home. Only 4% of conservatives voted for Harris. You want to double down on courting republicans????
I think Matt is nice and a smart guy. However, I think he is just fundamentally wrong. He is pro policy wonkism; but that is not reality. Democrats have been listening to gentlemen like him for years, but unfortunately that is part of what lost us this election.
Same. I'm a never Trumper that might have been a getting vote if Dems had tried (starting in 2021 you can't wait till 2024). But instead I just wrote in Nikki Haley
The one thing I can think of that might count is that she promised to bring up the bipartisan border bill (the one Trump killed) again for a vote and sign it if elected.
That was a bigger border concession than the Democrats wanted to do, and she promised to do it after winning when it had failed beforehand.
That said, thank you for doing your part to try to keep Trump out of the White House again.
I've been mulling the Tracing Woodgrains post since you shared it earlier on Twitter, and especially the bit you highlighted here: "And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all."
The people who are prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters at law schools are annoying, sure. But they don't think that Kamala Harris represents them, either. A lot of them spend a bunch of their time complaining online about Democrats and maybe not even voting for Democrats. It doesn't seem like Kamala really gave them the time of day during the campaign (which I think was a good thing). So why is this a Kamala Harris / national Democratic Party problem as opposed to a law school problem that needs to be reckoned with? I guess the answer is because these extreme left-wing views on college campuses have been successfully linked to the Democrats' toxic party brand throughout much of the country. But the relationship between these views and national Democratic politicians' party positions seems often more perceptual than real (there are exceptions). The poster talks about how they disagree with Democrats on the issue of "excellence in education" like with a high school in Virginia closing. Why is this something we should expect Kamala Harris to answer for?
In the 2020 primary the Dems who weren't Biden were tripping over themselves to see who could get further out to the left...Harris was in that mess. I think that's one source of brand association.
The other is the complete deep blue control in the very progressive localities where far left views can get more traction.
The national Dem party leans into midwestern-kitchen-table-normie but kind of only when theres' an election on the line. :-)
Thanks for responding. As someone who identifies strongly with the Democratic Party, it nevertheless wouldn't really occur to me that I'd have to tell people I'm not a prison abolitionist, don't support Hamas, etc. It seems so obvious -- I think of those as fringe views that are outside of the national party's agenda, no one would look at me and think I was a hippie, etc. And I don't really like punching anyone (metaphorically or literally) or like it much when politicians do that.
Anyhow, I'm not a political candidate. But just a perspective from a normie Dem who doesn't understand what national Dem political leaders can realistically do to confirm that yes, they are also normies, in the face of the kind of view expressed by Tracing Woodgrains.
It can be easier to see this from the opposite direction. Part of the problem with Trump is all the bad stuff he says and does. But part of it is his supporters. Trump is saying moderate things on abortion and social programs. But do you believe him? Or do you listen to his supporters say and support extreme stuff and think a chunk of that becomes policy?
I’d also note I remember Obama telling his supporters some policies just weren’t feasible. I think people saw Trump do the same. A party leader who is popular enough and credible enough to push back on unpopular ideas I think is very popular with the public. Both Biden and Romney I think suffered from a view the party would walk over them.
That's a helpful perspective. I do believe that Trump is more moderate than his supporters on abortion and social programs and see that is a big part of his appeal. Perhaps that is some of why I do not understand why Kamala Harris is so easily tarnished by some of her supporters' extreme views -- especially because I don't think the prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters are actually Harris supporters or Democrats.
I see your point about Obama telling his supporters that some policies just weren't feasible. Things like prison abolition are so extreme for most people though that they can't be considered along the lines of "yes, in an ideal world we would do this but it's not politically feasible." They can be denounced, sure, but they're so far out of the political conversation that that even seems weird to me because it draws attention to a viewpoint that doesn't deserve to be elevated. The OP may encounter those ideas on a college campus, where people are also considering and debating numerous other "crazy" viewpoints, but I don't see them as an idea that has any meaningful support in the national Democratic party. There are unpopular ideas, and then there are UNPOPULAR ideas, you know?
> Why is this something we should expect Kamala Harris to answer for?
I think the fact is the country does associate them. Maybe partially it's driven by the right wing news apparatus, but it's also because in their heart of hearts most Democratic politicians are at least a little bit sympathetic to those views. I do think Dems have tried really hard to pander to rural white voters, but I don't think many of them really, really mean it. We're going to have to deal with this and find some who can speak to these voters authentically. It's not totally fair, but it has to be done.
Thank you for your response. Personally, I don't at all think most Democratic politicians are a little sympathetic in their heart of hearts to the idea that prisons should be abolished or that Hamas is good. Some state and local Dems, yes, and a few Congresspeople from the bluest districts, okay. But any Senators? Kamala Harris? Most of the party? Hard to know what is really in peoples' hearts, but I don't see that.
Of course, you are correct that rural white voters don't think that Dems or Harris are speaking to them authentically.
You can write a revisionist history where Biden picks a VP based on who's best suited to run in '24, but realistically the answer was, and still is, "whoever Jim Clyburn wanted".
A non-white, multi-lingual mother, Daughter of the American Revolution, and most importantly, a veteran who's lost multiple limbs in war.
She was practically made in a lab.
And if she didn't want to do it, go with Klobuchar. She's pretty great, too.
It's important to remember that Biden was old and people knew it and were concerned about it in 2020. He needed a VP that could not only take over if necessary, but also run a winning campaign.
I think Walz was a costly choice for three reasons. First, Walz looks like Mr. Magoo. Second, Josh Shapiro could have made the difference in PA. Third, less well understood, Minnesota and Wisconsin are rivals--arch rivals. Here the Green Bay Packers are rivals. The Wisconsin Badgers are rivals. Walz may have helped Harris (somewhat narrowly) carry Minnesota but surely cost some votes in Wisconsin.
There was absolutely some truth to the Bulwark critique that Walz was an urban liberals' idea of what would appeal to rural medoerates (let alone conservatives). They both are aware that rural liberals exist - they find them weird, regardless of whether they know how to change a set of sparkplugs.
That is: there are a lot of suburban voters who identify as rural and appealing to that image of rurality is still relevant, even if appealing to the reality of rurality isn't.
ie: they're not actual farmers, you don't have to worry if your farm policy actually works, just say something they think will be good for their vision of what a farmer is like.
Rural white voters still don't vote as much as other demographic groups. There are a bunch more gains the GOP can wring out of them. Dismiss them and you may never win another election in most states in the country.
Looks like minnesota moved just as far right as wisconsin. The map is brutal. I don't think there's anything a VP pick could've done, but Walz seems to have actively hurt if anything.
I find the last part hard to believe. I don't think Minnesota voters would care if Evers was on the ticket. Heck, a lot of bucks fans cheered for the wolves during the playoffs. Doesn't make sense to extend the nfl/cfb rivalries
Yeah, it's a friendly rivalry, as most such are: and if a New York/Florida (or even Ohio) Republican had tried to attack on that basis, then they'd have very quickly lined up with the Minnesoatans against the outsiders.
To put a coastal analogy up: if you have a Boston RedSox/Celtics fan and a New York Yankees/Knicks fan, and then an LA Dodgers/Lakers fan walks into the room, you know which two are ganging up on the other one.
I haven’t spent time in Illinois, so I haven’t yet seen what people like about Pritzker. My impression so far is that he’s a richer and maybe a bit nicer Gavin Newsom, but that’s about it. I haven’t seen him demonstrate the distinctive personality or sharpness of Klobuchar or Buttigieg.
As for this article, there's not much to say from me because it's unimpeachable. In order to change policy, you have to gain power. In a democracy, you have to win elections. You win elections and gain more power by having more people in your camp to vote for you. This just seems like Politics 101.
Upside comments (some snark may be involved here):
1. It'll be nice to see the Oren Cass crowd be decisively disproven on how tariffs work, or if they're good for the US economy. Maybe this'll lead to a future Congress restricting the President's power to set tariffs unilaterally
2. I am kind of excited to fire Lina Khan, Gensler, and Kanter- not gonna lie
3. Allan Lichtman completely freaking debunked- can't go wrong there
4. If the Dems do win the House (which would be kind of hilarious), they should bring back Pelosi as speaker. She's obviously highly experienced and tougher than a coffin nail, but also not ideologically insane, which is exactly what we need right now
Pelosi is undeniably one of the most effective House leaders in US history, but I think one of the big lessons of this election is that the oldsters should step aside sooner, not later.
Mailbag question building on discussion in earlier comments thread: per Ben's observation that Ds did not deliver on local governance, and the impact of the resulting disorder on election results in cities, how important a factor do you think this was? My guess is "very" but would like to hear your take.
Writing from Northern California, I think a lot of this is coming soon. The tough on crime prop passed. Dan Lurie won the SF mayorship as the most conservative of the lot. Several of the worst ultra progressive city counselors got axed. Rent control failed statewide.
Dan Lurie was not the most conservative. Mark Farell ran explicitly on Conservative Dem (There was also a Republican) and took 4th behind the Liberal Nimby. Dan Lurie ran as the most bland alternative to London Breed. What made SF great is the alignment of Grow SF basically running as normal dems and getting a strong field of candidates across every district (I think Grow SF's top 3 endorsement in the mayor was great at keeping the movement big tent).
I'm feeling like maybe the most underplayed theory of the election right right now is, "The Dem ticket was two of the avatars of 'D politicians who lost their fucking minds in 2020'". Harris/Walz had zero chance of not getting tagged with that boulder around their necks.
After hearing your and Sharty's responses downthread, I wonder if part of the explanation is that NIMBY simply broke the old-school political machines ALONG WITH the classic "growth machine" it intended to break.
Without a growth machine to make the urban political machine popular in cities, the local Democratic parties have no way to mass-organize voters to turn out and run up the score. They can still benefit from and win on general cosmopolitan liberal sentiment, but there's no enormous, constantly growing construction trade unions that are trading favors with the machine. Bridges and highways and even SOME new skyscrapers get built, but populations decline and stagnate because not nearly enough are getting built.
So basically you're left with dead cities that refuse to grow, and educated suburbanites who want to keep abortion legal but don't give a shit about the urban growth machine and even have deep suspicions about their urban cores' dying political machines.
Maybe? I don't know. The simpler "disorder" explanation is persuasive to me, but it's so in line with my own personal experience - I am so tired of seeing turnstile jumping, public urination, flagrant shoplifting, encampments and drug use in parks, and garbage on the sidewalk, as well as being harassed by aggressive people on the street, and so on - that it might be making me irrational.
no it isn't, haven't we discredited the idea that urban street crime is about poverty? It's not the case that the shoplifters or vagrants are actually construction workers waiting for an economic upswing.
You've illustrated what I think is the Democrats' biggest problem and vulnerability here. They are all absolutely allergic to talking about disorder and how under-policed our cities are. There are a ton of voters out there who are fed up with urban chaos and how radically ineffective our security forces are. But the vast majority of Democrat politicians and activists *hate* thinking or talking about that. They think that thinking or talking about that is, I'm not exaggerating, evil.
You may be right that policing and order are necessary to get things back on the right track. Like saving someone’s life with an epipen before you ever consider using challenge therapy to alleviate their allergy.
But the destruction of urban growth machines is what caused the crisis in the first place, and the persistence of NIMBYism is what’s ultimately keeping every attempt to use the epipen of policing from doing anything but temporarily alleviating the problem, instead of getting us back on a virtuous spiral.
I think you are on to something. Traditional urban growth machines would not have allowed public disorder to become so pervasive because it threatens the viability of downtown focused investments. In downtown San Diego where I work, there is an increased focus on public order but things had to get pretty bad first, and the pervasive police shortage and reluctance of police to deal with disorder issues limits the effectiveness. Also, Sam Quinones is right in emphasizing the role of the newer drugs such as fentanyl and modern meth in making "disorderly" people be extremely disorderly. It's not going to be easy to unwind.
D's focus on turnout operations, but it strikes me that we never focus on election capacity. Why don't urban mayors do everything they can to cut down on long lines? To contribute staff to polling places to move people through?
Not sure all this would have saved us here. We're all still casting about right now. But still important questions to ask.
Where I have lived and voted in recent years, including in DC and NYC, my perception has been that this hasn't been a big problem, especially since early voting was introduced. I do recall standing in a longish line in 2016 (NYC), but it moved along pretty quickly. But maybe it's worse in other places? I'm not sure.
We never topped fifteen minutes. I agree that this problem is generally overstated (it's easy to film a single long line somewhere and then scream about it, just like it's easy to nutpick a goofball primary school teacher).
I tapped out on commenting on this morning's thread, and I'll start reading the comments now after this, but I spent that time thinking long and hard how this happened, and talking with some smart minds that I trust. I put together this "[#] points" style comment that I'll now post. It might go beyond 10 later if I think of more. If anything ends up being off, apologies, but obviously I'm in a bad mood like I imagine most Slow Borers are.
====
1. There are no more excuses anymore. Not even an electoral/popular vote split. Trump and the GOP won this thing fair and square without question. Democrats have got to significantly change their policy and politics advocacy going forward.
2. The top lesson that Democrats need to learn is to never, ever inflate again. If they want a larger welfare state, they have to get the pay fors nailed down, with ever nail secure. And no, you can't get the pay fors by just soaking the rich.
3. There also needs to be an acknowledgement that we're likely entering a post-discrimination society. I want to be careful here: it's obviously not a *non-discrimination* society, humans are who they are. But Jim Crow was over half a century ago. Title IX was about half a century ago. The late 20th century wave of Latin American immigration has had at least one generation go by, with assimilation on the way. Most people just don't have living memories of the bad old times. The Emerging Demographic Majority is dead and buried--and as Matt said before, that's a good thing for society as a whole.
4. Cut off education polarization now. Stop fetishizing academic higher education as something that everyone needs. Work on helping youths become employable as young as feasible when they become adults, with a wide array of paths available to do so.
5. It's quite clear to me now that Ezra Klein was dead on correct on the Democrats needing to have held a rigorous nomination at the DNC among multiple contenders. Perhaps the Democrats still lose, but lose less, which could have had major consequences on the Congressional races. In any case, for the future the 2028 Democratic presidental primary needs to be a complete blank slate--no connections to Clinton or Biden teams.
6. I had the quadrants of Harris/Trump and close/decisive baked into my expectations, so I could anticipate a decisive Trump win. What I totally missed is that if that 25% did happen, that it would imperil much more than Tester and Brown--Casey, Slotkin, Baldwin, Rosen all in trouble, even if some of them could.
7. Related: I'm setting the over under on both Alito and Thomas announcing their retirements on July 15, 2025.
8. Whether the Democrats win the House is now the biggest question. If they don't, then it's just a matter of helplessly hoping that Trump's worst economic policies don't get enacted. From tariffs to deportation to TCJA renewal (potentially with SALT coming back) to IRS enforcement to tax exemptions on tips/overtime/Social Security, the only question is just how much inflationary damage they'll do, and how much they'll get punished for it in the future.
9. I am very, very worried for hard working, good people who could be forced to leave this country. If it does happen, hopefully there's an inverse Elian Gonzalez style media frenzy that exposes the inhumanity of what would happen, if people can't be sold on the economic costs.
10. On foreign policy, my potential hot take is that regardless of Trump or Harris winning, little would have changed in Israel's war with Hamas and Hezbollah. Ukraine, on the other hand...I'm mildly bullish on it not being completely conquered, but much more bearish on getting the current lost territory back. Zelensky's going to have some tough decisions to make. I also think Matt has it correct when he tweeted "The EU's GDP is *nine times* larger than Russia's, it would not actually require Europe to spend a large share of GDP on the military to have robust autonomous defense capabilities — but they would need to be serious about what they spend on, coordination, etc".
Unpopular opinion, in a 2 party system with high polarization, control swings between parties on a pretty regular schedule. Thermostatic public opinion, etc. etc. It's you win, then I win, then you win, then I win, forever. Things like Democrats winning the Presidency 4 terms in a row, or holding the House for most of the 20th century, are long gone in the rearview mirror. If anything, being an incumbent seems to be a bit of a disadvantage now.
If the Democrats change literally nothing and run the exact same type of campaign in 2028, they're already the favorites. I mean, I agree some of the changes you're proposing are good policy and good ideas in and of themselves. But it's a your turn-my turn system now
This seems important. Every election, the winners "learn" that they are totally right and the American people are on their team and the losers "learn" that they did everything wrong and need to change course. But since we don't have a good model for quantifying the swinging pendulum and controlling for it, those take-aways are pretty unreliable - not just *what* we should learn from the election but whether we can learn *anything* from it.
The your turn/my turn thing has mostly happened in two-term increments, so Trump's 2020 loss and Biden's 2024 loss may be examples of disruptions to the "turn" system. Then again, maybe it's just the start of 1-term turns, which I don't think is an improvement.
Or maybe it's just a fluke that's entirely explained by a global pandemic (on both ends, with Trump's pandemic "response" being a main cause of his 2020 loss and post-2020 general voter grumpiness being a main cause of Democrats' 2024 loss.)
2020 was a weird election cycle. I don't think Trump would have lost to Biden if it was a normal election.
But if you consider the House, the your turn/my turn happens very consistently 2 years after a president is elected (Clinton 1994, Obama 2010, Trump 2018, etc). You definitely don’t need to wait 8 years.
yes. Matt and Brian actually talked about this on the podcast maybe a month ago. There is no guardrail in a 2 party system, any major nominee is at least a live underdog. And the ongoing viability of the system depends on the elites in one of the parties being willing to tank their own nominee if it's a threat to the system.
This is why I was saying literally decades ago that the Democrats would do well to try to pump up the Libertarians as a credible third party even if it risks the Republicans doing the same thing with the Greens -- the strategy would be to try to bleed thermostatic anti-establishment votes into a third party instead of concentrating them into one opposition party.
I don't think any assumption should be made in regard to thermostatic opinion. Things in history don't happen until they do.
At the same time, perhaps politics has tightened so much that the era of consecutive terms basically died with Obama and won't return until the next major paradigm shift.
For instance, I could see Latinos thermostatically flipping in 2028, and I could see Dems thermostatically going back to a turnout theory for 2028, and that maybe swinging enough votes for a victory.
But for my money, I'm pre-registering the take that the left is going to demand a Sanders-like figure, and may well get their way. One only has to peruse FdB's smirking takes today to see this "we told you so" dynamic taking shape.
What I'd ACTUALLY like to see, though, is a thorough house-cleaning in the whole party. Every single leader who presided over the last four years needs to be made to hang their heads in shame for failing the nation like this. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but Biden could've kept to his 1-term pledge. He could've handled inflation and immigration sooner. We could have allowed a primary where candidates disavowed him for those failures because they were simply responding to the imperative to show they could win a general election by empathizing with voters. Biden could've aggressively prosecuted Trump over J6 instead of lamely allowing them to accuse him of a witch hunt anyways.
The point is, we need a massive change in the Democratic party's entire firmament and power structures. Everyone who failed us needs to be viewed with utter, unforgiving suspicion. We can't just "run it back" with the same old cretins and busybodies.
For my money, the left's demand for a Sanders-like figure basically requires that the right continue nominating Trump-like figures who mainstream Democrats are terrified of in order to keep them in line.
Also for my money, there is no Trumpism without Trump and we will likely learn that in 2028.
I actually suspect the Progressive wing of the party takes a big hit outside of abortion rights (I noted in a half glass full post that if AG Ken Paxton tried to reinstitute some version of the Comstack Act it would insanely unpopular to say the least).
I'm actually a slight defender of Sanders just like Matt. I think he did show that a) in 2016 the cries of "we can't afford it" around M4A were kind of garbage in a era of low interest rates and low inflation (different story now) b) the neoliberal consensus did need to be shaken up.
Having said all that, I think the Sanders candidacy has ended up being pretty big net negative for reasons that aren't even necessarily his fault. But a clear signal went out too many people that the future was in go left and then left some more on everything. This was what the young people wanted and where the action is. I really think you can trace stuff like "defund" or "math is racist" to Sanders' unexpected success (never mind that his strong showing was really more of a canary in the coal mine that Hilary was not a strong candidate as much as anything).
Most acutely of all, it's really clear the positions Harris took in 2019 to appeal to this supposed growing progressive movement was an albatross. Given how close final margins are likely to be, it may have made the difference if she hadn't staked out such far left positions. Point being, far left prospective I really think are going to be super discredited right now.
What scares me is that they still own most of the levers of power within the party. And they’re NOT the gerontocracy, so they may not end up being the bete noire of the party mainstream amid the upcoming cycle of recriminations and what’s probably going to be a generational turnover.
I’m working on an opinion for tonight’s thread, but the core is basically that I think we need someone who’s willing to go full YIMBY. Repudiate everyone else in the party, and make the case that we’re already most of the way to losing a generation of young men to fascism because NIMBYs destroyed several generations’ worth of traditionally male construction jobs while impoverishing the rest of us with a housing-driven cost disease crisis.
Also, I think abortion simply wasn't the turnout driver Dems thought it was. It'll probably continue to lead their winning issues in midterms, but Harris flogged abortion hard and came up short in the general.
Personally, I also lay a good chunk of historical blame at the feet of Boomer/Xer pro-choicers who spent the last 50 years purging the Dems of anyone who tried to be remotely competitive in rural areas by being pro-life. They made it the party's third rail, and presided over the party basically voluntarily evacuating its entire political apparatus from a large chunk of the country. This is unforgiveable, and in my darker moments I think leaders like Cecile Richards should be reviled in the future for having actively harmed the party and ultimately undermined their own cause.
So a lot of the problem with abortion as a turnout driver is that voters have shown that when you let them get the parts of the Democratic agenda that they like in piecemeal fashion through ballot measures, they're more than willing to vote for that and then also vote Republican.
Has to be someone who says "this system is broken." All the comments on here are thought out and intelligent, but the only thing the country agrees on (it seems to me) is that everything is f***ed, and only one of them was saying it (even if his basic plan will result in it getting f***ed even more). So he won.
I’m part of the country and I don’t agree that everything is f***ed. I think we had been on a nice several century long trajectory of improvement, and there’s a long way to go, but breaking things isn’t going to help.
Agree, but if things are improving and you have the strongest economy in the world, and YET, a majority of the people think that everything is fucked, then something IS fucked. Maybe the citizenry are a bunch of babies or maybe they are perceiving something that I am missing, but either way it is fucked.
Interesting, so who the fuck do status quo voters even support in this paradigm? If I don't think the system is fucked, do I just check out and let the idiots on the left and right fuck it even harder?
"Fucked" is an extremely broad brush. Is the entire system fucked, or is that only in the funhouse version of reality that only exists online and in people's minds? Not the reality on the ground where we remain the most prosperous people on the planet.
Disagreeing on issues is one thing, but disagreeing on objective reality, or rather, caving to someone else's false reality is a dangerous bridge to cross.
It's been over 20 years since 50% of Americans said they were satisfied how things are going in the US:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/general-mood-country.aspx
Weighing against the likelihood of Latinos thermostatically flipping in future cycles is the observation that, over generations, ethnic groups have sorted more so by ideology and less so by ethnic identity, as they assimilate, intermarry, etc.
True. I think that my theory was working UNDER this sort of deracialized logic, where Latinos might just flip ANYWAYS because they were backlashing against Trump on more ideological/economic grounds, not because they felt any particular sort of racial solidarity.
I don't disagree about "overhaul", but it's hard to see how this happens. The overwhelming majority of elected Democrats will be returned to office, and none of the incentives for "coalition building" will change.
Democrats have won five straight presidential elections before. Republicans have won six straight before. Both have had long dominances in Congress. I'm not saying that's going to happen again soon, but I'm also not going to say that it won't.
Thermostatic reaction in 2026 and 2028 is the smart bet. The big question is how much damage will be done in the meantime.
Clinton and Obama both won comfortably.
Moderation works
lol.
It's funny. The story understandably is the "big" Trump victory given this is likely the largest popular vote margin for a GOP candidate since 1988. And yet once all California votes are counted it seems likely that his margin going to be 1% victory which in the grand scheme of things is a very narrow victory.
To your point, it wouldn't take all that much of shift left in the electorate for a Democrat to win.
I think because of what happened from 1980 to 1992 there is this hope from both parties that you can craft a permanent majority. Rove clearly thought there could be one in 2000-2004. Than because of Ruy Teixeira Democrats were convinced they had a permanent majority coming.
My point, there are going to be a lot of hot takes about this massive earthquake and how this is some sign of Trumpism is here to stay when in reality if inflation had come to current levels 6 months sooner Harris is probably president right now. I think both parties could probably use some humility and understand that a) in close electorate, you're ability to effect big policy change without endangering your governing majority is limited b) shifts in the electorate are not permanent. Swing voters shift votes for reasons very contingent on the issues of the moment (in 2008 it was the start of great recession. Today it's inflation and immigration) and not usually because they've become fully convinced of one side's entire policy platform (although obviously it happens).
I keep noting this but Trump is an extraordinarily unique figure. Which means even more than previous political errors trying to discern where the voting public will turn in 2 years or 4 years is going be a mug's game. Trump very clearly had a unique ability to inspire rural and working class voters who don't normally vote to come out and vote. Do we think a different GOP candidate in 2028 has that ability? I mean maybe but lordy I wouldn't bet on it.
This is possibly true, but you should still give yourself the best chance of winning.
Somewhat, but the Senate for the next few years has lots of vulnerable Democrat incumbents and very few Republicans, from what I've seen. The Senate is going to stay Republican for a while barring a bigger realignment than the usual swings you're talking about.
Generally agree with all of these comments, but I will push back on point 4. The primary issue I have with higher education is that as selectivity of state schools has gone up, the perverse self-sorting function of the institution has become supercharged. If you want to depolarize education, you need to change the fundamental concept of how it is supplied, not how it is demanded. When the average person in Manitowoc rightly understands that UW Madison is not interested in teaching them or their family, that is when the polarization occurs.
Agree (an Ivy college professor) - the best thing the selective colleges could do is double or triple in size and introduce a lottery into their admissions system (within a pool of high-scorers). Change the metric of prestige from their rate of rejection to their proportion of Pell grants.
Sounds terrible. Lotteries are inherently flawed and susceptible to Corruption.
Do this for your own universities. Our state institutions are great and provide many opportunities for in state students.
- Proud alum of a big state school
I was proposing it for the highly selective schools (private, plus public Ivies) - to make them larger and less exclusive . The model being something like Penn State. Would that take away opportunities for anyone?
I’m curious why you say lotteries are susceptible to corruption.
Important to view this *specific* example with the cultural context of many UW branch campuses closing in recent years due to collapsing enrollment at those campuses (which I have no idea how to fix).
The closing branches were a bit weird. They were originally two-year colleges where you could transfer to four-year colleges after the two years. They were created back in the day to handle an influx of boomers, and I think they just kind of outlived their usefulness. Between four-year campuses expanding and college-age population shrinking, there didn't seem to be much demand for them.
Well, yeah, that's exactly the problem. There *isn't* demand for them, not revealed demand anyway.
But you can understand why locals in Richland Center are not interested in your excuses for why their generation was able to get started in college living in mom and dad's house, but their children either miss higher ed entirely, or strike out on their adulthood in far-off distant Eau Claire, likely never to return.
If there were under 100 students at the campus, then there aren't many residents of Richland Center who are concerned about their children moving away. Plus, moving away was part of the point. The schools didn't offer four-year degrees; they were feeders for four-year schools. To get a four-year degree, they had to move away. (For the record, Platteville is significantly closer than Eau Claire.)
My point is that the schools were a quick fix for *the baby boom* in the 1960s, and it's actually kind of weird that they lasted as long as they did. There's no mystery, and there's nothing to fix.
I just picked Eau Claire because I like the name Eau Claire and the metro's future seems safer along the 94 corridor. I don't know if I think Platteville qua Platteville looks like a great place to be in twenty years (or now).
edit: although I saw today that the main Leinie's brewery in Chippewa Falls is set to close :(
That’s sad.
It is. But UW-Platteville Richland Center went from an attendance of ~550 in 2014 to 64 when the incipient closure was announced in 2022. What the hell are you doing with a "college campus" of under 100 students?
Did Covid eat that campus? I think the move toward online classes is a really bad thing.
The move toward online classes is a really bad thing in general but it's basically death to satellite campuses that literally only existed so that nontraditional students didn't have to drive an hour or so to school.
These branches were declining in attendance for a long time. In fact, that's why they were branches. They were originally stand-alone institutions but were merged with nearby UW schools in 2018 because their enrollment was too low to justify independent administration.
It's hard to find year-on-year numbers, but they were down to 224 in 2018. That's well into death-spiral territory even absent the pandemic.
Definitely agree on how it's supplied matters.
I've been banging the drum for awhile that if places like Harvard or Yale want to be seen as bastions of openness and progressive ideals they need to actually put their money where the mouth is and accept way way more students. The fact that enrollment hasn't expanded and places like Harvard still do legacy admissions tells me when push comes to shove they're more interested in being elite colleges over and above any commitment to progressive values.
I know Gladwell has taken a hit to his reputation (Some of it deserved in my opinion), but thought he laid out this case well in his "Revisionist history" podcast comparing McGill and Harvard.
"When the average person in Manitowoc rightly understands that UW Madison is not interested in teaching them or their family, that is when the polarization occurs."
I'm curious if the recent change to top N% admission to the UW system [1] will affect this. IIUC, the University of Texas does something similar. Maybe it helps?
[1] https://www.wpr.org/news/wisconsin-top-5-percent-high-school-students-uw-madison-admissions
I grew up in Texas and graduated from a competitive magnet HS in the early days of the top 10% system. I don't think it helped anything. Here are some of my impressions:
-Top x% systems harm students at competitive high schools. I knew people who deliberately went to less-competitive high schools to maximize their chances of getting into UT-Austin.
-I went to Texas A&M, a decent university with a solid engineering program. I saw the top 10% program led to a lot of unprepared students being admitted then getting absolutely wrecked their first semester with a 0.8 GPA or so.
-UT-Austin got absolutely swamped by admittees under the top 10% program, and the program was made more restrictive just for UT-Austin. Texas A&M was swamped too, but A&M grew its student body rather than become significantly more selective.
-Some private high schools gamed the system by submitting different top 10% lists to different universities.
-The Texas top 10% rule benefitted the University of Oklahoma and Louisiana State University, which absorbed a lot of smart Texas students from competitive high schools.
Ultimately, I think (one of the) problems of top x% systems is that there's only room for so many students at the most desirable state university, be it UT-Austin, UC-Berkeley, or UW-Madison.
EDIT: I wanted to add that the impacts of top x% systems are great evidence that higher education really is more about signaling and fun than about learning. There's no real difference between the material covered at UT-Austin and UT-Arlington, but one of these schools looks better than the other on a resume.
"one of these schools looks better than the other on a resume."
It's actually more that one of these schools has a much more extensive alumni network in important positions.
Presumably it also attracts better professors, I think it’s silly to pretend there is no difference in quality of instruction or peer set.
That opens up a question as to whether you could set an absolute standard (ie "you must achieve this level of knowledge and understanding to enter") rather than a relative standard ("you must be in the top 50,000 applicants to enter") and require the university to expand to let in anyone who is qualified.
Over time, the university will have to expand (population increases, the Flynn Effect means that people get more intelligent and also high school education improves), but that should be possible to plan for provided the university is prepared to spend on some surplus capacity as an insurance policy against a particularly academically strong year.
Helping out the Sooners in any capacity should have been reason enough for the Longhorns to demand change.
- Some private high schools gamed the system by submitting different top 10% lists to different universities.
I wouldn’t have thought of that, but in retrospect of course that happened
An underrated factor here is that when you have massive across-the-board grade inflation you can end up having more than 10% of your class with a 4.0.
The 4.0 scale is wtupid anyway. At my high school they calculated ranks by numerical grade average
In Texas it leads to heavy self-sorting of students between Austin and College Station (though with the one moderating influence that a lot of people who grow up in Houston choose the closer suburban campus rather than the farther urban one - but for the ranch kids coming from far west Texas, College Station is no more inconvenient than Austin, and much more friendly to their gigantic truck).
Flagship state schools have always been selective. The non-ambitious person in Manitowoc can go to UW-Oshkosh same as they ever did.
This is so accurate.
For better or worse, I think Democrats may be able to recover without making significant changes (EDIT: or even making bad changes): as MY has noted here and elsewhere, a lot of Trump's stated policies are inflationary (tax cuts, tariffs, deportations, etc.). Not all of the policies will be implemented, but even a subset could cause significant inflation, and Republicans would pay the price for it --- just as Democrats paid yesterday.
This is true but banking on Republicans self-imploding shouldn't be the goal. The goal should be performing well enough to defeat a competent opponent. Democrats just lost to an incompetent one, albeit against a very difficult economic backdrop.
"The goal should be performing well enough to defeat a competent opponent."
I agree, but it may be difficult to figure out what performs well. If Democrats run on message X in 2026 and emerge victorious against a background of Trump-induced inflation, Democrats need to be really careful not to take this a strong signal that message X is a winner. Republicans may be making this mistake as we type.
One of the challenges is that the Democratic Party does better against relatively competent Republicans (elder Bush, Dole, McCain, Romney) than it does against the less competent but more culturally populist candidates (younger Bush, Trump). There's a good chance that if the Republicans had been nominating people like Jeb or Brian Sandoval, the Democrats may have run better against them without the backdrop of cultural backlash.
Yeah, throughout the world the democratic system is producing subpar results these days
Also throughout the (Western, democratic) world the democratic system is being flooded with demagoguery about migration which mainstream parties have long barely paid lip service to.
This phenomenon makes me incredibly conspiratorial.
For example, I find it fascinating that the nonpolitical reddit subs that I read have been positively flooded for the last couple of weeks with random people boosting Palestinian rights/Green Party/shitty economy messages, and I'm extremely skeptical that this is going to persist going forward.
The scale and scope of internet-based ratfuckery seems shockingly underexamined, IMHO.
*If* Trump does what he's talked about doing, I expect that his admin will be deeply unpopular and will lead to a 2018-style backlash. Voters wanted the 2018 economy back, not a global trade war. But only time will tell.
But will the Democrats learn ANYTHING from this defeat when faced with the opportunity of a backlash in the theoretical future? I'd put in a person shrugging emoji but I'm not on my phone.
My fear is not that Democrats won't learn anything, it's that they'll learn the wrong things.
So help me God if the lessons learned from the post-mortem somehow comes out as "we need more activism and community organizing" I am going to become the Unabomber.
Pink knit hats for some, miniature American flags for others!
In a comment somewhere on SB within the past several weeks, I suggested that a plausible outcome of a Trump defeat of Harris would not be any sort of introspection on the left, but instead, "the Toxic Masculinity siren getting dialed to 11," if young men voting for Trump was shown to be a significant contributing factor to Harris losing.
That sounds like betting that Democrats will recover by letting Trump hang himself with his own rope. That is probably a good bet in the short term, but questionable in the long term.
It hasn't seemed to work yet, or at least not decisively.
Well, one could make the argument that True Let Trump Wreck Himself has never been tried - the Dems and some moderates were able to block most of his unpopular legislative agenda, and when his Covid bungling (combined with the bad luck of the pandemic, obviously) could have plunged the U.S. into a historic depression, Pelosi and the Dems worked with Mnuchin to save the economy and deliver historic Keynesian stimulus and welfare to the voters, which they loved.
To be clear, I’m glad democrats did those things because politics is about helping people, not f***ing the other side. But without those actions I think there’s a significant chance Trump gets wiped out so decisively in 2020 that even the MAGA cult would have been swayed against voting for him again.
But who knows, I guess.
The problem is that he wrecks the rest of us along with him.
Also, when Trump wrecks himself, it's suspicious how often other people seem to end up holding the bag.
I think it's worth it to let Trump wreck himself to discredit his message. This is what people voted for. Let them have what they want.
I guess I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. To do it you'd have needed enough Democratic support for them to be at minimum part owners of it. That would also involve turning on their constituents in ways I'm not sure are possible (and certainly wouldn't he desirable).
It would not be a good idea and would involve turning on their constituents for sure but it wouldn’t require much in practice at all. GOP will have the votes to repeal Obamacare via reconciliation. Last time around there was a huge #resist push on the Collinses and McCains of the world , not to mention the Manchins, to hold the line and not let it happen. This time Schumer / senate Dems / the leaders of the Democratic Party could avoid the full court press and just let the GOP take it out with their own votes.
Same deal if/when there’s a major economic collapse, like 2008 or 2020, both times in which a Dem Congress passed legislation with significant future downside that prevented a full on catastrophe. They could just … not? It seems unlikely the Superdole of 2020 would have happened without active democratic design and advocacy, it didn’t even require them owning a Trump policy. In 2008 it would have been incredibly easy to demagogue against the idea of TARP and bailing out Detroit and just let the bottom fall out.
Yep, that's the key about point 8: just how far will they go, and how much mess will they make for themselves and the country? It's going to be nerve wracking to learn that over the next years.
I would be cautious about this because the Republicans have decisively captured the media at all levels. Bezos bending the knee to Trump, Musk controlling Twitter, Sinclair owning regional news networks, Murdoch with Fox and WSJ, Joe Rogan/Tim Pool/Nick Fuentes etc dominating the online space. Even in TikTok, the supposedly more progressive commenters are bashing Democrats long before they even mention a Republican.
If Trump's policies cause an inflation surge, the Republicans will find it easy to lay it at the feet of the Democrats.
This is great and I agree with all of these, but I'm a little concerned that point 2 is going to overshadow everything else. There are signs that it's going to become the all-purpose excuse people use to avoid introspection. On the other hand, I agree on the merits: inflation _was_ a really big part of the story.
I do feel bad that the inflation that was triggered was done so amidst a highly unknowable situation in the pandemic. Without foresight, it easily could have been a deflationary recession instead. But unfortunately, that doesn't matter as it's clear not enough people care about how it happened--just that it happened and they're pissed. That's the lesson that has to be learned regardless.
Back to evan bear's earlier comment today that when your local pro sports team is performing below your expectations, the peanut gallery demands that the general manager fire the head coach. It doesn't matter whether it was their fault, it doesn't matter if you don't know what the next guy will do, you still gotta fire that bum.
The reality is that it has long been the case that Presidents get both credit and blame for stuff that happens on their watch regardless of the level of control they have. That is particularly true of the economy - an area where the Executive branch doesn't have a lot of independent authority.
Absolutely, I don't think this is new or unique.
What I think might be new or unique (to my top-level mailblag question sadly buried below) is how little of the voting public had ever experienced actual substantial inflation--you can sell me on the idea that Biden/Harris got hit unusually badly because of the aging out of this cultural memory.
Exactly - some buffoon at the NYTimes was going on about voters experiencing historic inflation. It hit 20% in 1946, 10% in 1952 and then 1972, 75…. And we won’t even get into the revolution or civil war inflation.
I think this is asymmetrical, though - at least recently, anyways, presidents seem much more likely to take blame than get credit.
I think the deflationary recession may have been more popular. Obama had a low-inflation severe recession with too little stimulus and got reelected handily.
People hate high prices and they’re willing to vote to end democracy over it, message received though it may be too late to matter.
Recessions could indeed be better times if you're not one of the unlucky ducks that lost your job. Higher variance than inflation, which none of us can escape.
The idea of the Misery Index is that +1% unemployment is worth the same as +1% inflation.
This seems crazy to me, as the suffering of unemployment is real and the suffering of inflation is nominal, but maybe it’s an accurate heuristic for political purposes?
I think inflation is worse. Not that a brief inflationary episode is more damaging; I continue to think people are wrong about this. But it affects everyone, whereas if you're employed and not actively looking for a new job, unemployment doesn't affect you much.
Inflation is electorally worse because it affects everyone and not just the unfortunate. But unemployment seems to be worse for human flourishing, because it’s really, really, really bad for the people it hits, while inflation is basically just a big annoyance when it’s around 10% or lower.
Correct. +1% inflation negatively impacts 100% of voters.
There were many unknowable things during the pandemic, but was inflation was one of them? Look at the graph for M2 [1], what did people expect to happen? I made a similar comment on SB a long time (years?) ago. People here and elsewhere have done midwit contortions to explain why that giant jump in M2 wouldn't cause inflation (I expect more below this very comment), but it did! Who woulda thunk?
That's not to say that giving people cash during the pandemic was automatically a bad thing. People lost their jobs, and it was good that they didn't starve (although the fact that pandemic financial assistance *increased* the wages of many should have raised more left-wing eyebrows --- instead of being met with cheers). But if you sail into an iceberg field to rescue people, you should be on the lookout for icebergs --- ready to take evasive action and get out of there ASAP once the job is done.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
I think if we had really sharp foresight, the correct path forward would have been to employ the ~5% of people in jobs that just couldn't safely be done during a pandemic in pandemic mitigation jobs--testers, contract tracers, couriers of physical goods to help people stay physically apart, and so on. That staves off mass unemployment without inflating the money supply toward everyone.
That again, requires said sharp foresight, to say nothing about the politics needed to pull it off.
Standing up the training infrastructure for such an effort would be quite the accomplishment, to the extent some modest-functioners in the customer service industry would even be net contributors for some of those tasks.
Interesting idea, though.
I just reopened a spreadsheet I made during the depths of the pandemic (since, like all of us, I had way too much time to kill) where I got BLS data of how many people were employed in which jobs, and categorized them as to how they could operate. The breakdown was something like half of the jobs had to keep going no matter what, another quarter could be done remotely, another fifth could be done outdoors, and the remaining 5% were just up shit creek that needed to work other jobs mitigating the pandemic
A couple other ideas that I also categorized in this was also repurposing college students to pandemic mitigating jobs too by leveraging federal funding and student loans, and to commandeer hotels for comfortable quarantine locations, since people should have not been traveling.
Lots of pure fantasy in this of course, but again, hard not to dream of better things during that horrible time.
It's not completely clear to me whether you mean unknowable to policymakers or unknowable to voters, but I have a STEM PhD and I haven't the foggiest idea what M2 is.
MX (M1, M2, etc.) are various measures of how much money exists. M2 is generally regarded as an indicator for inflation. If you print a bunch of money (Money Printer Go Brrr style [1]), you shouldn't be surprised when inflation follows.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/money-printer-go-brrr
I mean, in hindsight I do think there's a lot of truth to the idea that this cake was baked right around the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal (when the slant of media coverage of the Biden administration completely flipped for reasons that the media is very mad that you're asking them about) and inflation was a piece of the puzzle, but I said all along that switching the nominee wasn't actually going to make a difference because many of Biden's liabilities were not specific to Biden and would be transferred to any Democrat.
Well, the polls were pretty good overall, I think. And Biden was doing *much* worse in the polls. Given how close this ended up being in various states, the losses would probably have been much larger. Imagine Trump winning New Jersey, 59 Republican senators...
I actually think that downballot Democrats would've found it easier to distance themselves from Biden than they were from Harris.
I don't really understand how you are going to reduce educational polarization, I know Matt goes on about the people running the party but what are the issues normie college educated Democrats are going to be willing to compromise on? Note that RAISING taxes is now strongly negatively polarized where low education voters/areas will vote against progressive tax increases or larger government programs. It's not like the "What's the Matter With Kansas" days where the social issues were outweighing economic issues... economic issues are literally reverse polarized on education (highly educated voters vote for higher taxes and larger benefits)
The only path I see is that DJT eventually passes from the land of the living, his unique gravitas and hold over low-propensity voters cannot be replicated, and the relatively few educated elite who remain in the GOP gradually turn back the knob of heterodox, frankly stupid stuff like crushing tariffs and isolationism.
But that's not a plan, that's a combination of a calendar and several unrelated hopes.
This may be the most I've ever agreed with you.
I think that's possible, but I also think that it's possible that Trump is more of a liability in other regards that could offset this.
The thing is, Trump's liabilities are what keeps the party from turning in on itself.
I'd expect a Pres Vance to still go along with his own ideological obsessions, some of them involving tariffs (he'd probably govern pretty close to Biden on this one actually), and various other culture-war grievances.
But Vance doesn't have a "IDGAF" attitude about how he presents himself. He's not erratically incompetent, he has an actual agenda. Whatever a Pres Vance decided on, would become the party's basic platform going forward, and would start to ossify among that elite into an orthodoxy the way Reaganism did 40 years ago.
So, it's not like the elite would EXACTLY be turning back the knob away from the heterodox; it's just that the heterodoxy would become the new orthodoxy without Trump constantly disrupting and chaotically redefining it. Even a "competent Trump" figure (like Vance) who could do the demagogy while still having an agenda, would not disrupt that agenda in order to keep doing the demagogy, because although he'd understand the demagogy as vital to his political survival, he'd have too much baseline psychological inhibition to let himself be erratic enough to keep the heterodoxy fresh the way Trump does.
And if the heterodoxy is going to tend towards ossifying into orthodoxy, then that orthodoxy will come to feel boring and stop keeping new voters churning into his coalition. An orthodoxy can be attacked and organized to counter against.
Like in "Fahrenheit 451," I'm memorizing sections of Bastiat's "Economic Sophisms" to preserve that knowledge for future generations!
My hot take is that we should reduce education polarization with YIMBY housing policy.
City dwellers vote for Democrats. Once we get back to having cheap housing in cities, then Dem voters can become poorer and less educated on average.
But as long as urban housing is so expensive that only educated people can live in cities, it won’t matter how many giveaways we do for the unions.
I'm all about YIMBY housing policy. That said, check the data for NYC from yesterday (graph on Nate Silver's Substack: https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-story-of-trumps-win-was-foretold). The Republican share of the vote there has been increasing steadily since 2016.
I’m going with defund the police is 90% responsible. When Chesa Boudin got recalled in SF! The shark had well and truly been jumped.
It's hard. As a society we've overemphasized a college degree in most every way possible. A lot of this is a cultural problem that is difficult to reverse.
To Benjamin's point upthread, changing how higher education is supplied could force the cultural problems into line.
Absolutely, but what's the mechanism to do it?
Redirecting student loan money away from/beyond college would be a start.
I get what you are trying to say here but on the other hand how do you think your conversation with the average upper middle class (but not a political superfan, so just authentically invested in abortion, medicaid, etc) voter is going to go? Do you think you're going to be able to make a persuasive case they should moderate on their issues or lean more into RFK jr. style crankery?
The trump camp is full of fucking buffoons and led by a huge idiot and honestly that's part of the appeal. Do you think that's a cultural problem with college-educated voters?
#10 second half is almost the most worrying to me.
I find the lackadaisical European attitudes toward defense and smug free-riding incredibly frustrating, but I worry that they will mess things up terribly in the event of a rapid US exit. It's going to be difficult to thread the needle between "Don't worry, they'll stay east of the Oder" and "We should probably also be ready to defeat our EU neighbors."
Throughout history preventing a unified continental European military has been a top strategic priority of the UK, and I worry that they may play spoiler.
I'm less concerned with the EU's relationship with Russia (which I think has little effective combat power at this point), and more concerned with their relationship with China. This has been memory-holed, but at the very end of Trump's last term the EU was very close to signing a huge free trade deal with China, and they only pulled out because the Chinese were dumb enough to let a small sanctions dispute spiral out of control. Macron and Merkel were enthusiastically for it.
An EU that (rightly) sees the US as a highly unreliable partner is going to be very motivated to join Pax Sinica. That's the real global shift that will start to mark the end of US hegemony
“ An EU that (rightly) sees the US as a highly unreliable partner is going to be very motivated to join Pax Sinica.”
After what China’s done to the German economy that’s highly unlikely.
One mitigating factor is that Russia's absolutely destroyed so many of their resources by getting stalemated in this war. Even if they do conquer Ukraine, they are not going to be in good position to push further for a very long time.
If ever, given the demographics of Russia. IIRC the Communist Bloc was well ahead of the West in terms of sub-replacement fertility rates (in part due to their own errors, i.e. China's one-child policy) and doesn't have immigration to backstop it.
If Russia defeats Ukraine, all of Ukraine's resources will be folded into Russia's portfolio. That has been the protocol for a long time. It is similar to how Russia is starting to struggle with sufficient manpower to continue meatwave assaults and is now getting troops from North Korea and continuing apace.
"4. Cut off education polarization now. Stop fetishizing academic higher education as something that everyone needs. Work on helping youths become employable as young as feasible when they become adults, with a wide array of paths available to do so."
I don't think that higher education is "fetishized" - if anything I see a trend (especially among the young) in disparaging the value of higher education. I despair that we cannot see the value in educating more engineers, health providers, and scientists (among many other important professions that require college degrees) in our own country. We need a major overhaul in higher education, how it is provided and paid for, for sure, and I'm not saying that every college degree is equivalent. But I see a general turn against any college degree as elitist and unnecessary, and I think that is going to massively set us behind competing countries such as China and India that are educating tons of innovators (given their population advantage, they simply can have far more engineers, scientists, and healthcare professionals). And then the US just imports educated people from other countries to work these jobs (again, not against smart people immigrating to our country, there is a lot of benefit all around there, but I don't see why we seem determined to denigrate higher education for our own citizens instead of recognizing all of the future-facing jobs that DO and WILL require higher education and figuring out how to get more people those degrees and jobs).
So I go to college and I get a degree and then I earn more money. Are my higher earnings a result of:
1. Human capital – College taught me new things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, leveraging this additional knowledge makes me a more productive employee, I capture part of my increased productivity with higher wages.
2. Signaling – I got into a selective college and successfully graduated, employers can conclude I am reasonably smart and hardworking and will preferentially hire me over others they know nothing about.
3. Credentialism – My employer has an HR department which wants hiring decisions to be “transparent”. The hiring manager will be hassled if they hire someone other than the most educated candidate, so they are tempted to hire the candidate with the most credentials, regardless of whether they think they’re well suited for the job.
If the answer is human capital, then higher education is a societal good which we should be encouraging. If the answer is signaling, well, that means it is serving some purpose, but we probably can find some less wasteful way for employers to find out who is smart and hardworking. If the answer is credentialism, then more higher education is pure waste in service of zero-sum competition and should be discouraged as much as possible.
In the background is the fact that we're currently going through a crisis of crashing fertility rates, which means we should take a very hard look at any policies that are going to delay the onset of productive work and subsequent family formation.
The answer to that question probably heavily depends on what degree you got, from what school, and what job you are applying to. Do I think that a person with an engineering degree from an accredited state school has higher human capital for a civil engineering position than a high school graduate? Absolutely I do, and they should be compensated accordingly. I'm not going to dig into every possible example, there are cases that probably fall into each category and many that are a combination. Regardless, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater and paint every college degree as 2s and 3s.
I like future engineers taking rigorous engineering classes too, but that’s a small part of the current US higher education industry as a whole. My view is that right now, the marginal person choosing to go to university and get a degree is learning very little that will improve their future productivity.
So, whatever private benefits the marginal student gains from going to college are outweighed by the social costs, so this isn’t something we should be encouraging or subsidizing, at least not to the extent we currently are.
But I think the solution to that problem is not to denigrate college as a whole, but to initiate more efforts and dialogue around encouraging and enabling (including financially) enrollment (and graduation) in majors most conducive to building a stronger and more innovative US workforce. I think we should incentivize more people to go into those fields, not just say “well college is useless and too expensive anyways!” and then just fill in the gaps with people educated in other countries.
I know this is a slightly different argument but the overall context of the thread is trying to reduce educational polarization... would it be good for our politics to induce educational polarization by having fewer people with college educations in the electorate? Are people without college educations more likely to have correct political views?
I don’t see why reducing the share of voters with degrees will induce more education polarization? My instinct is that the opposite would be more likely.
(I’d guess: Fewer educated voters -> They’re not important as a voting bloc -> Their views just don’t get incorporated into party platforms -> Education in itself depolarizes)
Look, I don't think you need a higher education to be Candace Owens. I hate to say this, but liberal artists don't need to go to college. But what about in medicine? Engineering? hard sciences that improve the world? Education is really important. I don't want my surgeon getting his degree from the department of memes.
But you just listed the reasonable majors. 40 years ago, when I was a philosophy major, we studied Mill and Kant and Locke and a few continental dead white guys, and it was a true discipline. Now the humanities are much mushier and largely shaped by colonizer/colonized dichotomy. I'm extremely sad about that. But when the only plausible majors are STEM, you do start to wonder if traditional universities are as valuable as they used to be.
With all due respect, I think that is truthy folklore if what you are talking about are humanities programs at selective colleges/universities and state flagships. Speaking as a father of two recent English majors, a philosophy major and a history major. There are sub-topics and some classes that bend to leftier-than-thou rhetoric but my casual observation would be that lots of substance and critical thinking remains in the humanities and at least some social sciences.
I hope you're right. I'm dismayed by the course listings at my own alma mater, but my own alma mater was always a little earthy-crunchy-lefty. It's just gotten worse, apparently, and of course I've gotten older. Not crankier, though; I was always cranky.
Yeah, granted that the mushier leftier-than-thou stuff is much less the province of "traditional" humanities/social sciences departments (like, well, English, philosophy, and history) and much, much more about "gender studies" and that sort of crap that largely didn't exist 30 years ago.
There's a trend among the young (largely encouraged by their parents) of disparaging education in general, not just higher education. There's a reason why school vouchers are getting pushed every-fucking-where and homeschooling is exploding.
Ukraine is in deep trouble. Elon and Trump are having secret discussions with Putin and now they are both in power. There is also the open question of the US functionally pulling out of NATO once Trump is in power, since Trump and Vance are not on board with it.
Where can we read about these secret discussions?
https://apnews.com/article/musk-putin-x-trump-tesla-election-russia-9cecb7cb0f23ccce49336771280ae179
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-had-as-many-as-7-private-calls-with-putin-since-leaving-office-bob-woodward-writes-in-new-book
All three articles cite Woodward citing one anonymous source, and everyone involved denied it.
"Musk and Putin have spoken repeatedly about personal matters, business and geopolitics, The Journal reported Thursday, citing multiple current and former officials in the U.S., Europe and Russia." That's not one anonymous source.
The statement by Steven Cheung isn't a strict denial. It's more of a character attack on Woodward: "Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, derided the reporting as “made up stories” and said the book is a work of fiction that could double as toilet paper.
“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung said in a statement.
He added: “President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue. Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality.”
The second paragraph isn't a denial. The first paragraph is a statement of made-up stories but doesn't specifically say Trump isn't talking to Putin.
I could maybe accept the Journal story if I have time to read the actual story, but you're playing semantic games saying that denial is not a denial.
Point me to where Elon Musk and Trump specifically deny speaking to Putin.
Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, derided the reporting as “made up stories” and said the book is a work of fiction that could double as toilet paper.
“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung said in a statement.
This is directly from the article you linked, maybe you should read the articles first?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-kept-touch-foreign-leaders-putin-leaving-office-rcna174762
The reason Ukraine has been struggling is because they have not been given *enough* aid. It's unclear how the Trump/Vance plan to terminate aid would rectify that.
To be fair, Ukraine also made some bad decisions of their own (delayed mobilization, not building fortifications, etc.), but yeah, when North Korea is (arguably) a better ally than the United States, that's a bad situation!
Harris is on record as being less concerned with escalation than Biden. By the way, Ken, if Republicans win the House, they will own it all, and you won't have the national Democratic party to kick around. You'll have to engage with what the Republicans actually do as opposed to always turning it back on the Democrats.
The Republicans currently control the House and the Supreme Court. Those don't count somehow? I thought we were living in divided government.
Fair to think ukraine is in trouble and fair to realize the likelihood of it getting much worse just increased dramatically
I think it's telling that, according to most reporting, Russia's preferred president was Biden [1], who is predictable and timid. It's possible that Harris would do more of the same, but there are reasons to believe that Harris would take more risks. At a minimum, getting rid of Jake Sullivan would likely be an improvement.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-06/trump-or-harris-for-putin-the-choice-isn-t-so-clear-cut?sref=ujjUxZdM
Item 4 is so wrong. Absolutely no one in the Democratic party is fetishizing higher education. Democrats have been including more encouragement for trade school and community college and apprenticeship programs since at least Obama. There's very little 'top-down' pressure to remove - sure the government can remove requirements for college degrees for its own jobs where possible, but beyond that, this an organic phenomenon.
The world is more competitive and college offers a competitive edge in getting good, high-paying jobs. That's why more people are going to college. There is nothing more complicated to it, and no lever that Democrats can pull to stop that.
So if your prescription for The Democratic Party is 'they should encourage fewer people to go to college', I think that's simply an unworkable idea.
I think this is overstated. Washington D.C. is run by Democrats. They recently started requiring that new police officers have at least 60 hours of college credit. They recently imposed a requirement that childcare workers in the district have associates degrees. So not everyone in the party has got the anti-college memo.
Re: “the world is more competitive” – This part is actually a policy choice too, not an inevitable law of nature. We chose to lower marginal tax rates, which means we have more income inequality, which makes competition for higher incomes more intense. We chose to negotiate free trade agreements premised on the idea that we should export tech, intellectual property, and consulting and financial services and import manufactured goods. We chose to require a bunch of paperwork and/or lawsuits for every new construction or resource extraction project in this country.
"and no lever that Democrats can pull to stop that"
Yes there is, reduce student loan subsidies. You may not want to do it, but it is there.
Comprehensively disagree on 5, totally agree on everything else, I guess that means a like.
It's obviously always going to be unknowable, I will very much cede that. A candidate completely free of the Biden administration might have very well still lost, but losing less matters, especially with 6 year Senate terms at stake.
In retrospect, it looks to me kind of like 2012--an election that was "close", but was also ultimately quite certain.
It was close because they nominated Trump. Any other normal R nominee, and Biden probably would not have even bothered stepping aside because it would have been known that the race was just unwinnable. Polling would have been like 52-48 for Rs the whole way with a normie nominee.
a norminee
i expect to be the featured comment of the week for this one
Yeah, I think Niki Haley was like +10 over Biden in head-to-head polling earlier this year. You need to take that with a grain of salt of course but seems like the only reason there was any chance at all for Dems this cycle was that they were running against Trump
I was listening to his victory speech and my GOD he sounds so old and tired.
Yup, while this was still a very solid Trump victory, it seems very likely that "generic Republican" would have completely run the table. Trump is historically unpopular, which I expect is something many voters will rediscover once he actually takes office.
I definitely think a lot of Trump voters are going to have some "I fucked around and found out" moments in the next four years
This is why I'm scared to engage TOO much with my questions about turnout. I don't want to end up looking like Karl Rove asking where the "missing white voters" are.
But at the same time, we definitely need to explain the massive drop in Dem turnout. It's easy enough to understand that Trump kept his coalition the same size. It's harder to explain precisely how Dems lost as many as 10M people -- ON NET. Which means they actually lost a LOT more than the perhaps 1M or so they probably gained from people who flipped on Trump over J6.
Agree - 5 seems pretty hard to resolve. There was so little time to find a new candidate. If there had been a short nasty fight, that one who won the nomination would still have lost the election, and we would all be wishing they had just passed the baton painlessly to Harris.
I'll push back on 2 and advise that the lesson needs to be that you really need to look at underlying economic conditions when figuring out whether spending priorities make sense or not. Periods of extreme low inflation and high unemployment is actually a very good time to spend money and yes expand the welfare state. But outside of this paradigm, there are real limitations to this strategy.
I feel like we are in agreement here--the only mitigating factor is the stress and the uncertainty that the pandemic caused that I mentioned downthread. If a recession happens, then yes money printer go brrrr, but otherwise Democrats need to observe TANSTAAFL hardcore.
Pretty good points, but I think 2 is off. The economy was objectively worse under Obama, with lower growth and employment. Trump tax cuts and Biden stimulus made things a lot better.
I think people are just delusional. Yeah eggs went up by $0.50, but it's easy to find a job, and the value of your home and 401k are booming. I've had conversations with family that are claiming unemployment has skyrocketed when it's obviously not true.
I think that's a pretty good list. I'd just add that Democrats need to rebalance what is popular among the ideologues who have an outsized voice in the party vs. public opinion.
That's likely an important part of point 1.
On your SCOTUS point, I could see Alito retiring next year, but I'd expect Thomas to stick around until June 20, 2028, when he'll pass William O. Douglas as the longest serving Justice in history. With the 2026 Senate map looking as bad as it does for Democrats, he could retire at the conclusion of that term leaving plenty of time for Trump (or Vance) to replace him before the 2028 election.
Thomas has hinted before that he wants to enjoy some of his life in retirement.
Say, do you feel like being Twitter Archivist on what I gather is an Yglesias thread that hits on many of this post's themes? Jesse Singal linked it earlier: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1854154544164294986
Gonna post this as a top level comment so it doesn't get buried by my wall of text.
Re Supreme Court - good riddance to Alito and Thomas. Barrett and Kavanaugh are not nearly as bad.
And Gorsuch is the highest variance.
On my bingo card for this week:
Andrew Sullivan this Friday: "Of course Harris lost, because she's an incompetent hack who is too far to the left! She should have pivoted to the center more convincingly!"
Freddie de Boer today or tomorrow: "Of course Harris lost, because she's a soulless shill who is too close to the center! She should have tacked to the left! Something something capitalism imperialism uniparty bad!"
Me: [screams into pillow]
What's funny is that, before he deleted a lot of his old blog (hence: not findable now), Freddie made what I thought was a really incisive point, which is that part of the nature of wokeness is that you treat it as a given that the country is virulently racist, everything-phobic, etc., but you also treat it as unthinkable that you would soften any of your expectations as far as what is achievable in the current political moment. The quote was something like, "[Progressives] talk endlessly about how badly they're losing, but do it in the superior voice of someone who's running up the score." I think it's a good point, but I think it applies on economic issues just as much!
Freddie's lack of self-awareness is truly stunning. Probably the lowest self-awareness-to-intelligence ratio I've ever seen.
Was it this post, e.g. point 5 "fatalistic"? https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means
No, his ollllld blog.
I think the truth that Freddie will never see as a leftist and that Sullivan seems to only get in the vaguest of ways is that the voting population anchors at something like 1. socially 'inchoate, vaguely populist, left of the Evangelicals but way, way to the right of Freddie and the average progressive pundit' and 2. economically 'interventionist so long as it doesn't cause other problems that are annoying to me [like, but not limited to, inflation and high interest rates].'
There's no secret army of leftists to take over the Democrats from the axis of Clintonites and cultural liberals in charge now, nor is there a principled mass of small-l liberal conservatives looking to turn the electoral balance for either party.
It's crazy how the election has confirmed everyone's priors!
100% on FdB. Last night one of the PBS panelists thought a / the biggest driver was Harris not campaigning with Bernie and AoC.
AOC has fallen out of favor with Freddie; he now considers her an amoral shill too.
I just don't have the heart to look at FdB's Substack today. I want to keep what tiny crumbs are left of my sanity.
I won't read any comments on ACX for the same reason.
Agreed on Freddie, but the ACX comment is slightly confusing; is there a cohort there that is more political than I’d realized?
Scott Alexander supported Harris, but there’s a sadly large contingent of Trumpy, right-wing dudebros among the ACX commenters, with a nice big dash of sexism for spice. I just don’t have the heart to read the “yay Trump” and “cry feminist libturd, cry” comments I’m sure I would find there.
Gotcha. I think if anything you’re far underrating the quality of the commentariat there; maybe Hanania’s audience or something matches that description but the right-wingers I’ve interacted with on ACX have uniformly been much better-behaved.
Post-election: the time when everybody in the losing party gets to pretend if the party were just more like them, they'd have won. Because we all know our positions are the only ones that will win and work!
In that spirit, I'll note that Harris failed to propose banning trucks with high grills and didn't pledge to ensure every school dismantled their parking lots while implementing bike buses. Obviously, she was doomed to lose!
Money quote from TFA: "Doing a better job of making California and New York growth-oriented jurisdictions will naturally make Democrats seem less like a party for rich snobs who don’t mind high taxes and bad services because they’re insulated from the struggles of daily life. "
I think if they can solve that, everything else would follow nicely.
As a New Yorker I’m not going to hold my breath.
As a Californian, likewise.
As an ex-New Yorker (I live in an even bluer state now :), I agree.
Hochul-mentum!
Yeah, actually proving you know how to govern would be a good start in trusting the party with more power
While I am also not holding my breath, I completely agree. As an ex-Californian, I am furious with my home state and it’s leaders’ total disregard for normal people that want to buy homes and raise families.
Unfortunately, the nimby candidate seems set to win our local mayor election in Irvine.
I expect nothing less from Irvine lmao
Dang, that’s a real shame.
>>The fusion of Trump with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, poses perilous risks.
RE this, I don't think we should underestimate the Entropy Of Victory. Trump will eventually sour on Musk when the happy vibes wear off.
Musk does seem to have a knack for alienating everyone who attempts to get close to him professionally or politically, so I really hope this pans out.
As does Trump. Maybe the double negative charge will bring them together.
Indeed, the history of Musk and Trump has not been so smooth. The alliance is a recent thing and may not last long.
I mean it's very clearly an alliance of convenience: Trump needed Musk to boost his chances of winning the election (both through donations and social media boosting) and Musk needed Trump to avoid facing criminal charges/civil penalties/lost government contracts under a Harris administration.
I do think we can blame some of Trump’s win on Elon buying Twitter. I hardly ever open Twitter, but a Trump ad would hit me first thing every time I did, and I’d even get trump ads as notifications! Pair that with every comment thread on Facebook/youtube/whatever being full of Trumpy bots and trolls and the bad guys just were able to plant brain worms better
Agree. I also think people overrate Vance's status as the successor. Why would Trump prop Vance in 2028 when he can prop up Don Jr?
I don’t see Trump ever bothering to prop up Don Jr. while he’s alive, and I don’t see Don Jr. winning a primary after Daddy’s dead.
More likely is that Carlson or Vance turns Jr. into a chained monkey to play Daddy’s greatest hits.
Donald/Don Jr. strikes me as more of a Logan Roy/Kendall relationship.
Kendall was at least half competent through all the drugs and bipolarness. He ran large chunks of the company for Logan and had a pretty reasonable expectation at the outset to get the nod.
Don Jr. has never had a successful enterprise that wasn't grafting off his own father's graft, and even most of those he's failed at. Ivanka's the smart one, which means Jared probably ends up being the Tom in this scenario. I would be a LOT less surprised by a post-Trump Jared-Carlson-Vance triumvirate fighting over control of the party, than by Don Jr. occupying Jared's spot on that roster.
It's weird how your fight over control of the party post-Trump only includes Trumpy figures!
While we're on it, why would Joe Biden prop up Kamala Harris when he could have propped up Hunter?
The moment Trump thinks Musk is upstaging him, it’s over
(Mailbag question) why is Mexico the only country where the incumbent's party/chosen successor won resoundingly this year? Why are they the only country where, in an era of high inflation, the incumbents are popular? (Or did Mexico not have particularly high inflation?) Sheinbaum not only won the presidency there, but AMLO/Sheinbaum's party I believe has a supermajority. Could we be learning something from crafty ol' AMLO?
As someone from Europe married to a Mexican and living there: it's a class/inequality issue, and there's not a ton to learn for more-equal/richer countries.
Mexico is effectively two societies and cultures that almost exclusively interact as employer-employee: the (small, well off to very rich, European-looking) elite and the (vast majority, very poor to pretty well off, indigenous/mixed) working class. There's not a ton in between, and very few working class people manage to participate in elite society effectively.
What happened from a high level is that after ~80 years of 1-2 elite ("neoliberal", center-right/right) parties winning consistently without significant improvement to working class lives (relative to the excesses of the elite), they finally "realized" they outnumbered the elites and voted in one of their own, who spoke in their language, to their concerns, and implemented some targeted short-term-good long-term-bad measures they saw the benefits of.
The economy may still be bad, violence may still be high, and politicians may still be shady, but that's the way it's always been. If someone's going to screw us, let it at least be one of us. They're not going to give up on their newly-gained vote so easily.
The more interesting elections in the coming decades (Mexico has presidential elections every 6 years) will be the Morena primaries, and potentially against future working class opposition parties.
Yeah, pretty much -- Mexico is pretty instructive for the rest of Latin America but might as well be on a different planet than Europe in this respect.
"they finally "realized" they outnumbered the elites and voted in one of their own, who spoke in their language, to their concerns, and implemented some targeted short-term-good long-term-bad measures they saw the benefits of"
This sounds strangely familiar...
Populism in a nutshell, just from the left wing rather than the right.
Very insightful - thanks for sharing. I've long been puzzled by how AMLO remained so popular despite seemingly doing nothing special.
This is a fascinating question and I can't find much on it but I find this:
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/how-amlo-became-latin-americas-fiscal-hawk/
"However, AMLO is turning out to be a fiscal hawk in times of crisis – to an extreme that few would have imagined. Mexico has insisted on avoiding, as much as possible, any increase in debt issuance. As a first course of action, the government announced the combination of stabilization fund usage and hefty payroll cuts for upper-level government bureaucrats."
It's interesting because its written in 2020 and the sub-head points towards this hawkishness being a problem given COVID-19. Ironic that a lefty was the one that swam against the conventional-wisdom and ended up being one of the only incumbents to save his party because of it (if indeed this is the case).
Mexico isn't the only country; it seems to be much more specifically a first-world issue.
One big difference is that the Mexican opposition (and much of the opposition across Latin America) can't demagogue on migration, which is only a minor annoyance to voters since migrants are only passing through Mexico. Whereas the right wing has very successfully demagogued the issue across the developed world.
Does India fit into the “first-world” pattern here, with the BJP losing strength in their recent elections?
No. BJP lost less than a percentage point in vote share. The opposition had a better strategy of not competing with each other this time.
I do not know enough about Indian politics to have an answer to this.
It should be noted that illegal immigration from Bangladesh is a long-standing issue in Indian politics.
That’s factually incorrect about Mexico.
Explain.
For my job, I happened to spend time last week touring some factories in the same area in NC where Trump held his final rally last Saturday. Talking to owners and workers about their #1 issue was eye-opening: How many times did you hear Biden or Harris express concern about how Section 321 of the U.S. Tariff Act creates unfair competition for U.S. manufacturers because of the de minimis exemption? (For that matter, how many times has Matt Yglesias written about it?) Under the rule, goods under $800 are imported duty-free, including from China. It's very easy for Temu and other vendors to package and ship items that fall just under the $800, including large items like mattresses. There have been recent layoffs in NC, MI, WI, and GA from many of all kinds of industries that point to this exact problem, along with what is seen as a lack of CBP, USTR, and Dept. of Commerce enforcement of rules of origin for USMCA, CAFTA-DR, and other deals-- which reflects on the Administration that manages those agencies. I talked with textile companies that had shifted their manufacturing focus, only to be undermined once again, and were laying off workers heading into the holidays. I'm an economist, a free trader. My point is what I heard last week was nothing but frustration that nobody in the White House (or Congress) seemed to care about their #1 issue. There was only one candidate (two counting Vance) pledging to do *something* about this, willing to come speak to factories and not just hold large rallies in Charlotte. (Mecklenburg County was already heavily for Harris.) I've met enough socially conservative people who preferred Harris personally and professionally, but "it's the economy, stupid"-- **their** economy. I think the Democrats missed an opportunity to peel off a lot of voters in NC by addressing a simple issue like de minimis-- a pledge to close that loophole would have gone a long way. Just picking a Midwesterner to be a VP candidate to speak their language seems condescending when he's not addressing the #1 issue that workers blame for their problems.
This is pretty insightful. I know there was some investigations on Temu and other drop shippers abusing the de minimis exemption to dump goods in the US but have not seen anything recently about it. I did notice a tick down in Temu spam though.
It’s the same in the Midwest. I wrote to my rep and senator about the de minimum exemption a few months ago and no response. Both were Republicans. Trump is the exception to the rule among Republicans. You have certainly started to see some shift with Rubio, Hawley, and Vance among others, but the Republican institutions are still the party of nationless capital and big business. There will be a huge opportunity for Democrats to take advantage of the inevitable Republican shift but there are frankly too many technocrats in the Democratic Party and not enough instinctual populists.
And this is somewhat of a critique of Matt. Macro economists and economic commentators need to talk to businesses and get out in the real world.
Indeed. Here's an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer from a factory owner: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article295062749.html
It seems like they did start to do something about this but probably too late to matter:
https://www.wiley.law/alert-Biden-Administration-Announces-Changes-to-De-Minimis-Trade-Exemptions-to-Address-Unfair-and-Unsafe-Imports-into-the-United-States
Mailbag thought/question: Accepting that global conditions put the incumbent at a massive disadvantage, I can't stop thinking about the ways in which the right has taken over both the political and "apolitical" media ecosystems, especially for men. You look at podcast charts, and it's either explicitly right or right-coded products at the top: Rogan, Shapiro, Theo Von, Lex Fridman. And then you look to other spaces that are, in theory, "apolitical" - streaming, video games - and nearly everything now has a right-leaning tilt. It's striking, and I think entirely part of the Democrats' inability to defend and advance their positioning with large constituencies. To pose a question... how does this change? While Politix and Ezra Klein Show are great, it would seem the key goal has to be to claim territory in more regular cultural media environments. Genuinely think there is a massive need for center-left "bro" media personalities and channels.
I think "gaming culture" overall is pretty "lib-coded" still, particularly when it comes to stuff like LGBT inclusivity. The incel gamergate /v/ 4chan stuff is real, but I would still view it as very much so the "counter-culture" within gaming.
Part of the issue, IMO, is that gaming spaces sometimes skew *too* far left, like borderline Marxist level, which can be pretty alienating to normal people in the same way that chud stuff is. When you just want to read a review of a video game but the person is talking about "late stage capitalism", it can be a big turnoff.
You could think of it as another manifestation of leftists capturing the discourse in unproductive ways.
Or when the newest Harry Potter game came out a few years ago, I saw some reviewer for a gaming site gave it 0/10 without even playing it because they deemed it problematic.
Yes, then it went on to make a billion dollars. Big disconnects between the gaming media and gamers (and it's not like a Harry Potter game is going to naturally attract a ton of alt right types, so this isn't all a 'gamergate' thing)
There's a big split here between video games writing and video games culture. Video game writing/journalism is certainly that way, which stems from the fact that it's probably the most precarious form of journalism out there.
I don't know who the big streamers are voting for, but I would bet that 90% of Gen Z only engages with gaming content that way, and all the kick streamers and a lot of the bigger twitch streamers are super trump-coded at least.
I really couldn't get into Disco Elysium mostly because of the difficulty but partly because of the heavy-handed politics. Yes, I'm that guy!
I think this sells it short. Yes the game is insane, but it's an exquisitely crafted novel/puzzlebox where everyone is insane. (except for detective Kim Kitsuragi, who's the real hero.) And I think it works.
I read about the creator's politics later, and while I sincerely disagree, I feel like I now more completely understand the game. Disco Elysium was written by a depressed Estonian Communist wrestling with how much the USSR fucked Estonia and the rest of Eastern Europe. But since he's a good writer, this cognitive dissonance becomes great set dressing for a murder mystery. Your mileage may vary.
Disco is a fascinating game because it's *so* beautifully done, but it's also *so* far up its own ass.
1000%
There are lots of apolitical podcasts with hosts with normie UMC left-leaning views. Unfortunately this means that whenever they veer into political content it is of the "everything is terrible, no one can afford anything" type
Yeah this is the real dichotomy -- it's explicitly right-wing content vs. antipolitical content. Right-leaning Zoomers get constant messages to vote for Trump; left-leaning Zoomers get constant messages to not vote for Democrats until they adopt Palestinian nationalism as a policy plank.
It's not just extreme Israel/Palestine or Marxist stuff, it's banal stuff like left-leaning gaming content creators complaining that no one can afford $70 video games (a 16% nominal increase since $60 became the norm in 2006) even though nominal median income is up 60% over the same period
That's a big part of the issue for sure. If you encounter left-wing content in gaming spaces, there's a decent chance it's literal Marxists talking about how US society needs to be broken down and rebuilt. It's exhausting if you just want to talk or read about games.
An example of *good* left-of-center content in gaming spaces is the general pro-LGBT attitude that is pretty prolific these days. It's a fundamentally positive, inclusive message that's easy to explain and justify ("don't be a dick").
UMC? (this might just show how out of touch I am, but the only acronym I'm coming up with is United Methodist Church)
Upper Middle Class
As a United Methodist I always think "United Methodist Church" when I see UMC.
For this to work you need to exclude essentially all popular music and mainstream film/tv though. The right has Kid Rock and Yellowstone and that's about it.
The splintering of pop music and mainstream film makes it harder for it to have dominating cultural salience, though.
It’s no more splintered than video games though.
Yeah; if anything, Taylor Swift is a bigger deal than any pop musician of the 1990s/2000s (granted, a lot of this is simple staying power and reinvention, but it *seems* like she's bigger than Britney Spears ever was.)
You probably have to go back to 1980s Madonna/Michael Jackson to get someone as big as Taylor Swift (less obvious to me whether Beyonce is as big). Certainly not Britney Spears/Lady Gaga/Katy Perry/etc.
I watch a decent amount of lifting content. The big youtubers don't seem outspokenly right wing, but there's a young-male-trolling vibe (jokes about sex that you wouldn't make in a professional context) that has massively polarized post 2016. Idk how to solve it, just an observation
“Why did Kamala lose in 2024?”
“The Democrats in their infinite wisdom made comedy itself right-coded”
It would be wild to go back in time to 2004 and try to explain to someone that the Republicans are coded as the leave-me-alone-I-say-what-I-want party, and the Democrats are the moralistic finger waggers.
The collapse in public religiosity: underrated factor!
In 2024, as a (non-evangelical/mainline) Protestant, I feel much more awkward/out of place in progressive/Democratic spaces than I did in 2004 and Democrats (and *especially* progressives) will spend exactly zero time pondering that this is a problem for them.
Can attest to this. Many progressive spaces now are anti religion/militantly secular. I think much of this comes from religious broadsides against queer and non-gender conforming people in general over the past 40 years.
I think that explains part of it but:
(1) they're militantly anti-religion even when the religion in question has been queer-accepting for years
(2) the militant anti-religion stance somehow doesn't apply to Islam, which is far more anti-queer than any Protestant denomination (unless you're counting, like, the Westboro Baptist Church as a denomination)
Also abortion views.
Agree but I think Republicans claimed even that gray area - saying “we’re the party that says it’s cool to make sex jokes” while the libs are all woke scolds. So even if those videos aren’t discretely promoting one side, Republican messaging and cultural positioning has made it so that those who think that stuff is funny feel they’re at home with the right. And I do think that stuff is largely fine and liberals need to relax.
Which is weird because the Republicans are also the party of the Christian Right and retrograde culture!
And yet Obama made a dick joke from the stage at the Convention.
The only acceptable sex jokes are those that belittle straight male behavior
Yeah, I think this phenomenon is much more the symptom than the underlying disease -- e.g. young men's alienation isn't because they watch Andrew Tate, but them watching Andrew Tate is a symptom of the problem.
Joe Rogan was a huge Bernie supporter! How on earth do you think he is right-coded? He's maybe anti-woke coded, but if that is enough to make something right-coded, that's on the woke people for driving everyone else away.
I think two slogans explain the problem: "The personal is political" and "Think globally, act locally."
There's a lot of lib-coded content that isn't afraid to be offensive and silly. Try Episode One.
“The pitiless machine’s impulse is to duck whatever can be ducked, rather than be caught punching left.”
This is exactly why it took me so long to get on board with the Democrats and why so many other people struggle to trust the Democratic Party. Actions speak louder than words—and people assume that when you go to great pains not to disavow lunatic extremists, and try your best not to be seen talking about them, that you quietly agree with them and are just trying to keep it under wraps until you can get into power.
And that inconsistency really does harm any effort to take the high ground against Republican extremism. Less involved voters on neither side just conclude that both parties are crazy. They’re not (at least not equally), but it would be a lot easier to make the case if there were any meaningful distinction in how the parties treat their nutjob extremists. It doesn’t really matter to less involved swing voters that one side is actively cynically using their extremists to gain power and the other one just lacks the backbone to stuff their nerds back into a locker. From the outside it looks the same, even if it’s not. (Plus, from a leadership standpoint, I’m not sure that “we’re afraid to stand up to our loons” is a better look than “we’re using them to get power.” I would be very leery of the ambitions for power expressed in the latter statement, but would be alarmed at a more fundamental level by the cowardice of the former.)
When I spent time looking at various Trump supporters making their case in the past month or so, an overwhelming theme I saw was the belief that a Harris Presidency would do things like:
* Do cancel culture super hard
* Reinstate masking/lockdowns and go super hard on mandatory vaccines
* Double down on DEI
* Outlaw fracking
* Have the most permissive possible immigration policy
And like, I think that is all more-or-less wrong. Probably Harris wouldn't have done any of those things, and I think that in fact the Democratic party has been trying to quietly distance itself from all of those excesses. But the key term there is QUIETLY, and I think what was needed was some amount of a hard break and reset.
>Actions speak louder than words—and people assume that when you go to great pains not to disavow lunatic extremists, and try your best not to be seen talking about them, that you quietly agree with them and are just trying to keep it under wraps until you can get into power.
A thousand times this.
"that you quietly agree with them and are just trying to keep it under wraps until you can get into power."
as a center left Republican that's definitely what I think. Then when Harris talks about packing the supreme court, or trans gender illegal aliens in prison getting sex changes on tax payer dime, it confirms it for me.
So glad you continue boring this hard board!
When I was slogging through my workout early this morning, I kept thinking "the boring is slow, the boards are hard, the boring is slow, the boards are hard" etc etc
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
Mailbag Question:
What can we do right now to most effectively pressure Congress to limit the President's tariff powers during the lame duck?
I'm cranky today, but I think we should let the voters get the tariffs they were craving.
Stupid face, I'll teach you to have a nose.
Implies this face can actually be taught anything. Unsure.
Sacrificing for the people
Let him tariff. Higher prices seem to be the main thing the electorate responds to.
Why should Democrats stop voters from getting what they wanted? Let them enjoy it.
"Democracy is the belief that the people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard."
He'll tariff and then provide exceptions for CEOs that grovel.
Seeing as the House is obviously not going to pass something on its own volition, it would require a discharge petition. I believe there have only been 2 successful discharge petitions in American history. So, tough odds
I thought this was actually an intrinsic constitutional question, thus much harder to address in this way. But I'm not that kind of doctor.
https://x.com/scottlincicome/status/1854153540958105740
What can we do to fight tariff mania once Trump is in office?
Perhaps if the tariff was sufficiently large and across the board, a bright liberal lawyer could convince SCOTUS that it was functionally indistinguishable from a VAT and thus outside of executive branch powers.
I’d find a bright conservative lawyer to do it. But yes.
If only we had an activist SCOTUS.
Too soon? ;-)
I am not the right person to criticize the Democratic Party. I am not a Democrat. I do not share Matt's New Deal concerns about the welfare state. I am all for securing the border, I am more hawkish on foreign policy. I identify as a Pro-Life Conservative who prefers the government be as small as necessary for our daily lives to function. My vote only became available for Democrats because Republicans nominated the worst possible nominee for President, and then proceeded to defend that choice through thick and thin for what will now become 12 miserable years of ghastly fights. I was, and am, prepared to accept all manner of policy disagreement to see Trump go down. Honestly, one hope I had for 2024 was finally being able to feel like I had a choice again, sadly with the return of Trump it's not.
So personally, my concern about the Democratic Party is entirely based on its ability to defeat Trump. I thought in 2022 Biden was the better choice. I was wrong, I was skeptical that Harris was the right choice but I also feared what would happen if the party kicked off an internal fight months before the election. In hindsight from here: I am unsure any of that mattered that much. This election would have been a landslide had ANYONE but Trump been the Republican nominee.
I don't know how bad a Trump second term will be, my fear is it will be incredibly bad. I personally think he'll at least try to find a way to run in 2028. I don't care if he says this is his last election, I don't believe him. I think the GOP will oblige him, and I don't know who will be able to stop him. More importantly, I think he'll keep taking a wrecking ball to the guardrails surrounding our democracy. Guardrails don't exist to constantly take a ton of heat: they exist to keep politics in the middle lane. I fear a few more body blows will break them, or cause them to break next time (and with Trump's success there will be a next time).
I will conclude with this: Democrats made zero effort to bring people like me into their campaign. They saw our disgust at Trump and took us for granted, and plenty of Democrats adamantly said that their party should offer voters like me: nothing. Exactly nothing, they expected me to go along with them for free. And sure, I agreed with them (that's why I was in the tent in the first place) but I always felt this attitude was stupid and misplaced. Surely moderating more would have brought more voters into the tent.
But Democrats did not want a bigger tent, they wanted more power, and weren't willing to compromise to get there, and I think that cost them. If they want to win next time, they either need to get lucky or they need to moderate. I suspect they'll just wait to get lucky, Lord knows politicians hate hard choices.
Respectfully, Harris caught a lot of flack from the left (seriously a ton) for going hard at pro-Democracy former Republicans with her campaign and putting folks like Cheney in prominent surrogate roles. There's a strong argument to be made that her prioritization of this group led to a lack of dramatic new policy proposals that would signal a clearer break with Biden.
I do think Harris ran a strong campaign focused on a bigger tent over policy advancement, so I don't think it's fair to knock the party on that. I am genuinely curious, though, what someone like you would have liked to see - or alternatively, what you think could have lowered Trump's margins among traditional Republican voters.
To me: the fact that the Left attacked Harris for just CAMPAIGNING with Liz Cheney is what Matt is writing about, and that to me is the point.
What would I have liked from Harris? Several things:
-She could have emphasized how the US needs to advance economic priorities via trade, and how rewriting and reinforcing our agreements will help Labor and consumers lower costs and provide markets for export.
-She could have talked more about how American investment in industry will both create manufacturing jobs while increasing our military capability.
-She could have pivoted more on abortion to "safe, legal, and rare"
-She could have acknowledged fears that just accepting someone at their word on gender can lead to problems, so we need to police this more so there's a fair playing field in women's sport, prisons, and the like.
-She could have pivoted towards more deregulation, to free up land for oil drilling and solar panels alike.
There are plenty of things she could have done on the big picture level. But the problem isn't Harris: nobody in the Democratic Party was willing to do this, even Biden.
I am not claiming that any of this changes the result, I am simply agreeing with Matt's observation that Democrats were quite unwilling to cave on hard policy unless they had no choice. Even Sherrod Brown was unwilling to do it.
Even some symbolic gestures to separate herself from the far-left might have helped, like cracking wise about pronouns, or arguing for clearing homeless encampments. She could have argued going hard on immigration from a liberal perspective - arguing to aggressively go after companies that hire undocumented workers.
love the name
I think that's the wrong message. Liz Cheney is a failure and trying very very hard to get conservative votes doesn't win elections.
I think we share almost the exact same set of priorities except for public lands use, but I largely agree. No one in the center-right genuinely thought Kamala wanted anything to do with them – but I’m not sure exactly how effective outreach would have worked without alienating the Left more.
I don’t know either. What I do know is that the current strategy does not appear to be a winning one
Very much agreed. I’m not even sure Democrats now have a Bill Clinton type who could genuinely win enough “normie” voters to not have to worry about marginal coalition fracturing on the left flank. Ugh.
I just want to go back to a 2012. I would take a Romney-influenced GOP a million times over this disaster. We’ll see what happens.
I wasn’t alive then to know how that would have gone. Biden was that figure in 2020, I know it’s unpopular now to say it but he was
On one hand, I think this is true: "But Democrats did not want a bigger tent, they wanted more power, and weren't willing to compromise to get there, and I think that cost them." This is like MY writing about how the dems say Trump is a democracy crisis but play their hand like it's chance to shoot the moon." And I think "the Dems have effectively made the tent too small" is true and a fair critique.
The flip side is: I don't know if the tent could be made big enough to cover the entire left (the normies and the wing nuts) and bring in a small government pro life hawk. It's just a big reach.
Still, "they didn't come close" is fair - more is more sometimes. I feel for you - I don't think anyone in the system cares about small government or fiscal restraint anymore; one of my co-workers has the exact same views and there's nothing out there for him.
Possibly, and I have little patience or tolerance for the moronic fools on the Left who are (still) CONVINCED if ONLY Harris had promised the Bernie-Sanders-Revolution-all-would-be-well. As if Donald Trump did not just do a far better job getting out the vote than Bernie ever did. The irony of Trump being: The Freedom Caucus has done a MUCH better job winning swing districts than the Squad. My utter disgust at the (non-AOC) members of the Squad, who could not even bring themselves to ENDORSE Kamala Harris is quite high.
Again: I am not the right person to critique the Democratic Party because I do not think most of their voters really want me in their tent. They'll take my vote when they can, but only if it's free. I was not blind to this compromise: I welcomed it, and sniped from the sidelines praying they'd make the right choices to win. They did not.
Which is not to say I think this election is all on the stupidity of the Democratic Party. I don't blame Biden for pushing for full employment. The American economy is quite strong, in large part due to how Biden reacted. He did not get credit for it, but that's because economics are bloody hard. There's plenty of Monday morning (well, we're way past Monday but regardless) quarterbacking on his decisions, but if you look at the results they're pretty good. I don't think he could have prevented inflation no matter what pundits say. But just because the election is not a complete repudiation of all the Democratic Party stands for, the election revolving around inflation does not absolve them either.
yet the non AOC ran better than kamala in Michigan. Rashida Talib handily won her election.
The last person I’d take electoral advice from is Tlaib
I'm sorry that's just not true. They campaigned with Liz Cheney. Every damn ad I saw was "vote your conscience". They ignored Palestine because they didn't want to upset conservatives and ran on an unabashedly pro-center ideology. 15 million people stayed home. Only 4% of conservatives voted for Harris. You want to double down on courting republicans????
I think Matt is nice and a smart guy. However, I think he is just fundamentally wrong. He is pro policy wonkism; but that is not reality. Democrats have been listening to gentlemen like him for years, but unfortunately that is part of what lost us this election.
This is a hilariously unhinged take from reality
Same. I'm a never Trumper that might have been a getting vote if Dems had tried (starting in 2021 you can't wait till 2024). But instead I just wrote in Nikki Haley
I voted for Harris, but she did not try to get my vote
The one thing I can think of that might count is that she promised to bring up the bipartisan border bill (the one Trump killed) again for a vote and sign it if elected.
That was a bigger border concession than the Democrats wanted to do, and she promised to do it after winning when it had failed beforehand.
That said, thank you for doing your part to try to keep Trump out of the White House again.
I do not think Harris did that for me, per se, she did it because it was so bloody obvious that Americans were fed up with the border.
I've been mulling the Tracing Woodgrains post since you shared it earlier on Twitter, and especially the bit you highlighted here: "And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all."
The people who are prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters at law schools are annoying, sure. But they don't think that Kamala Harris represents them, either. A lot of them spend a bunch of their time complaining online about Democrats and maybe not even voting for Democrats. It doesn't seem like Kamala really gave them the time of day during the campaign (which I think was a good thing). So why is this a Kamala Harris / national Democratic Party problem as opposed to a law school problem that needs to be reckoned with? I guess the answer is because these extreme left-wing views on college campuses have been successfully linked to the Democrats' toxic party brand throughout much of the country. But the relationship between these views and national Democratic politicians' party positions seems often more perceptual than real (there are exceptions). The poster talks about how they disagree with Democrats on the issue of "excellence in education" like with a high school in Virginia closing. Why is this something we should expect Kamala Harris to answer for?
In the 2020 primary the Dems who weren't Biden were tripping over themselves to see who could get further out to the left...Harris was in that mess. I think that's one source of brand association.
The other is the complete deep blue control in the very progressive localities where far left views can get more traction.
The national Dem party leans into midwestern-kitchen-table-normie but kind of only when theres' an election on the line. :-)
"so why is this a Kamala Harris / national Democratic Party problem as opposed to a law school problem that needs to be reckoned with"
If those aren't the view of Karris and the democratic party then it's time for a LOT of hippy punching to distance yourself.
That never happened.
Thanks for responding. As someone who identifies strongly with the Democratic Party, it nevertheless wouldn't really occur to me that I'd have to tell people I'm not a prison abolitionist, don't support Hamas, etc. It seems so obvious -- I think of those as fringe views that are outside of the national party's agenda, no one would look at me and think I was a hippie, etc. And I don't really like punching anyone (metaphorically or literally) or like it much when politicians do that.
Anyhow, I'm not a political candidate. But just a perspective from a normie Dem who doesn't understand what national Dem political leaders can realistically do to confirm that yes, they are also normies, in the face of the kind of view expressed by Tracing Woodgrains.
It's a tough question
The same one republicans, faced with trying to convince people they're not racist
I think unfortunately for a lot of the electorate you would in fact have to make that explicit.
If you distance yourselves from hippies too much; they won't vote for you. if you don't have your base turn out, you lose elections.
I think that's really not true. 99% of your Dem voters were going to vote no matter what against Trump.
What you need are the small number of moderate/swing and or low information voters in the middle.
That's who determines who wins or loses. Not Columbia Hamas supporters
It can be easier to see this from the opposite direction. Part of the problem with Trump is all the bad stuff he says and does. But part of it is his supporters. Trump is saying moderate things on abortion and social programs. But do you believe him? Or do you listen to his supporters say and support extreme stuff and think a chunk of that becomes policy?
I’d also note I remember Obama telling his supporters some policies just weren’t feasible. I think people saw Trump do the same. A party leader who is popular enough and credible enough to push back on unpopular ideas I think is very popular with the public. Both Biden and Romney I think suffered from a view the party would walk over them.
That's a helpful perspective. I do believe that Trump is more moderate than his supporters on abortion and social programs and see that is a big part of his appeal. Perhaps that is some of why I do not understand why Kamala Harris is so easily tarnished by some of her supporters' extreme views -- especially because I don't think the prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters are actually Harris supporters or Democrats.
I see your point about Obama telling his supporters that some policies just weren't feasible. Things like prison abolition are so extreme for most people though that they can't be considered along the lines of "yes, in an ideal world we would do this but it's not politically feasible." They can be denounced, sure, but they're so far out of the political conversation that that even seems weird to me because it draws attention to a viewpoint that doesn't deserve to be elevated. The OP may encounter those ideas on a college campus, where people are also considering and debating numerous other "crazy" viewpoints, but I don't see them as an idea that has any meaningful support in the national Democratic party. There are unpopular ideas, and then there are UNPOPULAR ideas, you know?
> Why is this something we should expect Kamala Harris to answer for?
I think the fact is the country does associate them. Maybe partially it's driven by the right wing news apparatus, but it's also because in their heart of hearts most Democratic politicians are at least a little bit sympathetic to those views. I do think Dems have tried really hard to pander to rural white voters, but I don't think many of them really, really mean it. We're going to have to deal with this and find some who can speak to these voters authentically. It's not totally fair, but it has to be done.
Thank you for your response. Personally, I don't at all think most Democratic politicians are a little sympathetic in their heart of hearts to the idea that prisons should be abolished or that Hamas is good. Some state and local Dems, yes, and a few Congresspeople from the bluest districts, okay. But any Senators? Kamala Harris? Most of the party? Hard to know what is really in peoples' hearts, but I don't see that.
Of course, you are correct that rural white voters don't think that Dems or Harris are speaking to them authentically.
My mailbag question is simple:
Who should have Joe Biden have chosen as his vice president in 2020, and how much would that choice have mattered?
You can write a revisionist history where Biden picks a VP based on who's best suited to run in '24, but realistically the answer was, and still is, "whoever Jim Clyburn wanted".
Duckworth.
A non-white, multi-lingual mother, Daughter of the American Revolution, and most importantly, a veteran who's lost multiple limbs in war.
She was practically made in a lab.
And if she didn't want to do it, go with Klobuchar. She's pretty great, too.
It's important to remember that Biden was old and people knew it and were concerned about it in 2020. He needed a VP that could not only take over if necessary, but also run a winning campaign.
I think Walz was a costly choice for three reasons. First, Walz looks like Mr. Magoo. Second, Josh Shapiro could have made the difference in PA. Third, less well understood, Minnesota and Wisconsin are rivals--arch rivals. Here the Green Bay Packers are rivals. The Wisconsin Badgers are rivals. Walz may have helped Harris (somewhat narrowly) carry Minnesota but surely cost some votes in Wisconsin.
There was absolutely some truth to the Bulwark critique that Walz was an urban liberals' idea of what would appeal to rural medoerates (let alone conservatives). They both are aware that rural liberals exist - they find them weird, regardless of whether they know how to change a set of sparkplugs.
Honestly, Dems need to pull the plug on rural voters completely and just focus on the suburbs. The GOP is basically maxing out rural counties now.
The problem is there are a lot of suburban voters who culturally LARP as rural.
That is: there are a lot of suburban voters who identify as rural and appealing to that image of rurality is still relevant, even if appealing to the reality of rurality isn't.
ie: they're not actual farmers, you don't have to worry if your farm policy actually works, just say something they think will be good for their vision of what a farmer is like.
Rural white voters still don't vote as much as other demographic groups. There are a bunch more gains the GOP can wring out of them. Dismiss them and you may never win another election in most states in the country.
Looks like minnesota moved just as far right as wisconsin. The map is brutal. I don't think there's anything a VP pick could've done, but Walz seems to have actively hurt if anything.
I find the last part hard to believe. I don't think Minnesota voters would care if Evers was on the ticket. Heck, a lot of bucks fans cheered for the wolves during the playoffs. Doesn't make sense to extend the nfl/cfb rivalries
Yeah, it's a friendly rivalry, as most such are: and if a New York/Florida (or even Ohio) Republican had tried to attack on that basis, then they'd have very quickly lined up with the Minnesoatans against the outsiders.
To put a coastal analogy up: if you have a Boston RedSox/Celtics fan and a New York Yankees/Knicks fan, and then an LA Dodgers/Lakers fan walks into the room, you know which two are ganging up on the other one.
Making the difference in PA isn’t particularly relevant given how many swing states flipped.
Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Pritzker
I haven’t spent time in Illinois, so I haven’t yet seen what people like about Pritzker. My impression so far is that he’s a richer and maybe a bit nicer Gavin Newsom, but that’s about it. I haven’t seen him demonstrate the distinctive personality or sharpness of Klobuchar or Buttigieg.
He’s farther to the left, probably more than Newsom
As for this article, there's not much to say from me because it's unimpeachable. In order to change policy, you have to gain power. In a democracy, you have to win elections. You win elections and gain more power by having more people in your camp to vote for you. This just seems like Politics 101.
Upside comments (some snark may be involved here):
1. It'll be nice to see the Oren Cass crowd be decisively disproven on how tariffs work, or if they're good for the US economy. Maybe this'll lead to a future Congress restricting the President's power to set tariffs unilaterally
2. I am kind of excited to fire Lina Khan, Gensler, and Kanter- not gonna lie
3. Allan Lichtman completely freaking debunked- can't go wrong there
4. If the Dems do win the House (which would be kind of hilarious), they should bring back Pelosi as speaker. She's obviously highly experienced and tougher than a coffin nail, but also not ideologically insane, which is exactly what we need right now
Pelosi is undeniably one of the most effective House leaders in US history, but I think one of the big lessons of this election is that the oldsters should step aside sooner, not later.
Mailbag question building on discussion in earlier comments thread: per Ben's observation that Ds did not deliver on local governance, and the impact of the resulting disorder on election results in cities, how important a factor do you think this was? My guess is "very" but would like to hear your take.
Writing from Northern California, I think a lot of this is coming soon. The tough on crime prop passed. Dan Lurie won the SF mayorship as the most conservative of the lot. Several of the worst ultra progressive city counselors got axed. Rent control failed statewide.
Even people in SF can be normal!
Dan Lurie was not the most conservative. Mark Farell ran explicitly on Conservative Dem (There was also a Republican) and took 4th behind the Liberal Nimby. Dan Lurie ran as the most bland alternative to London Breed. What made SF great is the alignment of Grow SF basically running as normal dems and getting a strong field of candidates across every district (I think Grow SF's top 3 endorsement in the mayor was great at keeping the movement big tent).
The GrowSF group should be the model of how to run a political machine
Fingers crossed - that would be better for everyone!
I'm feeling like maybe the most underplayed theory of the election right right now is, "The Dem ticket was two of the avatars of 'D politicians who lost their fucking minds in 2020'". Harris/Walz had zero chance of not getting tagged with that boulder around their necks.
After hearing your and Sharty's responses downthread, I wonder if part of the explanation is that NIMBY simply broke the old-school political machines ALONG WITH the classic "growth machine" it intended to break.
Without a growth machine to make the urban political machine popular in cities, the local Democratic parties have no way to mass-organize voters to turn out and run up the score. They can still benefit from and win on general cosmopolitan liberal sentiment, but there's no enormous, constantly growing construction trade unions that are trading favors with the machine. Bridges and highways and even SOME new skyscrapers get built, but populations decline and stagnate because not nearly enough are getting built.
So basically you're left with dead cities that refuse to grow, and educated suburbanites who want to keep abortion legal but don't give a shit about the urban growth machine and even have deep suspicions about their urban cores' dying political machines.
Maybe? I don't know. The simpler "disorder" explanation is persuasive to me, but it's so in line with my own personal experience - I am so tired of seeing turnstile jumping, public urination, flagrant shoplifting, encampments and drug use in parks, and garbage on the sidewalk, as well as being harassed by aggressive people on the street, and so on - that it might be making me irrational.
The disorder is downstream of not having a growth machine in place.
no it isn't, haven't we discredited the idea that urban street crime is about poverty? It's not the case that the shoplifters or vagrants are actually construction workers waiting for an economic upswing.
You've illustrated what I think is the Democrats' biggest problem and vulnerability here. They are all absolutely allergic to talking about disorder and how under-policed our cities are. There are a ton of voters out there who are fed up with urban chaos and how radically ineffective our security forces are. But the vast majority of Democrat politicians and activists *hate* thinking or talking about that. They think that thinking or talking about that is, I'm not exaggerating, evil.
You may be right that policing and order are necessary to get things back on the right track. Like saving someone’s life with an epipen before you ever consider using challenge therapy to alleviate their allergy.
But the destruction of urban growth machines is what caused the crisis in the first place, and the persistence of NIMBYism is what’s ultimately keeping every attempt to use the epipen of policing from doing anything but temporarily alleviating the problem, instead of getting us back on a virtuous spiral.
I think you are on to something. Traditional urban growth machines would not have allowed public disorder to become so pervasive because it threatens the viability of downtown focused investments. In downtown San Diego where I work, there is an increased focus on public order but things had to get pretty bad first, and the pervasive police shortage and reluctance of police to deal with disorder issues limits the effectiveness. Also, Sam Quinones is right in emphasizing the role of the newer drugs such as fentanyl and modern meth in making "disorderly" people be extremely disorderly. It's not going to be easy to unwind.
NYC suburbs were bizarrely a bright spot for Ds, at the same time that the entire 7 train went MAGA
NJ is more affluent and professional than Nassau county and swung 10 points to trump
D's focus on turnout operations, but it strikes me that we never focus on election capacity. Why don't urban mayors do everything they can to cut down on long lines? To contribute staff to polling places to move people through?
Not sure all this would have saved us here. We're all still casting about right now. But still important questions to ask.
Where I have lived and voted in recent years, including in DC and NYC, my perception has been that this hasn't been a big problem, especially since early voting was introduced. I do recall standing in a longish line in 2016 (NYC), but it moved along pretty quickly. But maybe it's worse in other places? I'm not sure.
We never topped fifteen minutes. I agree that this problem is generally overstated (it's easy to film a single long line somewhere and then scream about it, just like it's easy to nutpick a goofball primary school teacher).
Fair.
NYC has like two weeks of early voting. I haven't waited in line in years.