There’s also something about seeing a young hopeful (almost naive) politician having his genuine convictions disciplined under the responsibility of governing (Obama/Mamdani) that makes people more sympathetic to policy shifts than seeing party hacks (Hilary/Biden/Harris/Newsom) try to flip flop to gain power.
He was flustered because its very tricky to make the main villains of a story the people who had bombs thrown at them while they were holding a peaceful (but maybe unsavory) rally - tough taking the focus off bombmakers pledging allegiance to ISIS in that narrative. Something that is especially embarrassing when your wife was just outed liking posts praising the 10/7 attacks and declaring the atrocities 'hoaxes'.
I'm skeptical. NYC just elected him overwhelmingly. Him and his wife coming from a leftist milieu where 10/7 attacks are minimized surprises exactly no one.
Does anyone like Gavin Newsom on a personal level? I respect Gavin’s talent as a political operative but I’m trying to make a distinction. Take Obama if not Mamdani.
Likewise. I think he's fine. Not electorally-optimal for a national election, mind you—but "fine" as in, intelligent, quick-witted, well-spoken, right on most issues, and so on. In another era he could have made a perfectly good standard-bearer for Democrats.
Every single clip I've seen of him, and every quote I've read, just feels wrong. I've said it before, and I'll say it again-charm is a verb, not a trait.
I never saw Hillary Clinton as much of a flipper. Her low favorables were driven by a heady mixture of: perception of corruption, unwillingness to suffer fools gladly, misogyny, and dislike (on the left) of her hawkishness.
And she really *was* to Bernie's left on immigration and gun control. Sanders was a traditionalist, pro-union immigration skeptic, as well as someone who realized large numbers of his constituents were gun owers.
I encountered Hillary Clinton twice while she was senator in NY. I was with my mother at a town hall sort of event, and my mother talked to her for a few minutes about some troubles we were having, Clinton was very genuine and took my mother's seriously, took our phone number and she followed up personally (on the phone) a month or so later to see how things were going and see how she could help. She didn't have to do that, she never advertised that she was doing it, but it meant a lot. I get some of the Clinton hate, but it rubs me the wrong way when people who she was some cold hearted calculated monster, my experience was that she was a good person who tried. I'll go to the mat for her as having been a great president if she were given the chance.
She was also ultra popular when she was Secretary of State! For some reason there are some rare politicians out there who are well liked between elections but hated during election season.
She was unfortunately most popular whenever she wasn't campaigning - she would've been a 3-term Prime Minister in an alternate America where a Radical Republican Congress completely defanged the Presidency after getting that extra vote to impeach Andrew Johnson.
I blame Bernie for Trump eking out a win in 2016. I will never forgive him for his petulance and calling for a contested convention when he lost by a landslide.
I blame Bernie for knuckling under to the podium-stealers and hecklers. It was bad leadership and created a permission structure for bad behavior.
One of the little-known aspects of prewar Japan is that the military had a shitty cultural quirk where junior officers could basically commit violent mutinies and then get away with it by claiming they felt compelled to take action in defense of the emperor. It helped drag the country into wars it wasn’t ready for, and also undermined the chain of command and various other power centers in a country that was actively being contested between those centers.
A similar thing happened starting with Bernie. His refusal to stand up to the activists paved the way for a shitty mutiny that we’re only just now starting to see peter out.
Didn’t he wait literally months to endorse her? He took steps that maximized the amount of dissension at the convention and afterwards. Contrast with her actions in 2008. I’m not saying that cost her the election, and certainly not that she made no mistakes, but he was playing games we couldn’t afford to play with the stakes as high as they were.
Part of the problem is that no one thought the stakes were that high. There has been a running theme through Democratic approach to Trump to not take him seriously enough. You see this in 2016 when no one thought he would win. You see this in 2024 when there were many Democrats who preferred to run against Trump thinking again there was no way he could win.
You can't blame Bernie Sanders because Hilary Clinton stole the primary race by using super-delegates to be the presidential nominee. You are uninformed.
Nvm. This person is just debasing language. No election was “stolen.” The 2016 Democratic primary was a free and fair election that respected the legitimacy of the overwhelming majority of primary voters.
I am not because centrist Democrats have rigged the political system. It is nothing new. Hilary Clinton lost to Trump because she refused to embrace universal policies that were popular among American voters.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut financial ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system with incremental changes. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of a radical problem going back to at least four decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China. Shame on you for being biased in your reporting.
She was one of those candidates who has really been hurt by the fact that the presidency is also a TV job. I always liked her a lot better than the average person, but this is because I mostly read her statements rather than watching them. When I watched her on TV, I suddenly got why people didn't like her much: she just doesn't have the ability to deliver speeches without anyone seeing the work she's doing to not make it awkward. Bill Clinton has the magical ability to make it seem like he's just having a chat with a few people when he gives a speech. The actual substance has always been great, but she just can't deliver it well.
You are informed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaing a completely broken system. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs to Canada, Mexico, and China.
Are these actually replies to my comment or has Substack's app done something weird again? The content doesn't seem to relate much to my point.
I think one thing we might agree on that Matt also has mentioned in the past is that the Democrats should be much more comfortable rejecting business interests and being the poorer party. Obama was so good at fundraising that the party got sidetracked and started focusing more on fundraising as if that was why he won. Because of that fixation, professional Dems have given a lot of cultural ground to leftists to preserve their relationships with donors in basically a mirror image of what pre-Trump Republicans used to do for their culture warriors when they were running on abortion bans and school prayer. They throw red meat to the party base on cultural issues because they don't want to "attack" the wealthy.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs to Canada, Mexico, and China.
Correction: You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs to Canada, Mexico, and China.
I don’t agree about 2016. Hillary ran a poor campaign and lost narrowly. If one or two minor things had gone in her favor, she’d be President. There was no structural disadvantage because Obama was a popular President and she did win the popular vote.
>I don’t agree about 2016. Hillary ran a poor campaign and lost narrowly.<
Only once in the modern era (1988) has a party managed to secure a third consecutive White House term. It's very difficult to do. Moreover, much of the Midwest was suffering from a mild recession. A strong, mainstream GOP nominee would have romped to a much more impressive victory, but the Republicans nominated a lunatic mafioso, and so managed the narrowest of victories.
But yeah, the GOP enjoyed the structural advantage that cycle.
I don't disagree, mind you, that HRC was a pretty mediocre nominee. The fact that the Republicans nominated a weak candidate gave Dems an opportunity to prevail *despite* the strong structural headwinds against them. And she flubbed it.
She would have been facing a Republican Senate and probably House as well. And considering how effectively McConnell used the filibuster against Obama, she would have been boxed in to a great extent had she won.
Usually divided control works fine for the President. Worked well for Bill Clinton and Obama. Passing legislation is highly overrated as Democrats discovered during the Biden presidency.
>I don’t agree about 2016. Hillary ran a poor campaign and lost narrowly.<
Only once in the modern era (1988) has a party managed to secure a third consecutive White House term. It's very difficult to do. Moreover, much of the Midwest was suffering from a mild recession. A strong, mainstream GOP nominee would have romped to a much more impressive victory, but the Republicans nominated a lunatic mafioso, and so managed the narrowest of victories.
But yeah, the GOP enjoyed the structural advantage that cycle.
I don't disagree, mind you, that HRC was a pretty mediocre nominee. The fact that the Republicans nominated a weak candidate gave Dems an opportunity to prevail *despite* the strong structural headwinds against them. And she flubbed it.
I guess it depends on what you mean by structural. The electorate was looking for a change candidate, and Clinton wasn't that. Also, it's very rare for a party to win three Presidential elections in a row. That Clinton came very close speaks, I think, more to Trump's inherent weakness than anything.
But I agree she made a lot of mistakes in the campaign, and that a few less would have seen her as President.
It wasn't like 2020 or 2024 when being from the incumbent party was definitely a negative because the unpopularity of the incumbent. You're right that historically it has been very hard for one party to win 3 in a row but as you've mentioned, she was running against Trump and not a generic Republican.
I think you're right those issues took front and center, but there was also a perception that the Clintons were flip-floppers because of Bill's third way stuff, and the fact that Hillary never really made it clear what she stood for when she was a senator or a candidate, and when she did, like her support for th Iraq War, she had to reverse track.
C'mon. She was one of the most famous women in the world in 2000. She didn't need whatever nonsense "connections and leverage" related to a rabbi and a Puerto Rican terrorist you're talking about. Come to think of it, your comment is an excellent example of what I'm trying to illustrate.
I think people just don't like it when someone visibly hungers to be President. (I think, by the way, it is bad that people feel this way. We should encourage ambition!)
With HRC the visible hunger wasn't the problem - by definition everyone who runs for president HAS to be visibly hungry - it was the perception of a sense of entitlement because she had been First Lady. Independent voters REALLY did not like that in 2016, and a big chunk of Democratic primary voters (including me) didn't like in 2008 either. It gives me at least a little hope that we won't ever have to endure President Donald Trump Jr.
Trump doesn’t encourage ambition in his own children. I don’t think we have to worry about Don Jr, who seems well aware of his own mediocrity. I think I read somewhere that he helped pick J.D. Vance as Trump’s successor, knowing it couldn’t be him.
I think we should encourage ambition on the scale of becoming a doctor or a field grade officer. And if you make it that high and the dice come up in your favor, then you seek high office.
However, starting with high office as a goal is fatuous and distorting
I must say I hate them and much prefer the cynics. No one I despise more than people who think they can solve things with pithy slogans and "good" intentions.
Great post, Matt. AOC is not the solution but at least she aims to put forth a vision (perhaps incomplete) for the future of the country. I see Newsom as a Hillary 2016, wanting the presidency so bad he'll bend and twist in every manner to look as appealing to every Democratic faction but lacking any actual ideals.
I'm quite certain that Beshear will run in '28 but folks seem to be sleeping on him right now. I see him having quite possibly the largest net of appeal across most 2028 hopefuls and being a successful two term governor in KY is no slouch. He also has a Talarico earnestness that I think could play very well among conservatives in red states. He's about as moderate as one could want without being too overtly ideological (by default given where he lives) and articulates his policy wins in clear ways. I would say this is what makes the horse race so fun but the stakes are too chillingly high over the next couple years.
What are Beshear's successes as governor of Kentucky?
I mean this seriously, not sarcastically. The governor of Kentucky is a largely figurehead position that has zero legislative power (vetoes can be overridden by simple majority). What are his accomplishments in office that we should see as supporting his platform?
Aside from the Steve/Andy Beshear mixup here, it's worth noting that Kentucky actually still had a Democratic majority in its state House of Representatives at the time.
It seems hard to believe this to be true but it is. That majority managed to survive 2010 and even 2014 before the Trumpian laws of political gravity finally took it down in 2016.
He was touting a battery factory in the state recently on the Daily Show having brought in new jobs and has overseen low unemployment in the state. He’s got one of the highest approval ratings of EVERY Governor right now. And, this should appeal to most SB readers, he avoids cultural wedge issues.
Getting elected in a red state is an achievement. Sending viral tweets is not. People take it for granted that Dems should win, and yet they seem to keep losing and approval ratings for the Democratic party are lower than for the Republican party. The Biden administration's task was to repair the damage, return normalcy, and prevent the reemergence of MAGA, not to deliver a progressive wish list. They failed. The Democrats' goals for 2028 should be winning and delivering on the same three things. If Beshear can do that (I don't know), then he should be the nominee.
I don’t get the Beshear hype. He’s only governor because his father was a popular governor of Kentucky. That is not replicable in a presidential campaign and he’s not very charismatic.
"He’s only governor because his father was a popular governor of Kentucky."
That can't be the only reason. It's the kind of thing that probably gave him a big leg-up early on in terms of name recognition, but sasn't he won reelection?
Beshear is good but the previous governor was so bad, that it made it somewhat easier to win. Beshear is more a check on an ultra-right legislature in Kentucky, so he’s more stopped really bad things than done really good things. He’s likable but a lot of his support really came from how he responded to the tornados in western Kentucky in 2021. That may not translate into something that can lead Democrats in 2028. I also find him to be not hugely different than most politicians in that he sounds very rehearsed and sounds like every other moderate democrat. I agree that charisma and authenticity aren’t everything but they’re qualities that are more important in presidential elections than they are in governor/senator or other local elections.
O’Malley barely got anything noteworthy done in a deep blue state. Beshear may not gin up the same excitement as a Gallego or Shapiro but he’s not wallpaper
The important thing moderates need to do is recognize that Democratic primary voters want people who are proposing solutions to the serious problems we face. Right now the left wing is the faction that advocates both for Matt-style solutions like congestion pricing and legal apartments and for things Matt doesn't like, like punitive taxes on billionaires. As long as moderates are the faction of not doing things they're going to keep losing intra-party debates.
As I said, moderate Democrats are designing everything by committee which benefits progressives in factional battles. A strong moderate personality and agenda means progressives get fewer policy wins.
Great point, big tent usually needs to appease everyone to continue to be big tent and win. However the inter party fighting just always benefits progressives, because some of them don't care about winning overall but just the fighting in of itself.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut financial ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system with incremental changes. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of a radical problem, which goes back at least four decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China. Shame on you for being biased in your reporting.
I don’t think things like congestion pricing and zoning reform are being pushed exclusively by the left wing. It’s the Abundance movement, which has been thought of as centrist, but is also disproportionately Californian and thus includes some representatives of the left, and has picked up some others as well.
I agree that these come out of the abundance movement. I also think that most of the energy for abundance is from people on the left. The specifics of SF politics distorts this but it's what we see most places.
Primary voters want that. Do sufficient numbers of general election voters want those proposed solutions? Because however true the former statement is, it's irrelevant, it is only the answer to the latter question that matters.
I am to the left of the median voter in this country. I know that, I have known that all my life. If I were to run for office on my views I would deservedly lose, EVEN THOUGH MY IDEAS ARE BETTER.
Every time a Republican has won in my life time, the state of the world, and especially the state of the people who I would most like to see improvement for, has gotten worse. When democrats have won, the world, and the state of the more vulnerable, have gotten at least a little bit better, and have gotten much, much better than if the Republican had won.
Neither I nor any other democratic primary voter can make the world or the median US voter different than they are. We can only do what we can to make things a little better rather than a lot worse.
It is not a personal attack, and my comments with analysis are related because Americans have not deeply examined Bill Clinton's neoliberal policies that are still hurting working class Americans in the 21st century and beyond.
Ignoring the opening incoherence, lots of ideas are popular if you ask the question in a “Do you like this idea yes or no”. Ask, “Do you like Girl Scout cookies?” The overwhelming answer is yes. Ask, “are you willing to pay $20 a box for Girl Scout cookies”,or “do you want to only have Girl Scout cookies and not be allowed to have oreos or chocolate chips”, and you get a different answer.
Do you like MFA? Yes. Do you want to change your current employer provided health insurance for a health care system run strictly by the government? Hmm, maybe not so yes.
And specifically on MFA, there are many successful universal health care schemes that aren’t MFA. And FFS, do you really want the only health care system in the US to be run by RFK Jr?
All of that without even touching on the salience of how voters actually decide what is important when they vote.
Actually, if you ask Americans about maintaining the employer sponsored health insurance where they can't switch jobs because their benefits belong to their employers. A majority of them said that they prefer Medicare for All over employer sponsored health insurance. In other words, they want career stability and health insurance portability over job lock. Please read the source from Data for Progress. Period.
Interesting false choice, we’re not kept from switching jobs, 60% of Americans have employer healthcare, if you leave one job with benefits it’s highly likely you’ll get a new one with benefits. The choice I listed was Bernie’s plan.
This is not to say our current system is good, it’s not. But SWITCHING to MFA is not actually popular, and more importantly not a way to win elections.
I’ve read the Data for Progress stuff, they cook their books in the way I described. They could do better and be actually useful, but they choose not to.
The Data for Progress did not cook up its books. Polling asked American voters across the political aisle if they supported Medicare for All after reading about the policies and tradeoffs. It showed that most Democrats, Independents, and Republicans supported Medicare for All when key words included publicly funded healthcare, but privately owned and operated healthcare by healthcare providers, however, health insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays would be eliminated. Medicare for All is a healthcare system that is publicly financed, but it is privately delivered by healthcare providers.
It is not a false choice. According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a majority of Americans are not satisfied with their employer sponsored healthcare because they face balanced billing, out of network charges, deductibles, and other healthcare expenses. Therefore, Americans have to file medical bankruptcy, which impacts their credit scores. That is not a good way to live without economic security. Not too many Americans receive better health insurance benefits at their new jobs. Health insurance in America is not portable when Americans face job lock. What is not popular is not implementing Medicare for All among young voters. Medicare for All is not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken healthcare financing system with incremental changes. Also, maintaining Obamacare without real guardrails is not going to win elections among young American voters. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of excessive medical debt, which goes back at least several decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent health insurance benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China.
I have traveled or lived abroad to use Taiwan's healthcare system, which is called Medicare for All. In Taiwan, citizens are satisfied with their healthcare system and don't have to worry about job lock, medical debt, out of pocket costs, and other expenses.
In the past, I worked for the private health insurance industry, and I know the tricks that you are not aware of by denying people's access to life saving medical treatments and satisfying shareholder's monthly financial reports.
I am disappointed in you for being biased and not thinking big for a better future. Period.
It seems bad to oppose a policy that is both popular and effective. The technocratic side of Democrats really disappears if you mention crime or education, I just don't understand why Democrats risk so much unpopularity with terrible policies on crime. There are powerful teaching unions which I can understand listening to, I don't think there is a shoplifters union, but Democrats act like there is and it is a powerful lobby they want to support.
It might be negative polarization against the policies police unions are in favor of? At least in part. That and a misguided attempt to appeal to minority voters that are “disparately impacted” by law enforcement (despite the fact that low income minority groups are most negatively affected by property crime).
There's not a pro-shoplifters union, but there are a lot of people who do not trust our justice system at all. Maybe I'll use my personal experience as an example. My aunt's house was robbed and they never caught the people who did it. Meanwhile, the cops arrested my brother for getting mouthy with them when he was biking home and didn't immediately stop and obey their instructions. There were 4 attempts to steal my car before the 5th one succeeded. We reported all of them but they didn't actually deal with it until the car was gone.
Now, I mostly have a technocratic mindset, so I look at this series of events and think that while the guy who arrested my brother probably was a power-tripping jerk, I think the other issues are mostly things that could be solved with basic modernization and reforms toward efficiency. But a lot of people would look at that and think that cops arrest people for challenging their authority on trumped up charges while not bothering to arrest people who are difficult to catch. Even more conspiracy-minded people might assume that the cops are in league with someone making money off the crime- for example, when our car was finally actually stolen, we had to pay the police lot like $400 just to not pick it up (the theft had totalled the car).
I would love for a Democrat to run on truly modernizing law enforcement and implementing the latest and best in crime-prevention and case solving. But overwhelmingly, the lever politicians usually want to fiddle with is sentencing, which I think is one of the least effective and most expensive policy solutions we have for the problem.
Does anyone outside weird left wing circles, object to repeat shoplifters getting a felony conviction? It is very popular and while data is sparse it seems to be effective.
It's not that it's a felony per se but that I dislike how much we rely on prison as our punishment of choice when it's expensive and doesn't have much in the way of rehab potential compared to most other programs. It costs over $100k per prisoner per year in California, so ratcheting up sentences means spending a lot more money on criminals. When you consider that a lot of people don't have contact with gangs before they get to prison but they're unavoidable within, I feel like sending someone to prison for mere shoplifting is me paying for small-time criminals to go to crime school where all the crime mentors are. I'd much rather do something like garnish wages for property crime until you've made up the value of what you stole + damages.
What other programs? Drug treatment programs are worth doing but not sure of their effectiveness, probation can be great but both need the threat of prison to work and don't work on persistent offenders who aren't safe in the community, which is the case of the vast majority of people going to prison. I am sceptical of the idea of prisons as colleges of crime.
Supervised labor, curfews enforced with ankle monitoring, restorative justice, that kind of thing. The kinds of things that basically every other country does so they don't have to have our absurdly high prison population.
I wonder how much of the pressure on the Democrats for soft-on-crime policies comes from renters living in high-crime but otherwise desirably-located neighborhoods, who fear they'd be displaced by gentrification if the crime was dealt with?
I have thought about that as a theory, especially in terms of riots lowering rent. But I don't think it works in mainstream politics, it is too big of an effect and the pro-crime stuff is popular in a left wing politics not just in places that could gentrify.
Shit, that’s what turned me into a tough-on-disorder person. I got tired of seeing people shoot up by the dumpster when I took out the trash, being yelled at by crazies at the bus stop, seeing litter in the park, and being asked to bum a cigarette 5 times during the 2 minute walk to Safeway. That shit got old. Par for the course for such a prime location, but it didn’t have to be that way, at least not to that degree.
I'm skeptical how salient Israel will be in the in '28 primary. I know it is THE litmus test on the left, but it never cracks top 10 in issue priority polling.
I think it's fair to say that Slow Boring commentators are not representative of Democratic primary voters in a lot of ways, but one of them is that even compared to primary voters (i.e. the subset voters who are paying attention to politics more than you're typical voter), the commentariat is unusually well informed on all sorts of topics but especially foreign policy.
My point is that while most of us have reasonably informed opinions on Israel/Palestine and often passionate opinions on Israel/Palestine, I don't really think that's true of even Dem primary voters.
This is something Matt has actually either said or touched upon a lot since October, 2023. Just yesterday he (I think correctly) noted that events in the Middle East get way oversized attention vis a vis other foreign policy topics that you would think should have more attention like events happening with our second biggest neighbor. But I think something he's sort of touched on is that it's not really all that clear this topic is actually of profound concern to vast swaths of Dem primary voters despite what very loud voices on social media and quite frankly MSM would tell you.
One sort of complicating factor that again Matt has touched on. A disproportionate amount of donor money to the Democratic party comes from Jewish voters. I know this observation is touchy because unfortunately there really are voices out there who use this as a cudgel for some genuinely antisemitic garbage about who control US foreign policy. But it's just a banal fact about the demographic make up of the Democratic party and (again as Matt has touched on), kind of an underrated source of tension in the Democratic party when it comes to this topic.
Sort of a jumping off point to a different prediction. My suspicion is one reason Democratic position on Israel/Palestine is going to change going forward is that I think it's likely that the donor class of the Democratic party is going to become disproportionately people of East Asian and South Asian background. I know there was a lot of ink spilled point out that people of East Asian and South Asian descent shifted right in 2022 and 2024, but it remains the case this is a Democratic voting constituency by and large. And given how many Silicon Valley engineers are people with this background when does that start translating into real power in the Democratic party? I know Indian Americans have passed Jewish Americans as far as highest median incomes in America. So are we sure this won't result in the Democratic party paying more attention to events in India (call me biased, but per Matt's observation, I'd say India is high on the list of places US should be paying more attention to foreign policy wise).
Highly engaged voters -- which are well represented in the comment section, though not fully representative -- have been the driving force behind elevating all sorts of problematic issues being made salient in primaries. I worry next time will be no different.
As other commentators have noted, that really depends on whether the Iran war still being an "A1" story in late 2027/early 2028. Without American boots on the ground I highly doubt it.
This time five years ago, Russia invasion of Ukraine was "front page" news. Even four years ago, it was still a pretty big topic of discussion. I personally think it's still quite an important issue. But I think I'm on solid ground in saying it was negligible part of the 2024 political campaign.
I'm aware that Israel/Palestine is almost its own category as a foreign policy story. I had an International Studies class in college where my professor noted something about this conflict breaks people's brains; colleagues who are capable of nuance when it came to discussing any other conflict in the world suddenly were incapable of seeing Israel/Palestine as anything other than a black and white issue. So point taken that if there is a foreign policy topic that could rear it's ugly head and not only become salient in the primaries but have some truly unhinged voices making it salient it's this one.
But honestly, is it all that clear this issue was all that important to what happened in 2024? Again, I know there was not a "traditional" primary (Again point taken that of all foreign policy topics that could be elevated, this might be the one), but we really sure it had much of an impact on the election.
There were lots of super leftists who posted how they were voting for Jill Stein and get thousands of "likes" on Twitter or Bluesky. But as far as I can tell the number of Harris voters who voted for Stein is extraordinarily small. If there is one place where the Israel/Palestine did have an electoral impact its Dearborn Michigan. But that's not really because of leftists elevating an issue in a primary, but anger at Biden's embrace of Bibi (and talk about buyer's remorse).
I just think a lot depends on where the situation stands in October, 2027 (so similar timing to the Hamas attack on Israel). I'd say more likely scenario is some foreign policy "black swan" event happening in some other part of the world we are not even paying attention to very closely right now (Taiwan anyone?) becoming the main foreign policy talking point in a primary.
To quibble mildly, Russia invaded Ukraine 4 years ago. 5 years ago, very few people could have pointed out Ukraine on a map. Now there are a few people who can.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut financial ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system with incremental changes. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of a radical problem, which goes back at least four decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China. Shame on you for being biased in your reporting.
As a class, South Asian Muslims really dislike Israel, and South Asian Hindus and Christians are conflicted. So it's likely if your prediction is correct that support for Israel by Democratic donors will decrease.
It's a low-priority issue for general election voters, but I'm guessing it's a much higher-priority issue for Democratic primary voters and (especially) the influencers and tastemakers whom Democratic primary voters listen to.
It's also pretty obvious that the optimal strategy on Israel to win a Democratic primary at this point is pretty much the Bernie Sanders/Mamdani/AOC line of calling it a genocide, saying Bibi is a war criminal, pledging no more aid, criticizing AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Now that Biden's out of office, registered Democrats (particularly older ones) have become much more opposed to the war in Gaza because doing so no longer codes as breaking with "their" president. See here: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/09/18/america-is-falling-out-of-love-with-israel. The same dynamic happened with the Vietnam war and LBJ, as detailed in Chapter 9 of this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_and_Origins_of_Mass_Opinion.
That’s poison for the general though. I think you have to hope a “not my business” America first peace ticket vaguely in support of a two state solution but promising much less involvement is enough.
Zionists don’t care about gas prices. If this keeps up, they will become a rather unpopular minority. The reasons for supporting Israel are too gossamer for normies to embrace any real sacrifice to maintain israeli nuclear hegemony.
I’m hopeful that Dems’ distancing themselves from Israel is limited to this… but I’m worried that there’s always another way that antizionist politics can go.
Especially if this Iran thing goes sideways, there might be an opening to frame “Zionists” as the enemy within. Why worry about far-away middle eastern countries when the real enemy is here at home?
The topic could be linked to lots of things Americans care about — the affordability agenda (the Iran war!), the rise or Trump (the “Epstein class”!), immigration issues (Soros/ICE trains with the IDF, depending on who you’re pitching to), and even AI (Altman! Sutskever! Yudkowsky! Amodei… doesn’t have the same ring to it).
Strategists will see the opportunity to appease the left while attacking the establishment, win over minorities who swung to Trump while affirming the rights of Jews to eat bagels and lox. (With Tucker on the other side, who else will they vote for?) Pure political calculation might push Dems hard towards this position.
After all, small cost to pay if this is all that stands between them and justice, universal healthcare, etc right?
I'm a bit more worried that "[e]specially if this Iran thing goes sideways" the anti-Semitic whistles you're noting will happen more on the right side of the spectrum.
I basically agree with this. It'll become a competitive lane in politics, and Democrats will understand that by going only 50% as far as Republicans, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Who are you going to vote for? "We hate all Jews?" or "We love Jews, unless they cheer on the wrong side in The War Against Half the Jews?"
Also possible that Tucker Carlson- or someone like him- gets into the Republican primary bashing the war and claiming it’s only for Israel’s benefit with huge costs to America.
I think TACO should be retired as an insult. I'm tired of him NOT chickening out. Illegal and unwise actions to capture Maduro, start a war with Iran, unilaterally and illegally apply tariffs on the entire world with extra tariffs on anyone who insults.
One of the few redeeming qualities Trump has is not actually an ideologue and that one of his few talents is basically being able to "read the room". This has mostly resulted in him getting away with being a con-man, but it at least has the side benefit of Trump doing a 180 on a variety of topics overnight in a way most politicians would not. I know most politicians would never have done the "liberation day" tariffs at all which is one of the many reasons why the way he governs is so dangerous.
But there are A LOT of hawks in the GOP. In fact, when the "tik tok" of what led to this war is written in detail, wouldn't be shocked if the hawks basically pushed Trump to join the bombing campaign (seems like based on reporting Lindsey Graham may fall into this camp). Point being, a "normal" GOP politician being a) an Iran hawk and b) having someone like John Bolton as NSA or SecDef seems a very plausible scenario. In this timeline, my suspicion is the GOP Pres in question not only isn't backing down, but is probably even more likely to be putting boots on the ground and expanding the war in a very damaging way.
My usual spiel once again. In our (I think correct) zeal to sound the alarm about everything Trump is doing, let's not overromanticize the "good ole days" of the supposedly more sane GOP (And let's face it, plenty of hawkish Dems too).
Except Trump is an ideologue on tariffs. He's flexible about it, but kind a wild the extent he is willing to push for them.
"let's not overromanticize the "good ole days" of the supposedly more sane GOP (And let's face it, plenty of hawkish Dems too)."
They feel pretty romantic to me. Every other politician would have at least involved Congress or tried to build support for an attack and would have stopped if they couldn't. Trump just decides to attack other countries. He's also out there threatening to take land from allies, violating US law constantly, taking bribes for pardons, tariffing countries because their leader said something he didn't like, tearing up alliances/deals the US spent decades forging, etc.
Plenty of leaders in the past have made decisions that I disagree with, often vehemently. None of them violated all institutional constraints they way that Trump has.
Exactly! We want him to chicken out, politicians should chicken out from doing destructive things! It’s kind of a shame that it’s a catchy acronym that describes a real phenomenon as Dems use it too when it is good when it happens
He has notoriously thin skin. Given that I believe Obama making fun of him at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011 was a significant factor in Trump's decision to run, I don't think the risk is worth it.
The current supreme leader’s wife and parents were just killed in the war. The rest of the leadership are, unlike in Venezuela, ideologues. The Iranian government has the ability to project power through foreign terrorist organizations and could reconstitute their domestic drone and ballistic missile programs relatively quickly after an end to immediate hostilities. At this point, if we don’t conduct regime change, we will not see the end of retaliation for years to come.
Oh I have no idea about the specifics of gas prices. I'm talking generalities: more and longer war means higher oil prices, and sinking numbers for the GOP. Stopping the war presumably does the opposite. But he's done himself and the GOP brand damage either way, I reckon, because there doesn't seem to be a revolution brewing in Iran, and if the regime survives, it's going to be hard to dodge the "LOSER" label.
Think about the effects of a long pause in oil shipments and fertilizers from the gulf.
It isn't just the shooting. It's like when there is an accident on the highway. Even if they clear the accident away in an hour, the traffic will be backed up all day as that temporary blockage ripples through the system.
I agree, I could have been more precise. I think that if we’re not dropping bombs, Israel won’t be front of mind (it’ll be another “that’s another Trump mess we have to clean up”). But I’ve been wrong before!
Nor do the popular vote and cross-tabs from the general election suggest Israel is all that salient. There was lots of angry screaming to the effect that Genocide Joe's policies were going to sink Harris, but I've seen pretty much zero evidence of this.
I'm happy to be corrected, but she didn't lose because of defections from the left.
I doubt Israel/Palestine was the difference-maker even in Michigan, but assuming I'm wrong, Trump takes six of seven swing states instead of seven of seven.
I agree with the proposition that the issue could be pretty salient in the upcoming primaries, though.
This is the way. I sort of think that Kamala benefited (as much as she could for losing the election) from having a short campaign. I actually think all campaigns should be run that way.
I think the fact that Israel is THE litmus test on the left is directly relevant to the point of this post. There is no rational reason why US relations with a small country in the Middle East is a defining issue for an ostensibly left-wing economic movement in the US, but here we are.
I hope pro Palestinian politicians will deploy “Zionists don’t care about gas prices.” That sort of attack will work better than hand ringing about human rights.
What evidence do you have of them being able to do that?
You have better odds of Trump coming out tomorrow supporting a free Palestine because at least then you're just counting on Trump being willing to roll a former ally, of which there is plenty of evidence.
True, but it’s hugely important to the far-left of the party. Just looking at the last election, the “Genocide Joe” types seemed perfectly happy to hurt Biden’s chances and get Trump elected over this issue.
The party needs a realistic position on Israel, neither unconditional support, nor the extreme anti-Zionism of the far left.
I think the priority polling is the wrong way to think about this. It's a signaling issue. A candidate's positioning tells a voter whether their moral compasses align, for better or worse.
Just kidding, obviously for worse, because people should vote on the basis of the tangible outcomes that will impact their lives rather than topics that, definitionally, they don't care about (see: the priority polling.)
I agree. I think even if Israel isn't central to the median voter by 2028 it's the perfect issue to wedge the Democratic coalition and it's a debate that goes toxic fast, meaning it will get a lot of attention and generate bad feelings all around. I dxpect bad faith actors (chuds like Jill Stein and Musk type algorithm manipulators) to amplify the issue in the 2028 Democratic primary.
I’m still mad all the reporting on this initially was “anti Muslim extremists try to blow up mayor”. Surprise surprise it was the islamists throwing bombs around.
Because the two sides present in numbers were the goat-walkers and the omnicause leftoids and very few people expected a bomb-throwing 18-year-old ISIS sympathizer as the wild card.
I don't think pro-Israel Jewish Democratic primary voters (who are rapidly vanishing in number) are a big enough group to wedge the coalition in any significant way. Most Democratic primary voters right now are either staunchly opposed to the Israeli government or (like me) don't care and would prefer to talk about literally anything else. I would be astonished if the 2028 nominee were "pro-Israel."
Jill Stein isn't that nice. The whole sitting down and having dinner with Putin was a bad look. Nice old hippies don't sit down with dictators who assassinate their political enemies.
What’s fun is “support for Palestine” and “support for Israel” are both very unpopular positions. But politicians will be asked about it anyway!
I think the Iran war, unless it works out great, opens a lane here though. “I support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. But they need to stop expanding settlements and return to the negotiating table for a two state solution instead of dragging America into their wars with Iran. As president will do everything I can to facilitate peace and support our allies but I am going to be putting American interests not Israeli interests first in foreign affairs”.
Kind of tangential but I am really tired of the “Israel’s right to exist” language. No state has a right to exist. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia didn’t have a right to exist and now they don’t. As a nation if you have enough strength to hold yourself together from internal and external threats you will continue to exist. If you don’t you won’t. It really is that simple. Israel is probably going to be around for a while. The question is what kind of relationship do we want to have with it.
Eh, I don't really understand why this annoys people, personally. You can read "Israel has a right to exist" pretty much as a short hand for "Israel has a right to engage in requisite actions to maintain its existence" - I.e. military action and/or prevention of right of return.
If you have a problem with the concept of rights generally, go high five Jeremy Bentham about it, I guess? It's a fairly well understood universal framework of moral reasoning even if you don't believe rights literally exist.
It's because 'Israel has a right to exist' is not matched by 'Palestine has a right to exist', so in practice it indicates the speaker's position on one side of the debate.
Matched by whom? Perhaps some people are hypocritical in this way, but then your issue is with the hypocrisy, not the statement. I think Israel has a right to exist and so does Palestine. This is the extremely common mainstream liberal two state solution position. In terms of wording, this is not used for Palestine because it's not currently a state, so it makes more sense to frame it as "Palestinians deserve statehood" - with the corollary fairly straightforwardly being that once they have that state it would have a right to exist. I think this is an artefact of it not making sense to say that things which don't yet exist have rights.
>It's because 'Israel has a right to exist' is not matched by 'Palestine has a right to exist', so in practice it indicates the speaker's position on one side of the debate.<
This seems wholly inaccurate.
Plenty of people believe both that (1) Israel has a right to exist AND (2) Israel is illegally occupying conquered territory that by rights ought to be handed over to the Palestinian people for the latter's use as a homeland.
Hell, to this day the formulation remains the single most common position among most foreign policy elites globally.
Can’t speak for others but I believe that rights exist when there is an overarching authority that enforces said rights. So if you and I sign a contract where I agree to pay you $500 you have a right to that money because a court will ultimately enforce it if I refuse to pay. But that doesn’t exist for international relations.
I think that's a perfectly fine metaethical viewpoint, but you must recognise that you can talk about moral behaviour in terms of rights even if you do not believe they literally exist. If someone says to you that individuals have a right not to be tortured, you can surely comprehend that statement without the need for an authority to enforce that right? By which I mean, you can see how that can be repackaged to mean "It would be morally wrong to torture someone without exception".
The Declaration of Independence language says the overarching authority is our creator. There are indeed many people in Israel and the US who think the same creator also grants that right for Israel to exist.
>Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia didn’t have a right to exist and now they don’t.<
Sure they did. They were both members of the UN in good standing. It's true both of those countries ended up not existing, but they had a right to continue doing so. Just like Israel does. And Paraguay. And Singapore.
There are apparently significant numbers of leftists who feel the Jewish State does not possess such a right (I wonder why that might be), hence the appropriateness of assertting this truism from time to time.
But this is my point. I think there is real value in drawing a bright line between rights that are guaranteed by a higher, stronger authority (like commercial contract law) vs things like UN membership where there is no higher authority that will either guarantee continued existence or at a minimum exact significant consequences when the right is violated. We end up using the same word for two very different things and I think it is unhelpful when trying to reason through difficult situations.
There's zero reason to believe this to be true. The Christians in Lebanon haven't been. It's not exactly a fun relationship between them and the Muslims but it's stable enough.
It’s actually the opposite. Jews have been purged from every other Arab country, many Palestinian groups openly support Jewish genocide or ethnic cleansing, and the history of Israel from 1948 is a series of wars started by Arabs with the expressed purpose of driving Jews into the sea.
Even this grants far too much. Israel has no "right to exist" (that is a nonsense concept; there is no world government capable of handing out "rights to exist" and enforcing them), and American politicians trying to wish such a right into existence at the expense of the US's own interests has gotten completely out of hand.
Correct. The reason the US is (hopefully, maybe, if we're lucky) not going to launch an insane war to conquer Greenland is that even Trump has figured out we would suffer economic or military, or both, retaliation from other states if we did. That has nothing to do with "rights"; it's pure power politics.
No one is defending, or enforcing, Iran's "right to exist," even though that is as (un)real as Israel's is.
Maybe they will, but no matter what you say some people are going to be super pissed. Classic wedge issue. I think two state solution is the least controversial of the controversial options, especially coupled with signaling that you are going to draw down support and involvement and untether our foreign policy from “whatever Bibi wants”.
Why would a two state solution work when the Islamists continue to call for the genocide of the Israelis? Can the Israelis ever trust the Palestinians after Oct. 7th?
I don’t know what the path is from here to a two state solution. The problem seems intractable to me. Accordingly, I would say “this seems like the correct outcome, and I am happy to advocate for it and facilitate talks to achieve it, but I am not going to spend more time and resources trying and failing to secure it, nor am I going to be fighting regional wars on behalf of either party”.
It would be good to impose sanctions on Israel too, since it’s a democracy. I’m not generally in favor of sanctions because usually they make things worse for the people who have no voice under dictators. But for Israel, it makes sense, until they vacate the settlements, elect a permanent Labor government, and find a way to make every Republican politician’s cellphone explode by their ears.
I really wish critics of Israel would do that instead of claiming there was no rape in 10/7, that settlers aren’t civilians, and that resistance by any means necessary is justified.
Yes. It will be a race to the bottom, someone will actually propose eliminating the country in the debates, and whoever gets elected will have made some insane promise to treat Israel like cancer - and it will all amount to nothing, exactly as Biden’s promises to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state” did.
Maybe you’re right. But pre-2019 would you have guessed that the 2020 Democratic primary would feature a Jewish Poker* game of Medicare for All proposals? Or any of the other nutty things that came out of that cycle? Things have a way of building up to absurd crescendos in these primaries (to say nothing of the Republican ones)
Would that that were the situation in Congress, where we had such a Jewish poker game for things that helped the people! Oh no healthcare, we can’t have healthcare 🙄
We are already seeing some insane policies being through out there like no taxes on the first $75k of income, or increasing taxes on fossil fuels, permitting, etc. Racing to the bottom is always stupid and populism is a cancer.
Sadly, I think the no taxes on tips or overtime are here to stay, despite their being terrible policy. Too many people are going to benefit from that. I know I’m going to happily deduct my OT this year, despite my knowing it’s dumb policy.
Think about Trump's cabinet at the moment. They are all getting theirs while the getting is good. I imagine a lot of AIPAC is looking at the current moment like that.
I think that there's an impregnable position on Israel for any candidate smart enough to take it:
-- non-cooperation and non-support of Netanyahu and the Israeli Far Right;
-- insistence that any Israeli government return to support of a two-state solution and removal of all obstacles, including settlements in the Occupied Territories, that make a two-state solution non-viable;
-- unquestioned support for the legitimacy of the State of Israel in domestic politics and international forums;
-- absolute rejection of anti-Semitism in all its forms and guises.
Of course there has been, and there's a technical term for that push: it's called "a lie". "Live not by lies" is as good advice for political life as it is for moral life.
OK, to take another hypothetical, #3 and #1, so let's say the far right does what they want and does kick out the Palestinians from another big chunk of the west bank or Gaza. Maybe there will also again be tens of thousands of unfortunate deaths as well.
Then can someone in America say Israel, the state, is illegitimate? Maybe it wasn't before, but it has become so through their own elected leaders and actions?
The politics on this are not as easy as the 4 points suggest. (They aren't bad points, but I am thinking of the practicalities of it)
I didn't say that the position I suggested was "easy", I said that it was "impregnable", by which I meant "very difficult to attack effectively", because it's legally, morally, and ethically coherent, and outlines a path of action that's I think is executable, legal, and politically smart.
With respect to this particular question, of course individuals can "say" what they want -- it's a free country. The real question, I think, is what does the Government of the United States DO? My answer is, what it's done many other other times that a member of the United Nations has committed a serious violation of international law in its view: impose sanctions. The issue is never with the legitimacy of the state actor -- that's assumed. It's with the legality of the action, and the appropriate response.
Jeff Mauer released a 30 minute monologue staking this out in detail and arguing for it. As someone far more right wing on Israel than him or Matt or most people here, I do wish candidates would figure this out and adopt it. It’s not my policy preferences clearly, but it’s a much healthier policy and attitude than any we’ve had for the past 20+ years and is quite fair. Or, let me put it differently: 90% of even strongly pro-Israel Americans would be put at ease.
Realistically this won’t happen: the primary candidates will realize they can throw activist chum at anti-Israel fanatics (see: Gavin Newsom’s recent moves) and just quietly revert to the norm once in office while occasionally throwing out some more activist chum when convenient (see: the entire Gulf, who all adopt this tactic - besides Qatar, who really are that malicious.)
In all honesty, I propose doing it by force, if necessary.
Tearing all the happy talk, doubletalk, and outright lies aside, the Palestinian leadership position from the time of the notorious Mohammed Amin al-Husseini to the October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas has amounted to pogroms on the scale of a Holocaust 2.0. The Israeli position under Netanyahu amounts to ethnic cleansing -- "transfer of populations" if one prefers the sanitized term that the Allies favored in the immediate postwar years. Neither is acceptable to me.
There exists the possibility that new leadership on both sides will embrace the opportunity for a genuine solution of two sovereign states living side by side in peace -- friendship is probably too much to ask for in the lifetime of any of us who are currently adults, but peace and democracy will do. I'd certainly welcome that, from either or both sides. If not, it should be imposed, probably with an impenetrable barrier between them and an extraterritorial link between the West Bank and Gaza. We know how to do all that, the two Germanies and West Berlin lived that way for 44 years.
“The Israeli position under Netanyahu amounts to ethnic cleansing…”
Considering the number of Palestinian there are in Israel who are full citizens, at all levels of society including members of the Knesset, Netanyahu seems to be doing a truly dismal job at his “ethnic cleansing.”
I’d rather be an Arab Israeli citizen than one in a refugee camp in Gaza, but they are considered second-class citizens. It’s not as bad as Jim Crow, but it’s adjacent.
The Israeli Supreme Court has been absolutely heroic in its defense of the rights of Israel's Arab citizens and, to give the devil his due, Netanyahu hasn't been as serious about that as his far Right supporters have been: if he had, he would have pushed his Court "reforms" even harder, in spite of public outrage. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir make no secret of their desire to expel the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, and Netanyahu has been more ambivalent -- at best -- about that. He certainly hasn't stood in the way of settlement expansion. Those two also seem to be intent on denying Israel's Arab citizens their full citizenship. If Netanyahu decides that the only way he can hold onto power is by upping his game on ethic cleansing and lining up more fully with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, does anything in his history suggest that he wouldn't do it?
I think that my original four-point post in response to Matthew's post at the head of this thread should be the position of the next Democratic candidate. So should the OBJECTIVE I've stated: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace, independence, and freedom.
The specific form of the two-state solution immediately above that you're responding to is strictly my own. I think that may turn out to be the only viable approach in the end, but statesmen and -women will want to explore every other possibility that they can imagine, and I'm in favor of that. One of them MIGHT work.
While I largely agree with this, #3 is going to be a bridge too far for a lot of people (myself included) that see no particular reason to support this particular fascist authoritarian pseudo-democracy over any of the hundred other fascist authoritarian pseudo-democracies that exist in the world today. It implies that we should stop trying to make Israel abandon apartheid in a way that we should not do for, say, China.
Since I don't consider Israel to be guilty of "apartheid" -- words mean something, and that word doesn't mean what you apparently think it does -- that's not an issue for me.
Liked this because I think it's a very important question that's not getting much in the way of attention in these discussions of potential 2028 Dem candidates. I think being Californian (and not just any Californian--San Franciscan) is a HUGE potential liability for Newsom, just like being a New Yorker is a huge potential liability for AOC. There's a significant regional angle to Dem struggles in Presidential elections, and nominating a candidate from one of their coastal bastions would be just about the stupidest thing the Dems could do.
Yes - my kind-of-insane litmus test for 2028 is that I won’t vote for a blue-state Dem in the primary.
There’s a big list of candidates from purple or red states (Shapiro, Ossoff, Warnock, Gallego, Kelly, Whitmer) who have proven records of winning tough contests. You could even convince me on Klobuchar just because she overperforms fundamentals so much.
I waver on this. For one, my "independent" (but solidly red) parents, have HATED and looked down on California since the beginning of time, so I understand how rabidly some people hate that state. They'll never swing tho.
On the flip side, I find Gavin interesting because when you hear him talk, he's decidedly NOT what people imagine a Californian to be. He's more moderate on trans issues, policing issues, immigration issues. He's just not the far left wacko that people like my parents imagine every Californian to be. I do think there's something refreshing and compelling about that- makes him feel "different". And it makes his more moderate (but still left-leaning) takes feel more moderate than they really are, just because of the comparison point of expecting him to be far left.
And re Vlad's comment here, in the opposite way, AOC is very left and that matches with the perception of NYC, so she has less of those mitigating factors imo.
In the end, it's probably still a big liability, but I do think there are some mitigating factors there for Gavin.
I guess the question is, do people listen and agree with you that he's not a lefty wacko in time for him to get traction, or does he get lost in the snowstorm of a big early primary race?
I honestly would like to know we have a huge group of moderates on this board. What is the big picture vision for why we want to elect moderates?
Like you’ve achieved every political goal you have the presidency and 67 Senators and a 50 seat majority in the house. What are you doing? What is the spoils because all I ever hear about is how the left is bad.
Matt's whole blog is basically an answer to that question. Some that come to mind:
Immigration: Strengthen border security, don't look the other way on asylum loopholes and understand that it's *good* if an illegal immigrant (or even green-card holder) that gets caught shoplifting is deported.
Housing: Do whatever Ezra and Matt Y. would do. Don't be Dean Preston or whatever.
Large Gov't Bills: Do big stuff (IRA, etc.), but don't everything-bagel it. Focus on getting the stuff done, not appeasing workers, unions and non-profit lobbying groups.
I actually don't think the 2028 election will be determined on whether or not Democratic candidates will bravely say some college kid here on a green card should be deported if they steal some makeup from a Sephora.
I mean, if you would've told me in 2003 that two of the people w/ 'normie vibes' by election results were a black constitutional lawyer from Chicago named Barack Obama and Donald Trump, I would've laughed you out of the room, so maybe deciding who can have normie vibes isn't something somebody should decide right away.
Like, I'd actually argue AOC has the most normie vibes among possible 2028 candidates but at the same time, Bernie never really had normie vibes but that was part of the reason he got support from surprising people.
Yes, I know, things would be so much better if both parties unaccountable elites could force down faceless centrists who stand for nothing onto the populace.
yeah I agree, I overstated. I was thinking more "professional shoplifting ring person" vs. "got caught shoplifting once" there, and green card/PR should offer a lot more protection than illegal immigrants get.
I will say, simply boxing the more extreme economic left out of power and keeping them from trying to implement policies that would ruin the engine of economic growth that is American capitalism is a good thing.
For a more affirmative vision though:
- Raise taxes on the wealthy through higher inheritance taxes, eliminating the step up basis, and raising capital gains taxes to expand the EITC and cut the deficit.
- Eliminate trade barriers (particularly Trump’s tariffs) with our allies in Europe, East Asia, and in the Western hemisphere generally.
- Invest in more medical research, particularly vaccines and pandemic preparedness.
- Improve our immigration system to simplify the process for global talent to come and contribute to our research institutions.
- Eliminate regulatory hurdles to construction of new transmission lines and solar/wind farms.
- Reintroduce the health care insurance mandate with more teeth, create a national risk equalization fund, create a national healthcare market place, and change the tax code to encourage employers to pay employees to find their own health insurance rather than purchase it for them to get us closer to the Netherlands model and establish universal healthcare.
The big picture vision for me is that if Vance wins in 2028 it's all over for the American experiment.
If AOC was more likely to beat him then I'm on Team AOC. I don't think the nation would vote her in which is why I'm on Team Gallego. But any strong, compelling case you can make for any potential Democratic nominee (like Gavin) and I'll listen. If it's all based on hope and vapors then I won't waste my time.
I think Rubio is more likely to get the GOP nomination than Vance. Trump has put Vance in a very difficult position right now vis a vis the Iran war. Very hard for him to pivot back to America First when he was VP of an admin that started a war in Iran. He's either an ineffectual pussy or a sell out.
I was listening to some of the folks on The Dispatch podcast say this morning they think that's a real weakness for Vance, and I took heart. I hope they're right. And I hope the next Republican nominee isn't worse than Vance.
I think you've hot the nail on the head with this one. Before you answer, moderates, think about how what Biden did didnt get across to the electorate. Also think that this is an electorate somewhat tired of your type and expecting something big. Its not the electorate of the 2000s, there's a lot of discontent and there are a lot of change voters these days.
Moderate Dems must convince America they deserve to govern.
I reference Trump first and foremost. His anti-eliteist, change messaging is often underconsidered imo.
Secondly, the fact that Bernie came out of nowhere in 2016 shows that Democrat progressives aren't just a reaction to MAGA.
Third, voters have big discontent with the "establishment" of both parties. Progressives consistently out poll the Democratic party as a whole right now.
Comparing voters today to voters of decades past, I think the "change" demand is obvious enough.
"Progressives consistently out poll the Democratic party as a whole right now."
Can you show me polls to that effect? I can see individual politicians both centrist or progressive being more popular, but do "progressives" poll more popular?
The question of what is true and the question of what is compelling are two separate ones. It's well and good to say that people are not convinced by a desire to not have Republican governments, but the past 10 years have demonstrated precisely why that is a bad opinion.
It is important to inspire voters because it's important to win, but it's also clear to anyone with any sense that avoiding a sociopathic lunatic for a president is an end in itself.
To be absolutely clear, I think many realise it's reason alone to elect moderates to win elections and prevent lunatic right wingers from implementing their lunatic policy. Even if the rest of US history was just totally bland centrists who did nothing to improve the country from the baseline of, say, 2008 it would still clearly be superior to the alternative of Republican governments.
That isn't moderation; it's doctrinaire conservatism, a political philosophy that the global developed-nation electorate is clearly uninterested in (see the pathetic recent performances of center-right parties in the UK, France, Australia, etc.). It's a proven failure.
A strange response which contains a category error. I am not saying that my position that moderate candidates are worthwhile even just to prevent the worst excesses of Republicans is "moderation", I'm saying it's my position on what electing moderates is for.
I think Matt's popularism, which includes moderated positions on certain issues is clearly not a proven failure, and it's rather telling that literally all three of your examples are, as we speak, run by centre left governments with heavy moderation while the US is run by the worst President in history.
Remember, some people contort reality and substitute alternative arguments that the ones you propose so that they can assert a rhetorical “victory.”
Debasing language to call Australian and UK labor parties “center right” is silly. Then declaring how theses parties have successfully kept right wing parties from power (or in the case of France the center right blocking the far right) as “failures” is absurd.
All to assert that appealing to a larger group of the electorate wouldn’t have prevented Trump?
You and I have seen this exact dynamic twice over the past 24 hours, in fact! Still, I'm new to posting here so not sure of the etiquette and trying to engage in as good faith a manner as I can.
I agree with your assessment, though - it's not a good argument, though I think Zagarna is referring to the actual centre-right parties like the British Conservatives who have indeed imploded. That's a stranger argument still, because we're talking about the centre left party in the US and what it should do to succeed!
That said, I suppose your interpretation is equally possible. Here in the UK people have been calling Labour a centre-right government on the internet since I can remember. Usually as a cudgel. I think this is partially a consequence of the belief particularly prevalent on the internet that there is some objective compass on which you can map each party and person and say they sit on the right or the left (in fact there's a website that does this very neatly and completely misleadingly for you!).
What I think is the closer reality is that right and left are constantly evolving hyperobjects which emerge from the sum of their parts (voters and activists) and really can mean only what the relevant actors do in a given context (here 21st century western politics). It makes as much sense to say that the Conservatives are centre-left because they're pro minimum wage and anti-absolute monarchy as it does to say Labour are centre-right because they don't hold entirely anti-market/anti-capital views.
Got on my soapbox a bit there, but that's what we're here for.
Most people here are respectful and try to have productive discourse on this board. This is why when certain people try to bring in Twitter-like rhetorical strategies like “substituting in alternative claims not made” or “pretending words have different meanings than they do” it stands out and gets ridiculed. It’s fairly normal for people to walk back or admit their claims were wrong or overly broad or inaccurate on this board. Truth and learning is valued.
Zagarna is addicted to “winning” an argument. That results in people taking his claims with less credulity. I just don’t like dishonesty and casual mendacity. It comes off as silly (e.g. is Mitt Romney really a fascist?)
No, I get that. What I'm saying is that if you say to voters "you should elect moderates to prevent the worst excesses of Republicans" the electorate will be like "nah." "Four years of things not getting worse" messaging is a complete flop.
(Side note: Both France and the UK are also governance disasters heading straight for far-right takeovers at the next election, so I would not be taking any strategic advice from their center-left parties, either.)
"No, I get that. What I'm saying is that if you say to voters "you should elect moderates to prevent the worst excesses of Republicans" the electorate will be like "nah." "Four years of things not getting worse" messaging is a complete flop."
I don't endorse this messaging, though it has paid dividends in France and is categorically not a proven failure. It obviously wasn't successful in the latest US election, though parsing how much of the loss is due to that messaging and how much of it is due to other things is a matter of continued debate - still, I am not arguing that should be the approach for the next Democratic candidate.
More importantly, though, the question was what are the reasons to win elections, not what are the reasons Democrats should run on.
"Side note: Both France and the UK are also governance disasters heading straight for far-right takeovers at the next election"
Labour are bouncing between being the bookies' favourites and second favourites to win the next general election. Of course, they are not in an incredible position but it's false that a Reform win is anything close to guaranteed. You correctly note that the governance, not the level of moderation, is what is harming Labour. Macron has persistently held off an extremely popular far right. These are not successes to ignore.
I literally have subscribed to Matt’s Substack since it was created and have been following him for years.
I don’t have a strong sense what he builds if he’s not thinking tactically about picking up more seats in the next election. Like what does a prolonged comfortable majority that no longer is operating strictly for tactical advantage in the next contest or two want to deliver other than housing abundance.
OK, you don't have to take that literally, but I'd prioritize comprehensive immigration reform with an eye toward massively expanding legal immigration (in the law, not just in executive orders), ditching most of the broken asylum system, and bringing in refugees in pre-Trump or greater numbers; pronatalist reforms to the tax code; and asking Jessica Riedl personally to advise me on federal budget balancing with the goal of not crashing Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.
(I know this is too large an agenda! Maybe pronatalist tax reform, rebranded to emphasize the value of helping young families thrive and retirees keep their benefits, would be the place to start.)
I moved from the latter (in the Rust Belt) to the former (Sunbelt) and voted with my feet. I loved a lot of things about my tiny town in the Rust Belt, but it's a Sisyphean task to try to make a life for your kids in a region where most of the parent-aged people have already moved away.
ETA: Between two red states, choose the one with the growing economy and lots of children, IMHO. :-)
I'd like to get on the record as not wanting Newsome OR AOC.
Similar to the discussion around the Talarico/Crockett race, I would like someone who presents as moderate/mainstream but has a sincerely liberal heart. A good communicator who can connect with a majority of the country, but also someone who can do math and think about actual budgets - not just make wild assertions about impossible dreams.
I think Buttigieg would govern as a true pragmatic moderate with a sincere liberal heart. But I worry that he won’t do enough vocal stiff arming of the left in the general election. And he also has Biden administration baggage.
I think he could govern, and he would be a good prime minister - if that were our system.
But I worry he misses on the "connect with the majority of the country" part. He doesn't have that "person you'd like to have a beer with" vibe. Not convinced he will be a good candidate.
Some variation that is "Buttigieg, but a cool guy" would be tempting though!
I disagree on that, Buttigieg has quite a good personal manner on podcasts and seems like someone who voters (maybe only White voters) would like to have a beer with. Maybe he seems less presidential because of his height and inexperience, but his personal interactions are good.
Something that Josh Barro brought up that I didn't realize about Buttigieg is that he didn't come out until he was like 33, and then ran for president at 38.
Like, it's weird he didn't come out until so late in life, right? As a gay guy how does that come across to you?
Plus he has been going on Fox News and doing very well in those situations. He codes as pretty traditional aside from, you know, having a husband. He’d wipe the floor with JD Vance in the general, if he can get through the primary.
Well yes, if you can seem like you'd enjoy a beer with Andrew Schulz, you are doing a very good job at seeming relatable. Likewise this would be a bridge too far for me.
This Ultra Dark MAGA Republican wouldn’t mind seeing a Mayor Pete/JDV match up. Then Mayor Pete could explain why he was more concerned about racist roads and why he discriminated against white male air traffic controller applicants.
Not sure if you are kidding or serious, but Mayor Pete's comments about the racist placement of highways back in the day are very true, at least it is every place that I have lived, which are all in the Northeast and Midwest. But, yeah, the sound bites probably won't play well.
I believe you. Why would anyone lie about this? But these stories astound me, given the huge shortage of air traffic controllers. Why would we even need preferences? They can use anyone qualified that they can get.
Tracing Woodgrains did an investigation, air traffic control jobs scandal is more complicated,more corrupt and less woke. But also mad, they counted having a scientific background as a negative in applications.
Whatever happened 50 years ago, the folks in those ghettos have largely moved on -- and tearing out those roads today is largely a real-estate scam (leading to gentrification), fronted by astroturf "racial justice" groups.
You know what would play well (to all but the poodle-walk-and-latte-class)? A(n electric) car in every garage!
You're obsessed with this, lol. Basically every normie I know wants to own a car, but basically all of the ones who live in cities or suburbs also like when they don't need to use it for everything because they know it makes traffic worse. The ideal state is Munich- or Amsterdam-level transit provision, along with everyone being able to afford a car. The latter is already the status quo in the US outside the densest parts of the densest cities, what further policy intervention is required?
As for the highways, Philadelphia gets very little per-capita federal transportation funding and would love to cap the gaping slash I-676 cut through some of the nicest, densest, most walkable neighborhoods in the country with a nice park. Is that too woke for you?
By all means, cap the road -- but don't tear it out -- and don't convert it to a congested, surface-level "boulevard" that would add more pollution (and be more hazardous to pedestrians) than what's there now. (That's what they have in mind for 980 here in Oakland.)
Oh, I'm sorry -- did I say "congested"? I meant "vibrant" -- the mandatory term when dealing with the poodle-walk set.
The densest, most walkable neighborhoods are, indeed, nice for a Friday-night or Sunday stroll -- but that doesn't require living in an urbanist theme park, as long as there's parking nearby or underneath.
I firmly believe that you can move on from bad tweets, especially from when you're young, but you have to like, actually apologize and say you've changed your mind and say what you now believe. If you pretend the question is in bad faith and you haven't changed but the way you're talking now is what people should focus on, you'll be Kamala in 2024 and people will have no idea what you really believe. I will be interested in what Talarico does, because as of now he's basically Texan Tim Walz (a liberal loved by liberals for giving off what they imagine to be red-state vibes). But he's young and ambitious and he could easily redefine himself to be more palatable to the Texas audience if he thinks he needs to. Otherwise he'll lose by 5+ points
I don't care what people say when they are 17 or that much what they said when they were 22, but he was 31. It is also just weird, dishonest and unpleasant in a way that doesn't give him an excuse.
He also has no demonstrated ability or track record of winning general elections. The one time he ran in a general election, he lost by 25 points (to Richard Mourdock no less) in the same year that the Democrat at the top of the ticket lost by only 15. Yes it's a small sample, but it's the data we have. Of course nobody could have expected him to win in Indiana, but he did poorly even if you adjust for that.
His impressive overperformance in the 2020 primaries has zero value since 99% of the people who voted in those primaries will vote Dem no matter who in the general election. All Buttigieg showed in those primaries was that he's very good at impressing highly educated voters spanning the spectrum of social progressivism from only moderately progressive to very (but not the very most) progressive. I guess that's a nice feat, but it's not going to win you a general election.
Well he also showed that he could go on Fox News and other non-friendly media and have quick and competent responses to challenging questions, unlike a certain 2024 nominee.
There are law schools full of people who have quick and competent questions. It’s a skill, but it’s not a unique skill. Why Harris wasn’t good at it is a mystery, given her history and even demonstrated competence in Senate hearings. It’s also worth remembering that Fox et al aren’t that unfriendly. They are in the business of entertaining their audience, not in rabidly tearing down their guests. He could get a very different treatment if that’s what they wanted to do.
Ok. But so what? That's valuable if it causes you to be good at winning elections. It seems like it ought to cause you to be good at winning elections. But ultimately what matters is whether you actually achieve the end result of being good at winning elections, and there's no data that shows that Buttigieg is able to do that.
I'm not saying it's impossible. Maybe he's gotten better at winning elections since 2010 - that was a long time ago. Maybe if we gave him a chance, his "good combine stats" would translate into general election votes. But why put your chips on that when there are multiple other potential candidates who've actually done it before (i.e. run ahead of the fundamentals and won elections in purple/red states)?
I don't get the impulse to pretend that Buttigieg is a viable general election candidate. Is it intended to signal that the person saying it is not homophobic? It doesn't make sense since most people suggesting that are not in danger of being accused of homophobia.
It's the super obvious elephant in the room that left leaning media refuses to acknowledge about why he has single digit polling with blacks and latinos
Well he seems like the most "technocratic" person in the mix. I think that is the appeal. But I would not say it is the mood of The People at the moment, sadly.
Nonsense! I'm gay, and I like Pete -- but he's too glossy and slick for the blue-collar types. That's why (for electability) I prefer Kelly or Gallego.
And the "queerer-than-thou" folks (those most inclined to pounce on "phobias") don't even like Pete; they consider him an "assimilationist" and (thereby) "heteronormative."
People think he's a viable candidate because he is extremely smart, a great communicator, and comes off as very likeable.
Why do you think he isn't possibly a viable general election candidate? I think if the question is one of electability because he's gay/lacks support from minority voters - I think the reasoning is that
a) there's some evidence that people overrate the extent to which personal identity influences other people's votes and supporters are recalibrating on those grounds and
b) People expect there may be a watershed moment where being gay stops being remotely relevant quite rapidly in the same sort of way that there were no Black presidents until there was.
He worked at McKinsey. Like Romney with Bain, a lot of people really hate McKinsey and for excellent reason. Those guys (and I've worked with plenty of them, and at two companies they decimated) are smart, technocratic, and sociopathic - their job is to make the machine go, the fact that it destroys people pointlessly isn't their problem.
I want a happy warrior who loves the flag, hot dogs, and fireworks. I am tired of people being so down and negative about this country. Also being back Rock.
-''white skin gives me and every other white American immunity from the virus [racism]. But we spread it wherever we go..."
-"Black Americans in a church. Mexican Americans in a store. Asian Americans in a spa. Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country."
-"Prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity...it's a painful process'
Turning to policy
-Abortion is biblical and should have no restrictions at all
-God is non-binary, no restrictions on youth gender transitions
-Supports all the same gun laws as Beto
-prisons are 'state violence', anti law enforcement
-Southern border should be a front porch with a giant welcome mat, has tweeted tips on how immigrants can avoid ICE - EDIT: he always accompanies describing the border as having a welcome mat but also a lock, however, no fear for leftists he is very very pro-immigration and supports efforts to evade ICE, etc., the second part is completely accurate.
-As liberal as you get fiscal policy.
The reader of slow boring have just turned their brains off when it comes to Mamdami and Talarico, they are both just bad candidates with bad ideas. Talarico doesnt stand a chance but Mamdami is going to be eaten alive by this group within the next couple years.
It reminds me of Kamala, very focused on vibes rather than what is this person actually saying/proposing. Isn't the lesson of 2024 supposed to be that we should actually care about the historical record of this guy?
"-Southern border should be a front porch with a giant welcome mat,"...AND A LOCK ON THE FRONT DOOR. He never says the one without the other.
Are your tweet "quotes" similarly selective/incomplete/out-of-context? The first one, Charlie Crooke made lots of hay over; I'm curious how many like that there actually are.
your criticism of that quote in particular is fair, you're right, that one was deceptively edited, the rest of the quotes are not edited, they are from full tweets, I will edit my note to reflect. thanks.
To be clear, it wasn't me that deceptively edited it! It was the source doc, that was the only comment that wasn't printed in full so I should have followed up.
Any of the people who hold statewide office in purple or red states and get mentioned a lot (Shapiro, Kelly, Beshear, Gallego, maybe someone else I'm forgetting) would probably be fine. That is a big problem! It's tough to win out of the so-called "centrist" lane to begin with. If you split it multiple ways, then there's no chance.
Like I say, it would work if every time JD Vance went on the attack he said “fuck you, I’m an astronaut. Are you an astronaut? No, then sit the fuck back” but I think he’s too squeaky clean for that
That person does not exist and could not survive in national dem politics.
I think the closest thing is Shapiro, and if he acts on national ambitions, he will immediately be DOA (or change himself into an unconvincing progressive).
I think Shapiro is best poised to roll his own base (part of his base at least) of pro-Israel Democratic moderates into accepting a turn away from Mideast involvement as the best worst outcome for Democratic party politics re: Israel. He should just say things like "Why are we underwriting the political aims of Israel's right wing parties with billions in American money and the full weight of our Mideast diplomacy?"
He would just have to decide that it's beneficial for him to evolve in this direction.
Either (1) he has the honesty to say that no, they have not committed a genocide or (2) he folds in the face of a lie, same as the Republicans who folded in the face of the "stolen election" lie (believed by 70% of Republicans). Either way, we will know who he is.
The thing is, Shapiro's base is like 2% of the dem primary electorate. Even among the vocal moderate dems my twitter diet overindexes on, 9 out of 10 arguments for him are "this guy's moderate enough to trick independents into voting for us!" rather than "this guy has good ideas".
Really glad for this post. As someone who is likely to the left of you (although definitely not as lefty as say Bernie or Bernie super fans) I’ve come to accept that even just for just for pragmatic political reasons you need to moderate strategically. But I’ve come to really frustrated with “Moderate” voices in general partly because I find I real smugness in rhetoric but also because I’m continually underwhelmed and quite frankly disappointed with “moderate” policy ideas being put out.
Case in point. Please see the latest tax plans put out by Senator Van Hollen and Senator Booker. Someone on social media described the plans as almost “perfect” Democratic tax plans; policies cosplaying as for the working class that actually benefit the upper middle class. Also, for the first time in decades we have real concerns that high deficits are putting upward pressure on interest rates and you want to make it worse?! Also, there’s a reason your Democrats. And one reason is recognizing that the unique circumstance of 1980 haven’t applied for decades which means blind devotion to tax cuts is idiotic and has only become more idiotic over the past 25 years.
I could go on, but man o man is it not a good look for the moderate faction to a) try to moderate on an issue where public is actually probably on your side b) putting our policy proposals that would genuinely make people’s lives worse give what this would likely do to interest rates c) just have a complete lack of understanding of what issues are actually the best issues to be moderating on.
There’s actually more I could criticize about this plan but I just want to say to Matt that stuff like this is why people like me have had reasons to at least be skeptical of moderate Dems since late 90s.
Good point to reference the “smugness” aspect. We can’t complain when leftists wag their finger, morally lecture people etc. when the moderates etc. do the same thing too, BUT right after complaining about leftists lecturing people etc
It's really a tough call to be a pragmatic moderate and do what's necessary (if it's even possible) to right the ship overloaded with $40 trillion in debt, inflation, crazy housing, and such. Maybe that's why extreme politics is de rigueur: it's a form of denial to have weird fantastical policies like defending police, overarching DEI, bleeding borders, or on the other side, Trumpism ( it's a casino mentality and we've long since bet away our disposable income). It's almost like wait for the extremists to sink the ship and THEN get someone with some pragmatic balls to see our way forward.
My personal politics are pretty far-left, but I recognize my goals are not achievable when government is ineffective and people don't trust it. That's why I have tremendous respect for Shapiro fixing the highway ahead of schedule and Whitmer filling the potholes.
I've heard slogans like "make shit work," "public excellence," and "make public services great again" (we probably won't use that last one).
While achieving this will involve slaughtering some sacred cows, I think the overall message is both pragmatic and progressive.
I give Shapiro credit for getting so many people to call him a hero for the rapid repair of I-95 but you know who else did the exact same thing? Newsom! A huge fire did damage to an I-10 overpass in 2023 and Newsom cut through red tape, involved the federal government and got the repairs done in an unbelievably short time.
This may be giving him too much credit, but I wonder if Newsom doesn't talk about this is because he's waiting for a primary debate because that bridge may become his version of Guliani's a noun, verb, and 9/11 to use this example on Shapiro.
Obama left a huge hole in the Democratic Party. This hole got filled by committees and we get this long list checkbox like set of policies but no real direction or message.
Rank and file elected Democrats are risk adverse and the tumult of Sanders’ insurgent campaign reinforced that risk aversion.
Progressives like the current govern by committee and weak moderates for factional reasons. It is easier for them to exert influence or extort concessions (e.g. why do NGOs only protest Democrats who support their stated aims?)
Finally, Obama had a level of technocratic elitism. He thought Harvard educated people and professors were the best experts and filled his administration with these types. That has to have affected the priorities of the Democratic Party. That also probably feeds into how many Democrats snub non college educated voters, culture, and challenges.
It's interesting that Matt slags on California with its soft on crime attitude toward shoplifting, with its recently passed law making any such theft under $950 a misdemeanor, and compares it unfavorably to his experience in Charleston South Carolina.
Where shoplifting under *$2000* is defined as a misdemeanor.
Right, the difference is not the theoretical maximum penalty, it's that SFPD spent three years afflicted with "blue flu" because the cops were mad about people saying they shouldn't kill black drug users willy-nilly, and Charleston PD apparently did not. (I guess the power of police to kill black Charleston drug users is unchallenged.)
As a result, even though actual shoplifting remained quite rare, organized groups were able to hit stores in a highly visible way with zero police response, generating horrible-looking clips of brazen criminality for the local news.
Misdemeanor shoplifting in South Carolina is very different from misdemeanor shoplifting in California-especially misdemeanor shoplifting in extra blue cities. Hell, there's video of shoplifters in California realizing what it means going from one jurisdiction to another. The primary benefit for bumping misdemeanors to felonies is to require all jurisdictions to arrest criminals, instead of issuing a summons.
>I think the people most likely to do that in a compelling way are purple-state politicians like Josh Shapiro and Ruben Gallego, but Newsom could do it and so could A.O.C.<
I was looking at some polling a few days ago—sorry, no time to rustle up a link at the moment—but Shapiro performs *much* better vs. hypothetical GOP nominee J.D. Vance than Newsom does. The latter's numbers nationally are not...wonderful. Neither are Harris's. Nor Buttigieg's for that matter. I suspect the Gallego/Ossoff/Kelly/Beshear/Whitmer tier would similarly poll more strongly than the Establishment Libs vis-a-vis Vance (the poll indicated they're not sufficiently well-known nationally to generate a meaningful result).
Newsom *could* win it, sure. But why risk going into the general without the strongest possible nominee?
I mean, you know the answer: every marginal point you get by moderating is a platform plank you’ve “sold out” on. If you’re going to win anyway, it doesn’t actually matter if you win by .1 or by 20 points. And have you ever met a political party operative that’s pessimistic about their chances of winning? It’s like meeting a religious person who thinks their religion’s eschatological vision won’t play out.
"it doesn’t actually matter if you win by .1 or by 20 points."
This drives me crazy. It really does matter whether you win by a lot, because if you do you have coat tails that makes you actually able to legislate. Its also means you have a good amount of room before your losing in the polls when things go wrong - and something always goes wrong.
America’s executive doesn’t quite work out that way is my response. Increased implied win percentage is more important than it typically is in lots of systems given the level of personal latitude.
Well, yeah-- this is a fairly obvious corollary of the fact that politics is about maximizing long-term expected policy value, not about narrowly maximizing your probability of winning the next election. The latter is Starmerism, which...[gestures across the pond]
I'm impressed with Gallego thus far in that he seems unafraid to go against the left, while being stridently anti-Trump and anti-Iran war. I even saw him ding Janet Mills on a podcast just for being old. So he's a moderate "fighter" that isn't yet part of the Establishment and doesn't talk like a career pol. He could end up being the right guy in the right place at the right time. Yet, he's actually not that articulate nor charismatic. I'm wondering if this could end up being an advantage though, boosting authenticity while not coming off as slick.
Newsom just isn't as likeable as much of the other contenders. He's clearly teeing himself up for a run but I think the more exposure he has leading up, the less popular he will become.
Especially with the Iran war (unless the regime falls quickly, with a rapid transition to democracy -- a highly unlikely prospect, to say the least!) -- I dread the thought of Shapiro running against Vance -- much as I like almost everything about Shapiro.
Springtime for Hitler! That's where Vance finally breaks with Trump. The undercurrents are already unmistakable -- "Israel dragged us into this" -- among friends to whom Vance has already given the nod (and then some), declaring, "No purity tests." And this, in turn, will even appeal to certain elements of the "woke" left.
Against Vance, I'd put my money on Kelly, with Booker, perhaps, as VP -- though I also wouldn't mind seeing Gallego run over a crowd of latte-sipping urbanists with his big-ass truck. ;-)
PS: With Kelly, we get a Jewish first lady -- but with Vance, we get a Hindu, which (in that instance) might help neutralize the Jew-baiters in his campaign.
All of this leaves me withthe question of what is winning for? Is it just to prevent the next Republican from continuing with or exacerbabing Trump's defict, immigrtion restrictions and tariffs by being slightly less bad on these same issues? If so, is Newsom any worse than Gallego?
I'd like to see Democrats with a positive vision of growth with equity -- low deficits, high immigration of skilled people, low import restrictions except from adversaries, and low cost reductionsin CO2 emissions -- and measures to restrict Executive powers vis a vis Congress.
That depends on whether you think MAGA is an existential threat to the American republic. I think it is, so, yes, literally the only point of winning is to prevent the next Republican presidential candidate from being the winner. I will acknowledge that isn't a very motivating campaign slogan, especially for swing voters, so I wouldn't recommend anyone formally run on that platform, but it is the lens that any candidate should be viewed through and it is the objective that any candidate should have in mind.
While there are many benefits to winning, many of which are elucidated throughout this thread, do you genuinely not think that simply preventing the worst impulses of the Republican party is sufficient reason to want Democrats to win?
Isn't that kind of the malignant ping-pong we've been playing since Obama, conflating the duality and each side demonizing each other to win the election and feel "safe"?
But the duality is real. Especially with Trump and the current Trump/MAGA dominated Republican party. There is zero chance the Republican party is going to nominate a Romney like figure. If that was the possibility on the Republican side than we'd be arguing about optimal marginal tax rates, and the size, scope, and efficacy of social welfare programs.
But those aren't the issues. Today's Republican party has top to bottom demonstrated a comfort, and in its majority, support, for autocracy, corruption, and a disregard for the rule of law.
I agree with your slippery slope esque argument, just that we’ve already slid down and we’re at the bottom. The new Conservative-Socialism of Vance et al. is worth opposing on its own.
Yeah, no. Both-sidesism ain’t gonna fly on this here comment thread, where most of us, while certainly not super-lefty, are very, very clear on which of the two major political parties in America is a cesspool inside a snake pit wrapped in a Dumpster fire.
They both look like cesspools to me (the far left and Trumpers--not the left and right center folks). The far left are in a way more insidious because they take the moral high ground as "do-gooders" but have zero self- reflection on how they could have lost to a pathetic, worst in a century, candidate like Trump. That doesn't mean I don't vote for them, out of necessity, so in that regard you're ultimately right concerning the Trumpers. But my feeling is almost wishing for a third party to break these chains we've created.
Hmm, perhaps, though I don't think the problem with the current American political predicament is that Republicans weren't demonized enough.
I take the point about a sort of spiral race to the bottom, though, and I'd say that just because I'm advocating that as a clear reason to vote to keep Republicans out in a space like this does not mean I endorse it as a public electoral strategy.
By the same metric, a sincere evangelical Christian who believes abortion is murder is perfectly rational in voting to keep Democrats away from the government at all costs, it's just that we don't agree with their views. By the same metric, a sincere liberal is perfectly rational in not wanting the government to be controlled by...well...the Republican Party.
That's a better reason to win big (as distant a possibility as that may seem)... the only long term solution is to crush the Republican party and get it to reconstitute or change its ways. The worst people shouldn't be participating in politics at all except at the lunatic fringe.
I also think it could and should be mentioned, especially for how many times we criticize or “punch left”, the time that the person establishment or party leaders were wrong policy wise, “vibes” wise, picking candidates etc.
Definitely not saying the party shouldn’t moderate in some aspects (policy, perception, slogans etc.). But makes me a bit cynical when one moment the party is wagging their fingers at the “left” (very vague or open ended definition in this context) to tell them they’re not popular or large in numbers, but then almost instantly blame them for every loss (they can’t be the reason every time).
But overall, I agree with the article. Sometimes, it’s not just the activists or left who have their priorities in the wrong order
Every time this topic is the explicit headline of an article, as opposed to the subtext, every nutjob "destroy the welfare state" neocon and every nutjob "the people demand revolutionary change" left-entryist turn up to bitch.
I am nonetheless impressed that MY can count members of both groups among his subscribers.
There’s also something about seeing a young hopeful (almost naive) politician having his genuine convictions disciplined under the responsibility of governing (Obama/Mamdani) that makes people more sympathetic to policy shifts than seeing party hacks (Hilary/Biden/Harris/Newsom) try to flip flop to gain power.
Also relates to Matt's point about Mamdani. Having charisma makes it easier to roll your base.
It also conforms to a sense of a “hero’s journey” for the career of the politician.
Charisma is not enough, and it should not be tolerated at all. Substance is more important than someone being nice or sincere.
He was flustered because its very tricky to make the main villains of a story the people who had bombs thrown at them while they were holding a peaceful (but maybe unsavory) rally - tough taking the focus off bombmakers pledging allegiance to ISIS in that narrative. Something that is especially embarrassing when your wife was just outed liking posts praising the 10/7 attacks and declaring the atrocities 'hoaxes'.
NYC politics is going to eat that guy alive.
>NYC politics is going to eat that guy alive.
I'm skeptical. NYC just elected him overwhelmingly. Him and his wife coming from a leftist milieu where 10/7 attacks are minimized surprises exactly no one.
Getting 51% is not quite "overwhelmingly."
"minimized"
You might just personally like Mamdani more
Does anyone like Gavin Newsom on a personal level? I respect Gavin’s talent as a political operative but I’m trying to make a distinction. Take Obama if not Mamdani.
Apparently, a lot of women find him handsome and charming. I dunno, I'm not among them!
I have always found him reasonably charming in interviews.
Likewise. I think he's fine. Not electorally-optimal for a national election, mind you—but "fine" as in, intelligent, quick-witted, well-spoken, right on most issues, and so on. In another era he could have made a perfectly good standard-bearer for Democrats.
Zohran feels genuine, Newsome feels Hollywood
Henry's right. You like Mamdani more.
Every single clip I've seen of him, and every quote I've read, just feels wrong. I've said it before, and I'll say it again-charm is a verb, not a trait.
The difference between “accepting discipline” and flip flopping is charisma.
I hate it when you are right.
I never saw Hillary Clinton as much of a flipper. Her low favorables were driven by a heady mixture of: perception of corruption, unwillingness to suffer fools gladly, misogyny, and dislike (on the left) of her hawkishness.
And she really *was* to Bernie's left on immigration and gun control. Sanders was a traditionalist, pro-union immigration skeptic, as well as someone who realized large numbers of his constituents were gun owers.
I encountered Hillary Clinton twice while she was senator in NY. I was with my mother at a town hall sort of event, and my mother talked to her for a few minutes about some troubles we were having, Clinton was very genuine and took my mother's seriously, took our phone number and she followed up personally (on the phone) a month or so later to see how things were going and see how she could help. She didn't have to do that, she never advertised that she was doing it, but it meant a lot. I get some of the Clinton hate, but it rubs me the wrong way when people who she was some cold hearted calculated monster, my experience was that she was a good person who tried. I'll go to the mat for her as having been a great president if she were given the chance.
She was also ultra popular when she was Secretary of State! For some reason there are some rare politicians out there who are well liked between elections but hated during election season.
She was unfortunately most popular whenever she wasn't campaigning - she would've been a 3-term Prime Minister in an alternate America where a Radical Republican Congress completely defanged the Presidency after getting that extra vote to impeach Andrew Johnson.
Her public personality is that of an eminence grise. she has the perfect public demeanor for a Sec State or similar role.
and a terrible one for Presidency.
It’s called a firehose of propaganda. Plus a legacy media obsessed with presenting its own seriousness, to the detriment of actual good sense.
One day people will realize that anything with cross partisan appeal is just waiting for Fox News to go nuclear on it…
All I have to say is: I ❤️ Hillary. I will ❤️ Hillary always & forever.
I was always a fan, too. She would have made a fine president (and a spectacularly good one compared to what we ended up with).
Fine president, for sure. But a terrible candidate for reasons both within as well as totally outside her control.
I was a Hillary fan, but nowadays I find myself much more open to 2016 Bernie.
I blame Bernie for Trump eking out a win in 2016. I will never forgive him for his petulance and calling for a contested convention when he lost by a landslide.
I blame Bernie for knuckling under to the podium-stealers and hecklers. It was bad leadership and created a permission structure for bad behavior.
One of the little-known aspects of prewar Japan is that the military had a shitty cultural quirk where junior officers could basically commit violent mutinies and then get away with it by claiming they felt compelled to take action in defense of the emperor. It helped drag the country into wars it wasn’t ready for, and also undermined the chain of command and various other power centers in a country that was actively being contested between those centers.
A similar thing happened starting with Bernie. His refusal to stand up to the activists paved the way for a shitty mutiny that we’re only just now starting to see peter out.
So many of his 2020 staffers came out as nutters and made grifting careers as completely unhinged commentators and influencers.
“Some”
You and I aren’t on the same page on this. I think your bar for “nutters and grifters” is probably a low lower than mine.
I blame Nurse Ratched for losing to (a fake) McMurphy in 2016.
Bernie endorsed (but couldn't rescue) Her. She just wasn't likeable enough.
Didn’t he wait literally months to endorse her? He took steps that maximized the amount of dissension at the convention and afterwards. Contrast with her actions in 2008. I’m not saying that cost her the election, and certainly not that she made no mistakes, but he was playing games we couldn’t afford to play with the stakes as high as they were.
Part of the problem is that no one thought the stakes were that high. There has been a running theme through Democratic approach to Trump to not take him seriously enough. You see this in 2016 when no one thought he would win. You see this in 2024 when there were many Democrats who preferred to run against Trump thinking again there was no way he could win.
AND, O’Malley would’ve won.
Who's O'Malley?
People forget how popular HRC was in 2014 before the Democratic primary:
https://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2014/07/17/hillary-clinton-claims-title-of-best-liked-candidate-poll-finds
You can't blame Bernie Sanders because Hilary Clinton stole the primary race by using super-delegates to be the presidential nominee. You are uninformed.
Please tell me you are parodying.
Nvm. This person is just debasing language. No election was “stolen.” The 2016 Democratic primary was a free and fair election that respected the legitimacy of the overwhelming majority of primary voters.
I am not because centrist Democrats have rigged the political system. It is nothing new. Hilary Clinton lost to Trump because she refused to embrace universal policies that were popular among American voters.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut financial ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system with incremental changes. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of a radical problem going back to at least four decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China. Shame on you for being biased in your reporting.
I find myself much more open to the *2020* Bernie.
I think she would have done a good job as President but she and Biden were not very charismatic as candidates.
She was one of those candidates who has really been hurt by the fact that the presidency is also a TV job. I always liked her a lot better than the average person, but this is because I mostly read her statements rather than watching them. When I watched her on TV, I suddenly got why people didn't like her much: she just doesn't have the ability to deliver speeches without anyone seeing the work she's doing to not make it awkward. Bill Clinton has the magical ability to make it seem like he's just having a chat with a few people when he gives a speech. The actual substance has always been great, but she just can't deliver it well.
You’re right. The job of the President is more than behind the scenes dealmaking. The performative aspect of it is important too.
You are informed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaing a completely broken system. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs to Canada, Mexico, and China.
Are these actually replies to my comment or has Substack's app done something weird again? The content doesn't seem to relate much to my point.
I think one thing we might agree on that Matt also has mentioned in the past is that the Democrats should be much more comfortable rejecting business interests and being the poorer party. Obama was so good at fundraising that the party got sidetracked and started focusing more on fundraising as if that was why he won. Because of that fixation, professional Dems have given a lot of cultural ground to leftists to preserve their relationships with donors in basically a mirror image of what pre-Trump Republicans used to do for their culture warriors when they were running on abortion bans and school prayer. They throw red meat to the party base on cultural issues because they don't want to "attack" the wealthy.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs to Canada, Mexico, and China.
Correction: You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs to Canada, Mexico, and China.
Yep. Biden had a very good structural situation for Democrats in 2020. Hillary had a pretty shitty one in 2016.
I don’t agree about 2016. Hillary ran a poor campaign and lost narrowly. If one or two minor things had gone in her favor, she’d be President. There was no structural disadvantage because Obama was a popular President and she did win the popular vote.
>I don’t agree about 2016. Hillary ran a poor campaign and lost narrowly.<
Only once in the modern era (1988) has a party managed to secure a third consecutive White House term. It's very difficult to do. Moreover, much of the Midwest was suffering from a mild recession. A strong, mainstream GOP nominee would have romped to a much more impressive victory, but the Republicans nominated a lunatic mafioso, and so managed the narrowest of victories.
But yeah, the GOP enjoyed the structural advantage that cycle.
I don't disagree, mind you, that HRC was a pretty mediocre nominee. The fact that the Republicans nominated a weak candidate gave Dems an opportunity to prevail *despite* the strong structural headwinds against them. And she flubbed it.
She would have been facing a Republican Senate and probably House as well. And considering how effectively McConnell used the filibuster against Obama, she would have been boxed in to a great extent had she won.
Still an improvement over what we got though!
Usually divided control works fine for the President. Worked well for Bill Clinton and Obama. Passing legislation is highly overrated as Democrats discovered during the Biden presidency.
>I don’t agree about 2016. Hillary ran a poor campaign and lost narrowly.<
Only once in the modern era (1988) has a party managed to secure a third consecutive White House term. It's very difficult to do. Moreover, much of the Midwest was suffering from a mild recession. A strong, mainstream GOP nominee would have romped to a much more impressive victory, but the Republicans nominated a lunatic mafioso, and so managed the narrowest of victories.
But yeah, the GOP enjoyed the structural advantage that cycle.
I don't disagree, mind you, that HRC was a pretty mediocre nominee. The fact that the Republicans nominated a weak candidate gave Dems an opportunity to prevail *despite* the strong structural headwinds against them. And she flubbed it.
I guess it depends on what you mean by structural. The electorate was looking for a change candidate, and Clinton wasn't that. Also, it's very rare for a party to win three Presidential elections in a row. That Clinton came very close speaks, I think, more to Trump's inherent weakness than anything.
But I agree she made a lot of mistakes in the campaign, and that a few less would have seen her as President.
It wasn't like 2020 or 2024 when being from the incumbent party was definitely a negative because the unpopularity of the incumbent. You're right that historically it has been very hard for one party to win 3 in a row but as you've mentioned, she was running against Trump and not a generic Republican.
Her low favorables were also driven by decades of coordinated, unrelenting smear campaigns.
I think you're right those issues took front and center, but there was also a perception that the Clintons were flip-floppers because of Bill's third way stuff, and the fact that Hillary never really made it clear what she stood for when she was a senator or a candidate, and when she did, like her support for th Iraq War, she had to reverse track.
C'mon. She was one of the most famous women in the world in 2000. She didn't need whatever nonsense "connections and leverage" related to a rabbi and a Puerto Rican terrorist you're talking about. Come to think of it, your comment is an excellent example of what I'm trying to illustrate.
I think people just don't like it when someone visibly hungers to be President. (I think, by the way, it is bad that people feel this way. We should encourage ambition!)
With HRC the visible hunger wasn't the problem - by definition everyone who runs for president HAS to be visibly hungry - it was the perception of a sense of entitlement because she had been First Lady. Independent voters REALLY did not like that in 2016, and a big chunk of Democratic primary voters (including me) didn't like in 2008 either. It gives me at least a little hope that we won't ever have to endure President Donald Trump Jr.
In 2015, I was adamant about “no more Bushes, no more Clintons,” and a lot of people I knew felt that way.
Then I voted for Clinton anyway. Hopefully we can add “no more Trumps” to the list.
Trump doesn’t encourage ambition in his own children. I don’t think we have to worry about Don Jr, who seems well aware of his own mediocrity. I think I read somewhere that he helped pick J.D. Vance as Trump’s successor, knowing it couldn’t be him.
And ALL the Obamas
I don't think any Obama has given an inclination that they want to return to the White House...
Yeah I didn’t mention them because I see no indications that Michelle would be interested
Should have just coronated them hereditary royalty and ended this “elections” and “constitutional government” mess once and for all
I think we should encourage ambition on the scale of becoming a doctor or a field grade officer. And if you make it that high and the dice come up in your favor, then you seek high office.
However, starting with high office as a goal is fatuous and distorting
“….the dice?”
fortuna
I voted for her but I would have more respect for her if she had divorced Bill Clinton and built her own political network.
To be fair, Mamdani's massive flips flops after he won the Dem nomination were a big part of why he beat Cuomo, flip flopping works!
I must say I hate them and much prefer the cynics. No one I despise more than people who think they can solve things with pithy slogans and "good" intentions.
Extremely good point.
This is bizarre. You think Obama had his "genuine convictions disciplined under the responsibility of governing." What would be an example?
Great post, Matt. AOC is not the solution but at least she aims to put forth a vision (perhaps incomplete) for the future of the country. I see Newsom as a Hillary 2016, wanting the presidency so bad he'll bend and twist in every manner to look as appealing to every Democratic faction but lacking any actual ideals.
I'm quite certain that Beshear will run in '28 but folks seem to be sleeping on him right now. I see him having quite possibly the largest net of appeal across most 2028 hopefuls and being a successful two term governor in KY is no slouch. He also has a Talarico earnestness that I think could play very well among conservatives in red states. He's about as moderate as one could want without being too overtly ideological (by default given where he lives) and articulates his policy wins in clear ways. I would say this is what makes the horse race so fun but the stakes are too chillingly high over the next couple years.
What are Beshear's successes as governor of Kentucky?
I mean this seriously, not sarcastically. The governor of Kentucky is a largely figurehead position that has zero legislative power (vetoes can be overridden by simple majority). What are his accomplishments in office that we should see as supporting his platform?
Successful governor of a red state means basically no accomplishments which is great news. No baggage.
To just name one: Kentucky expanded Medicaid under Democratic Governor Steve Beshear in 2014, covering over 400,000 additional residents.
We should make Andy Beshear our nominee because of policies his father passed?
oops. my bad. All this time I thought it was the same Beshear.
Yeah who knew there were 2 different Beshears
I give this a meek “Yes?”
Aside from the Steve/Andy Beshear mixup here, it's worth noting that Kentucky actually still had a Democratic majority in its state House of Representatives at the time.
It seems hard to believe this to be true but it is. That majority managed to survive 2010 and even 2014 before the Trumpian laws of political gravity finally took it down in 2016.
He was touting a battery factory in the state recently on the Daily Show having brought in new jobs and has overseen low unemployment in the state. He’s got one of the highest approval ratings of EVERY Governor right now. And, this should appeal to most SB readers, he avoids cultural wedge issues.
Getting elected in a red state is an achievement. Sending viral tweets is not. People take it for granted that Dems should win, and yet they seem to keep losing and approval ratings for the Democratic party are lower than for the Republican party. The Biden administration's task was to repair the damage, return normalcy, and prevent the reemergence of MAGA, not to deliver a progressive wish list. They failed. The Democrats' goals for 2028 should be winning and delivering on the same three things. If Beshear can do that (I don't know), then he should be the nominee.
I don’t get the Beshear hype. He’s only governor because his father was a popular governor of Kentucky. That is not replicable in a presidential campaign and he’s not very charismatic.
"He’s only governor because his father was a popular governor of Kentucky."
That can't be the only reason. It's the kind of thing that probably gave him a big leg-up early on in terms of name recognition, but sasn't he won reelection?
Name recognition only gets you so far. Beshear ended up winning twice in a deeply red state that has sent Mitch McConnell to the senate for 30 years
Also, every governor has name recognition when they run for reelection.
Beshear is good but the previous governor was so bad, that it made it somewhat easier to win. Beshear is more a check on an ultra-right legislature in Kentucky, so he’s more stopped really bad things than done really good things. He’s likable but a lot of his support really came from how he responded to the tornados in western Kentucky in 2021. That may not translate into something that can lead Democrats in 2028. I also find him to be not hugely different than most politicians in that he sounds very rehearsed and sounds like every other moderate democrat. I agree that charisma and authenticity aren’t everything but they’re qualities that are more important in presidential elections than they are in governor/senator or other local elections.
If Newsom is Hillary and AOC is Bernie, does that make Beshear Martin O'Malley?
If O'Malley stands for "not a chance in hell", then yes.
O’Malley barely got anything noteworthy done in a deep blue state. Beshear may not gin up the same excitement as a Gallego or Shapiro but he’s not wallpaper
He seems like a nice young man.
Matt has said that his takeaway from 2016 is that O'Malley would have won.
Lenin also had a vision. You don’t, in fact, have to hand it to radicals that they have a vision.
His point is that it's something compelling leaders do. Like Lenin!
Beshear wouldn't win
The important thing moderates need to do is recognize that Democratic primary voters want people who are proposing solutions to the serious problems we face. Right now the left wing is the faction that advocates both for Matt-style solutions like congestion pricing and legal apartments and for things Matt doesn't like, like punitive taxes on billionaires. As long as moderates are the faction of not doing things they're going to keep losing intra-party debates.
As I said, moderate Democrats are designing everything by committee which benefits progressives in factional battles. A strong moderate personality and agenda means progressives get fewer policy wins.
Moderates need to do some self reflection on how that situation came about -- it's not a problem the left created.
I didn’t say the left created this. I just said they have successfully exploited it.
Great point, big tent usually needs to appease everyone to continue to be big tent and win. However the inter party fighting just always benefits progressives, because some of them don't care about winning overall but just the fighting in of itself.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut financial ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system with incremental changes. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of a radical problem, which goes back at least four decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China. Shame on you for being biased in your reporting.
Again with the copy pasted personal attacks ignoring what was written.
In NY, congestion pricing is thanks to Michael Bloomberg. And later put into legislation by Andrew Cuomo.
[pdf] https://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/downloads/pdf/publications/full_report_2007.pdf
If you want to live like a progressive, vote for the technocrat.
That Bloomberg is no longer representative of the moderate wing of the Democrats is precisely the problem.
Fair. Though please check out:
1. [pdf] Roadmap to Colorado’s Future: 2026 by Jared Polis
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DpdHabsrg8kL80DXGAoHxKl5zeSXY6Ht/view
2. [pdf] A Ten-Year Strategic Plan for Economic Development in Pennsylvania by Josh Shapiro
https://pagetsitdone.com/content/dam/copa-getsitdone/en/documents/economicdevelopmentstrategy-dced_2024_final.pdf
Not quite Bloomberg's PlanYC magnum opus, but the DNA lingers.
I don’t think things like congestion pricing and zoning reform are being pushed exclusively by the left wing. It’s the Abundance movement, which has been thought of as centrist, but is also disproportionately Californian and thus includes some representatives of the left, and has picked up some others as well.
I agree that these come out of the abundance movement. I also think that most of the energy for abundance is from people on the left. The specifics of SF politics distorts this but it's what we see most places.
Primary voters want that. Do sufficient numbers of general election voters want those proposed solutions? Because however true the former statement is, it's irrelevant, it is only the answer to the latter question that matters.
I am to the left of the median voter in this country. I know that, I have known that all my life. If I were to run for office on my views I would deservedly lose, EVEN THOUGH MY IDEAS ARE BETTER.
Every time a Republican has won in my life time, the state of the world, and especially the state of the people who I would most like to see improvement for, has gotten worse. When democrats have won, the world, and the state of the more vulnerable, have gotten at least a little bit better, and have gotten much, much better than if the Republican had won.
Neither I nor any other democratic primary voter can make the world or the median US voter different than they are. We can only do what we can to make things a little better rather than a lot worse.
Flagging this person has been banned for a day. Just ridiculous spamming in the comments, I'm not even doing a warning.
Another copy pasted personal attack at ML unrelated to what they wrote.
It is not a personal attack, and my comments with analysis are related because Americans have not deeply examined Bill Clinton's neoliberal policies that are still hurting working class Americans in the 21st century and beyond.
Ignoring the opening incoherence, lots of ideas are popular if you ask the question in a “Do you like this idea yes or no”. Ask, “Do you like Girl Scout cookies?” The overwhelming answer is yes. Ask, “are you willing to pay $20 a box for Girl Scout cookies”,or “do you want to only have Girl Scout cookies and not be allowed to have oreos or chocolate chips”, and you get a different answer.
Do you like MFA? Yes. Do you want to change your current employer provided health insurance for a health care system run strictly by the government? Hmm, maybe not so yes.
And specifically on MFA, there are many successful universal health care schemes that aren’t MFA. And FFS, do you really want the only health care system in the US to be run by RFK Jr?
All of that without even touching on the salience of how voters actually decide what is important when they vote.
Actually, if you ask Americans about maintaining the employer sponsored health insurance where they can't switch jobs because their benefits belong to their employers. A majority of them said that they prefer Medicare for All over employer sponsored health insurance. In other words, they want career stability and health insurance portability over job lock. Please read the source from Data for Progress. Period.
Interesting false choice, we’re not kept from switching jobs, 60% of Americans have employer healthcare, if you leave one job with benefits it’s highly likely you’ll get a new one with benefits. The choice I listed was Bernie’s plan.
This is not to say our current system is good, it’s not. But SWITCHING to MFA is not actually popular, and more importantly not a way to win elections.
I’ve read the Data for Progress stuff, they cook their books in the way I described. They could do better and be actually useful, but they choose not to.
The Data for Progress did not cook up its books. Polling asked American voters across the political aisle if they supported Medicare for All after reading about the policies and tradeoffs. It showed that most Democrats, Independents, and Republicans supported Medicare for All when key words included publicly funded healthcare, but privately owned and operated healthcare by healthcare providers, however, health insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays would be eliminated. Medicare for All is a healthcare system that is publicly financed, but it is privately delivered by healthcare providers.
It is not a false choice. According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a majority of Americans are not satisfied with their employer sponsored healthcare because they face balanced billing, out of network charges, deductibles, and other healthcare expenses. Therefore, Americans have to file medical bankruptcy, which impacts their credit scores. That is not a good way to live without economic security. Not too many Americans receive better health insurance benefits at their new jobs. Health insurance in America is not portable when Americans face job lock. What is not popular is not implementing Medicare for All among young voters. Medicare for All is not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken healthcare financing system with incremental changes. Also, maintaining Obamacare without real guardrails is not going to win elections among young American voters. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of excessive medical debt, which goes back at least several decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent health insurance benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China.
I have traveled or lived abroad to use Taiwan's healthcare system, which is called Medicare for All. In Taiwan, citizens are satisfied with their healthcare system and don't have to worry about job lock, medical debt, out of pocket costs, and other expenses.
In the past, I worked for the private health insurance industry, and I know the tricks that you are not aware of by denying people's access to life saving medical treatments and satisfying shareholder's monthly financial reports.
I am disappointed in you for being biased and not thinking big for a better future. Period.
It seems bad to oppose a policy that is both popular and effective. The technocratic side of Democrats really disappears if you mention crime or education, I just don't understand why Democrats risk so much unpopularity with terrible policies on crime. There are powerful teaching unions which I can understand listening to, I don't think there is a shoplifters union, but Democrats act like there is and it is a powerful lobby they want to support.
It might be negative polarization against the policies police unions are in favor of? At least in part. That and a misguided attempt to appeal to minority voters that are “disparately impacted” by law enforcement (despite the fact that low income minority groups are most negatively affected by property crime).
There's not a pro-shoplifters union, but there are a lot of people who do not trust our justice system at all. Maybe I'll use my personal experience as an example. My aunt's house was robbed and they never caught the people who did it. Meanwhile, the cops arrested my brother for getting mouthy with them when he was biking home and didn't immediately stop and obey their instructions. There were 4 attempts to steal my car before the 5th one succeeded. We reported all of them but they didn't actually deal with it until the car was gone.
Now, I mostly have a technocratic mindset, so I look at this series of events and think that while the guy who arrested my brother probably was a power-tripping jerk, I think the other issues are mostly things that could be solved with basic modernization and reforms toward efficiency. But a lot of people would look at that and think that cops arrest people for challenging their authority on trumped up charges while not bothering to arrest people who are difficult to catch. Even more conspiracy-minded people might assume that the cops are in league with someone making money off the crime- for example, when our car was finally actually stolen, we had to pay the police lot like $400 just to not pick it up (the theft had totalled the car).
I would love for a Democrat to run on truly modernizing law enforcement and implementing the latest and best in crime-prevention and case solving. But overwhelmingly, the lever politicians usually want to fiddle with is sentencing, which I think is one of the least effective and most expensive policy solutions we have for the problem.
Does anyone outside weird left wing circles, object to repeat shoplifters getting a felony conviction? It is very popular and while data is sparse it seems to be effective.
It's not that it's a felony per se but that I dislike how much we rely on prison as our punishment of choice when it's expensive and doesn't have much in the way of rehab potential compared to most other programs. It costs over $100k per prisoner per year in California, so ratcheting up sentences means spending a lot more money on criminals. When you consider that a lot of people don't have contact with gangs before they get to prison but they're unavoidable within, I feel like sending someone to prison for mere shoplifting is me paying for small-time criminals to go to crime school where all the crime mentors are. I'd much rather do something like garnish wages for property crime until you've made up the value of what you stole + damages.
What other programs? Drug treatment programs are worth doing but not sure of their effectiveness, probation can be great but both need the threat of prison to work and don't work on persistent offenders who aren't safe in the community, which is the case of the vast majority of people going to prison. I am sceptical of the idea of prisons as colleges of crime.
Supervised labor, curfews enforced with ankle monitoring, restorative justice, that kind of thing. The kinds of things that basically every other country does so they don't have to have our absurdly high prison population.
I wonder how much of the pressure on the Democrats for soft-on-crime policies comes from renters living in high-crime but otherwise desirably-located neighborhoods, who fear they'd be displaced by gentrification if the crime was dealt with?
I have thought about that as a theory, especially in terms of riots lowering rent. But I don't think it works in mainstream politics, it is too big of an effect and the pro-crime stuff is popular in a left wing politics not just in places that could gentrify.
yeah it's very clearly downstream from discourse about racial politics within the criminal justice system
That is definitely a significant part.
Shit, that’s what turned me into a tough-on-disorder person. I got tired of seeing people shoot up by the dumpster when I took out the trash, being yelled at by crazies at the bus stop, seeing litter in the park, and being asked to bum a cigarette 5 times during the 2 minute walk to Safeway. That shit got old. Par for the course for such a prime location, but it didn’t have to be that way, at least not to that degree.
This is about race, not unions.
The positioning on Israel in the primary is going to be wild.
I'm skeptical how salient Israel will be in the in '28 primary. I know it is THE litmus test on the left, but it never cracks top 10 in issue priority polling.
Just look at the number of comments whenever Matt writes about Israel / Palestine to see why this will be a salient issue in the primaries.
You joined the wrong Substack if you wanted a commentariat representative of the Democratic electorate.
Took me three overly long paragraphs to write the same thing you wrote in one sentence. Bravo.
What would be the right Substack for that! Asking for a friend.
Normal American Substack is probably TikTok.
I think it's fair to say that Slow Boring commentators are not representative of Democratic primary voters in a lot of ways, but one of them is that even compared to primary voters (i.e. the subset voters who are paying attention to politics more than you're typical voter), the commentariat is unusually well informed on all sorts of topics but especially foreign policy.
My point is that while most of us have reasonably informed opinions on Israel/Palestine and often passionate opinions on Israel/Palestine, I don't really think that's true of even Dem primary voters.
This is something Matt has actually either said or touched upon a lot since October, 2023. Just yesterday he (I think correctly) noted that events in the Middle East get way oversized attention vis a vis other foreign policy topics that you would think should have more attention like events happening with our second biggest neighbor. But I think something he's sort of touched on is that it's not really all that clear this topic is actually of profound concern to vast swaths of Dem primary voters despite what very loud voices on social media and quite frankly MSM would tell you.
One sort of complicating factor that again Matt has touched on. A disproportionate amount of donor money to the Democratic party comes from Jewish voters. I know this observation is touchy because unfortunately there really are voices out there who use this as a cudgel for some genuinely antisemitic garbage about who control US foreign policy. But it's just a banal fact about the demographic make up of the Democratic party and (again as Matt has touched on), kind of an underrated source of tension in the Democratic party when it comes to this topic.
Sort of a jumping off point to a different prediction. My suspicion is one reason Democratic position on Israel/Palestine is going to change going forward is that I think it's likely that the donor class of the Democratic party is going to become disproportionately people of East Asian and South Asian background. I know there was a lot of ink spilled point out that people of East Asian and South Asian descent shifted right in 2022 and 2024, but it remains the case this is a Democratic voting constituency by and large. And given how many Silicon Valley engineers are people with this background when does that start translating into real power in the Democratic party? I know Indian Americans have passed Jewish Americans as far as highest median incomes in America. So are we sure this won't result in the Democratic party paying more attention to events in India (call me biased, but per Matt's observation, I'd say India is high on the list of places US should be paying more attention to foreign policy wise).
Highly engaged voters -- which are well represented in the comment section, though not fully representative -- have been the driving force behind elevating all sorts of problematic issues being made salient in primaries. I worry next time will be no different.
As other commentators have noted, that really depends on whether the Iran war still being an "A1" story in late 2027/early 2028. Without American boots on the ground I highly doubt it.
This time five years ago, Russia invasion of Ukraine was "front page" news. Even four years ago, it was still a pretty big topic of discussion. I personally think it's still quite an important issue. But I think I'm on solid ground in saying it was negligible part of the 2024 political campaign.
I'm aware that Israel/Palestine is almost its own category as a foreign policy story. I had an International Studies class in college where my professor noted something about this conflict breaks people's brains; colleagues who are capable of nuance when it came to discussing any other conflict in the world suddenly were incapable of seeing Israel/Palestine as anything other than a black and white issue. So point taken that if there is a foreign policy topic that could rear it's ugly head and not only become salient in the primaries but have some truly unhinged voices making it salient it's this one.
But honestly, is it all that clear this issue was all that important to what happened in 2024? Again, I know there was not a "traditional" primary (Again point taken that of all foreign policy topics that could be elevated, this might be the one), but we really sure it had much of an impact on the election.
There were lots of super leftists who posted how they were voting for Jill Stein and get thousands of "likes" on Twitter or Bluesky. But as far as I can tell the number of Harris voters who voted for Stein is extraordinarily small. If there is one place where the Israel/Palestine did have an electoral impact its Dearborn Michigan. But that's not really because of leftists elevating an issue in a primary, but anger at Biden's embrace of Bibi (and talk about buyer's remorse).
I just think a lot depends on where the situation stands in October, 2027 (so similar timing to the Hamas attack on Israel). I'd say more likely scenario is some foreign policy "black swan" event happening in some other part of the world we are not even paying attention to very closely right now (Taiwan anyone?) becoming the main foreign policy talking point in a primary.
To quibble mildly, Russia invaded Ukraine 4 years ago. 5 years ago, very few people could have pointed out Ukraine on a map. Now there are a few people who can.
You are uninformed about moderate Democrats pivoting to the left because they have not cut financial ties from wall street and corporate donors. By the way, Medicare for All, tuition, debt free public higher education and vocational training, paid vacation, and other policies are popular among American voters, according to Data for Progress. These ideas are not radical at all. What is radical is maintaining a completely broken system with incremental changes. Incremental changes never worked back then, and they will never work today. They don't address the root cause of a radical problem, which goes back at least four decades. You are part of the problem going back to Bill Clinton's neoliberal days of outsourcing good paying jobs with decent benefits to Canada, Mexico, and China. Shame on you for being biased in your reporting.
My reporting? What are you talking about?
As a class, South Asian Muslims really dislike Israel, and South Asian Hindus and Christians are conflicted. So it's likely if your prediction is correct that support for Israel by Democratic donors will decrease.
It's a low-priority issue for general election voters, but I'm guessing it's a much higher-priority issue for Democratic primary voters and (especially) the influencers and tastemakers whom Democratic primary voters listen to.
It's also pretty obvious that the optimal strategy on Israel to win a Democratic primary at this point is pretty much the Bernie Sanders/Mamdani/AOC line of calling it a genocide, saying Bibi is a war criminal, pledging no more aid, criticizing AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Now that Biden's out of office, registered Democrats (particularly older ones) have become much more opposed to the war in Gaza because doing so no longer codes as breaking with "their" president. See here: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/09/18/america-is-falling-out-of-love-with-israel. The same dynamic happened with the Vietnam war and LBJ, as detailed in Chapter 9 of this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_and_Origins_of_Mass_Opinion.
That’s poison for the general though. I think you have to hope a “not my business” America first peace ticket vaguely in support of a two state solution but promising much less involvement is enough.
Yea, only the slightly more polished version of "fuck them all, they all suck" can possibly thread the needle here.
A pox on both their houses, focus on hearth and home is a fine general election message.
Wrong spot.
Zionists don’t care about gas prices. If this keeps up, they will become a rather unpopular minority. The reasons for supporting Israel are too gossamer for normies to embrace any real sacrifice to maintain israeli nuclear hegemony.
Not caring about prices is inconsistent with my experience with the Jewish people (I say this with love, my Jewish friends!).
I’m hopeful that Dems’ distancing themselves from Israel is limited to this… but I’m worried that there’s always another way that antizionist politics can go.
Especially if this Iran thing goes sideways, there might be an opening to frame “Zionists” as the enemy within. Why worry about far-away middle eastern countries when the real enemy is here at home?
The topic could be linked to lots of things Americans care about — the affordability agenda (the Iran war!), the rise or Trump (the “Epstein class”!), immigration issues (Soros/ICE trains with the IDF, depending on who you’re pitching to), and even AI (Altman! Sutskever! Yudkowsky! Amodei… doesn’t have the same ring to it).
Strategists will see the opportunity to appease the left while attacking the establishment, win over minorities who swung to Trump while affirming the rights of Jews to eat bagels and lox. (With Tucker on the other side, who else will they vote for?) Pure political calculation might push Dems hard towards this position.
After all, small cost to pay if this is all that stands between them and justice, universal healthcare, etc right?
I'm a bit more worried that "[e]specially if this Iran thing goes sideways" the anti-Semitic whistles you're noting will happen more on the right side of the spectrum.
I basically agree with this. It'll become a competitive lane in politics, and Democrats will understand that by going only 50% as far as Republicans, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Who are you going to vote for? "We hate all Jews?" or "We love Jews, unless they cheer on the wrong side in The War Against Half the Jews?"
Re AI, you forgot to mention Zuckerberg, Andy Jassy, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This could get very ugly on both sides.
Also possible that Tucker Carlson- or someone like him- gets into the Republican primary bashing the war and claiming it’s only for Israel’s benefit with huge costs to America.
Vance will get there first. (What color is a chameleon on a mirror?)
I’m sure he’ll try, but Tucker (or whoever) will say that you were part of the administration- why didn’t you stop it or resign in protest?
Is it not?
So we're betting on this whole Iran thing being over quick, then?
That would be the wildcard.
I'm personally betting on it. Trump happily telegraphs to the world what he's thinking, and what he's thinking is "I can't let gas go much higher."
I give the reappearance of TACO three weeks tops.
I think TACO should be retired as an insult. I'm tired of him NOT chickening out. Illegal and unwise actions to capture Maduro, start a war with Iran, unilaterally and illegally apply tariffs on the entire world with extra tariffs on anyone who insults.
Let's not encourage him to "stick to his guns".
One of the few redeeming qualities Trump has is not actually an ideologue and that one of his few talents is basically being able to "read the room". This has mostly resulted in him getting away with being a con-man, but it at least has the side benefit of Trump doing a 180 on a variety of topics overnight in a way most politicians would not. I know most politicians would never have done the "liberation day" tariffs at all which is one of the many reasons why the way he governs is so dangerous.
But there are A LOT of hawks in the GOP. In fact, when the "tik tok" of what led to this war is written in detail, wouldn't be shocked if the hawks basically pushed Trump to join the bombing campaign (seems like based on reporting Lindsey Graham may fall into this camp). Point being, a "normal" GOP politician being a) an Iran hawk and b) having someone like John Bolton as NSA or SecDef seems a very plausible scenario. In this timeline, my suspicion is the GOP Pres in question not only isn't backing down, but is probably even more likely to be putting boots on the ground and expanding the war in a very damaging way.
My usual spiel once again. In our (I think correct) zeal to sound the alarm about everything Trump is doing, let's not overromanticize the "good ole days" of the supposedly more sane GOP (And let's face it, plenty of hawkish Dems too).
Except Trump is an ideologue on tariffs. He's flexible about it, but kind a wild the extent he is willing to push for them.
"let's not overromanticize the "good ole days" of the supposedly more sane GOP (And let's face it, plenty of hawkish Dems too)."
They feel pretty romantic to me. Every other politician would have at least involved Congress or tried to build support for an attack and would have stopped if they couldn't. Trump just decides to attack other countries. He's also out there threatening to take land from allies, violating US law constantly, taking bribes for pardons, tariffing countries because their leader said something he didn't like, tearing up alliances/deals the US spent decades forging, etc.
Plenty of leaders in the past have made decisions that I disagree with, often vehemently. None of them violated all institutional constraints they way that Trump has.
Reading the room may be the only thing he has left, mentally. I’ve noticed he gets really interested in drapes and windows during high-level meetings
TACO is a pro-Trump message
Exactly! We want him to chicken out, politicians should chicken out from doing destructive things! It’s kind of a shame that it’s a catchy acronym that describes a real phenomenon as Dems use it too when it is good when it happens
TIAC
“Trump Is A Chode” (I miss that guy on my commute home. I hope he comes back out now the weather is nice.)
Trump's a lot of undesirable things, but chode isn't one of them.
100% agree with this. We want him to adopt TACO so don't talk about TACO. He's cunning but he has the maturity of an 8 year old.
You really think the particular insults Trump haters decide to use can have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of his presidency?
I'm skeptical!
He has notoriously thin skin. Given that I believe Obama making fun of him at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011 was a significant factor in Trump's decision to run, I don't think the risk is worth it.
He can TACO all he wants, but in foreign policy the enemy gets a vote, too.
Eh, I really don't think the Iranian regime is any position to keep going a day after we stop.
The Netanyahu government on the other hand just might, or restart things at anytime if they see it in their interest.
The current supreme leader’s wife and parents were just killed in the war. The rest of the leadership are, unlike in Venezuela, ideologues. The Iranian government has the ability to project power through foreign terrorist organizations and could reconstitute their domestic drone and ballistic missile programs relatively quickly after an end to immediate hostilities. At this point, if we don’t conduct regime change, we will not see the end of retaliation for years to come.
This sort of depends on Iran being a situation he can actually unilaterally withdraw from.
True enough -- and meanwhile, who will open the Strait of Hormuz?
Do you think that the price goes down enough if he stops in a week?
Oh I have no idea about the specifics of gas prices. I'm talking generalities: more and longer war means higher oil prices, and sinking numbers for the GOP. Stopping the war presumably does the opposite. But he's done himself and the GOP brand damage either way, I reckon, because there doesn't seem to be a revolution brewing in Iran, and if the regime survives, it's going to be hard to dodge the "LOSER" label.
Until a tanker gets a drone strike.
The faith of so many people that this can all be contained is surprising to me.
It wouldn’t have to be THAT quick to be basically over in early 2028.
Think about the effects of a long pause in oil shipments and fertilizers from the gulf.
It isn't just the shooting. It's like when there is an accident on the highway. Even if they clear the accident away in an hour, the traffic will be backed up all day as that temporary blockage ripples through the system.
I agree, I could have been more precise. I think that if we’re not dropping bombs, Israel won’t be front of mind (it’ll be another “that’s another Trump mess we have to clean up”). But I’ve been wrong before!
The Iranian regime is probably biding their time.
I don't see them being removed by this. When the bombs are done, they will go back to massacring their own people.
It's going to be "Iranians killed by Iranians" "Iranians killed by Americans and Israelis" "Iranians killed by Iranians"'.
I don't see why we had to insert ourselves in the middle there.
Netanyahu convinced Trump it would somehow enhance his greatness.
I feel that Biden made the mistake of helping intercept missiles after Israel assassinated one of Iran’s leaders.
Or (worse) Putin leaned on Trump to start the war (in order to increase global oil prices) by threatening to release the kompromat on him?
Maybe we will get an Omnicauser Putsch at the convention?
I am burned out on Israel.
Within political circles yes. It is vastly over done.
But, if Iran goes on for long or oil stays high or Americans are sent over, suddenly the non political people will be paying attention.
Iran still has a pile of fissile material they could dig up. They have every reason to be a bigger problem.
And what are we doing to stop that problem?
Bombing won't work.
Robot spiders?
Hear hear...
Nor do the popular vote and cross-tabs from the general election suggest Israel is all that salient. There was lots of angry screaming to the effect that Genocide Joe's policies were going to sink Harris, but I've seen pretty much zero evidence of this.
I'm happy to be corrected, but she didn't lose because of defections from the left.
Primaries amplify the left most people.
I completely agree. But apparently some DNC staffers disagree and were trying to make this the issue in the postmortem autopsy. https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaza
I mean, I blame the “Palestinians for Trump” in Michigan for some of Trump’s win but I don’t think that was necessarily what pushed him over the edge
I doubt Israel/Palestine was the difference-maker even in Michigan, but assuming I'm wrong, Trump takes six of seven swing states instead of seven of seven.
I agree with the proposition that the issue could be pretty salient in the upcoming primaries, though.
I wouldn't be surprised if whichever candidate talks about this the least benefits from being the least annoying.
This is the way. I sort of think that Kamala benefited (as much as she could for losing the election) from having a short campaign. I actually think all campaigns should be run that way.
I think the fact that Israel is THE litmus test on the left is directly relevant to the point of this post. There is no rational reason why US relations with a small country in the Middle East is a defining issue for an ostensibly left-wing economic movement in the US, but here we are.
I agree, with the exception that if it gets us into a drawn out war, it is a more meaningful subject.
I hope pro Palestinian politicians will deploy “Zionists don’t care about gas prices.” That sort of attack will work better than hand ringing about human rights.
Pro-palestinian's are even more unlikely to care about gas prices - and if they do, its more likely they want them to go up.
maybe they will figure out how to shut up.
What evidence do you have of them being able to do that?
You have better odds of Trump coming out tomorrow supporting a free Palestine because at least then you're just counting on Trump being willing to roll a former ally, of which there is plenty of evidence.
i have zero evidence
i am not defending pro palestinian politicians. they have been cucks and losers to date, witness the instant bombing campaign
True, but it’s hugely important to the far-left of the party. Just looking at the last election, the “Genocide Joe” types seemed perfectly happy to hurt Biden’s chances and get Trump elected over this issue.
The party needs a realistic position on Israel, neither unconditional support, nor the extreme anti-Zionism of the far left.
I don't know that it will be a super salient issue, but it seems like an issue where one mis-speak could doom a candidacy.
I think the priority polling is the wrong way to think about this. It's a signaling issue. A candidate's positioning tells a voter whether their moral compasses align, for better or worse.
Just kidding, obviously for worse, because people should vote on the basis of the tangible outcomes that will impact their lives rather than topics that, definitionally, they don't care about (see: the priority polling.)
I agree. I think even if Israel isn't central to the median voter by 2028 it's the perfect issue to wedge the Democratic coalition and it's a debate that goes toxic fast, meaning it will get a lot of attention and generate bad feelings all around. I dxpect bad faith actors (chuds like Jill Stein and Musk type algorithm manipulators) to amplify the issue in the 2028 Democratic primary.
Having a Islamist throwing homemade bombs in front of Mayor Mamdani's house isn't going to help, regardless of what Stein and the algorithm does.
I’m still mad all the reporting on this initially was “anti Muslim extremists try to blow up mayor”. Surprise surprise it was the islamists throwing bombs around.
Because the two sides present in numbers were the goat-walkers and the omnicause leftoids and very few people expected a bomb-throwing 18-year-old ISIS sympathizer as the wild card.
Are you saying the omnicause left and bomb-throwing isis sympathizers are different and distinct parties?
Within the context of a western country, at the very least they are a happily travelling together.
Turn off Newsmax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Speicher_massacre
In case anyone is wondering what ISIS types think of people like Mamdani
I don't think pro-Israel Jewish Democratic primary voters (who are rapidly vanishing in number) are a big enough group to wedge the coalition in any significant way. Most Democratic primary voters right now are either staunchly opposed to the Israeli government or (like me) don't care and would prefer to talk about literally anything else. I would be astonished if the 2028 nominee were "pro-Israel."
"chuds like [nice old hippie lady] Jill Stein"
pass di crack pipe pon di left hand side
Jill Stein isn't that nice. The whole sitting down and having dinner with Putin was a bad look. Nice old hippies don't sit down with dictators who assassinate their political enemies.
You aren't American, I've gathered from other comments, where are you from?
This is a terrible look for you, what’s been making you be such a jackass lately?
Europeans
Are you?
Yes.
What’s fun is “support for Palestine” and “support for Israel” are both very unpopular positions. But politicians will be asked about it anyway!
I think the Iran war, unless it works out great, opens a lane here though. “I support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. But they need to stop expanding settlements and return to the negotiating table for a two state solution instead of dragging America into their wars with Iran. As president will do everything I can to facilitate peace and support our allies but I am going to be putting American interests not Israeli interests first in foreign affairs”.
"I support South Africa's existence as a white state"....
A lot of people in the Democratic coalition are going to hear it like that.
"I support Israel's right to exist" would be better. Do not wade into making a statement about Israel's desired ethnic composition.
Kind of tangential but I am really tired of the “Israel’s right to exist” language. No state has a right to exist. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia didn’t have a right to exist and now they don’t. As a nation if you have enough strength to hold yourself together from internal and external threats you will continue to exist. If you don’t you won’t. It really is that simple. Israel is probably going to be around for a while. The question is what kind of relationship do we want to have with it.
Eh, I don't really understand why this annoys people, personally. You can read "Israel has a right to exist" pretty much as a short hand for "Israel has a right to engage in requisite actions to maintain its existence" - I.e. military action and/or prevention of right of return.
If you have a problem with the concept of rights generally, go high five Jeremy Bentham about it, I guess? It's a fairly well understood universal framework of moral reasoning even if you don't believe rights literally exist.
It's because 'Israel has a right to exist' is not matched by 'Palestine has a right to exist', so in practice it indicates the speaker's position on one side of the debate.
Matched by whom? Perhaps some people are hypocritical in this way, but then your issue is with the hypocrisy, not the statement. I think Israel has a right to exist and so does Palestine. This is the extremely common mainstream liberal two state solution position. In terms of wording, this is not used for Palestine because it's not currently a state, so it makes more sense to frame it as "Palestinians deserve statehood" - with the corollary fairly straightforwardly being that once they have that state it would have a right to exist. I think this is an artefact of it not making sense to say that things which don't yet exist have rights.
>It's because 'Israel has a right to exist' is not matched by 'Palestine has a right to exist', so in practice it indicates the speaker's position on one side of the debate.<
This seems wholly inaccurate.
Plenty of people believe both that (1) Israel has a right to exist AND (2) Israel is illegally occupying conquered territory that by rights ought to be handed over to the Palestinian people for the latter's use as a homeland.
Hell, to this day the formulation remains the single most common position among most foreign policy elites globally.
Can’t speak for others but I believe that rights exist when there is an overarching authority that enforces said rights. So if you and I sign a contract where I agree to pay you $500 you have a right to that money because a court will ultimately enforce it if I refuse to pay. But that doesn’t exist for international relations.
I think that's a perfectly fine metaethical viewpoint, but you must recognise that you can talk about moral behaviour in terms of rights even if you do not believe they literally exist. If someone says to you that individuals have a right not to be tortured, you can surely comprehend that statement without the need for an authority to enforce that right? By which I mean, you can see how that can be repackaged to mean "It would be morally wrong to torture someone without exception".
The Declaration of Independence language says the overarching authority is our creator. There are indeed many people in Israel and the US who think the same creator also grants that right for Israel to exist.
>Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia didn’t have a right to exist and now they don’t.<
Sure they did. They were both members of the UN in good standing. It's true both of those countries ended up not existing, but they had a right to continue doing so. Just like Israel does. And Paraguay. And Singapore.
There are apparently significant numbers of leftists who feel the Jewish State does not possess such a right (I wonder why that might be), hence the appropriateness of assertting this truism from time to time.
But this is my point. I think there is real value in drawing a bright line between rights that are guaranteed by a higher, stronger authority (like commercial contract law) vs things like UN membership where there is no higher authority that will either guarantee continued existence or at a minimum exact significant consequences when the right is violated. We end up using the same word for two very different things and I think it is unhelpful when trying to reason through difficult situations.
The reason is that, unlike Czechoslovakia, if Israel ceases to exist the Jews there would be purged, cleansed and/or genocided.
There's zero reason to believe this to be true. The Christians in Lebanon haven't been. It's not exactly a fun relationship between them and the Muslims but it's stable enough.
The number of Jews living in Arab countries has fallen from 850,000 in 1948 to less than 4,000 in 2023.
https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-populations-in-the-arab-world
It’s actually the opposite. Jews have been purged from every other Arab country, many Palestinian groups openly support Jewish genocide or ethnic cleansing, and the history of Israel from 1948 is a series of wars started by Arabs with the expressed purpose of driving Jews into the sea.
Thank you. The reason Israel exists and, say, Quebec or Catalonia don't is that Israelis won multiple wars in the mid-20th century.
I just see it as a nod to a two state solution without explicitly saying so.
Even this grants far too much. Israel has no "right to exist" (that is a nonsense concept; there is no world government capable of handing out "rights to exist" and enforcing them), and American politicians trying to wish such a right into existence at the expense of the US's own interests has gotten completely out of hand.
By this logic, there is no right for the US to not take Greenland forcefully from Denmark...?
Correct. The reason the US is (hopefully, maybe, if we're lucky) not going to launch an insane war to conquer Greenland is that even Trump has figured out we would suffer economic or military, or both, retaliation from other states if we did. That has nothing to do with "rights"; it's pure power politics.
No one is defending, or enforcing, Iran's "right to exist," even though that is as (un)real as Israel's is.
Maybe they will, but no matter what you say some people are going to be super pissed. Classic wedge issue. I think two state solution is the least controversial of the controversial options, especially coupled with signaling that you are going to draw down support and involvement and untether our foreign policy from “whatever Bibi wants”.
Why would a two state solution work when the Islamists continue to call for the genocide of the Israelis? Can the Israelis ever trust the Palestinians after Oct. 7th?
I don’t know what the path is from here to a two state solution. The problem seems intractable to me. Accordingly, I would say “this seems like the correct outcome, and I am happy to advocate for it and facilitate talks to achieve it, but I am not going to spend more time and resources trying and failing to secure it, nor am I going to be fighting regional wars on behalf of either party”.
It would be good to impose sanctions on Israel too, since it’s a democracy. I’m not generally in favor of sanctions because usually they make things worse for the people who have no voice under dictators. But for Israel, it makes sense, until they vacate the settlements, elect a permanent Labor government, and find a way to make every Republican politician’s cellphone explode by their ears.
I really wish critics of Israel would do that instead of claiming there was no rape in 10/7, that settlers aren’t civilians, and that resistance by any means necessary is justified.
Yes. It will be a race to the bottom, someone will actually propose eliminating the country in the debates, and whoever gets elected will have made some insane promise to treat Israel like cancer - and it will all amount to nothing, exactly as Biden’s promises to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state” did.
I'm willing to bet that no serious candidate (by which I mean, anyone who polls >2% at any point) proposes 'eliminating' Israel. Just hyperbole
Maybe you’re right. But pre-2019 would you have guessed that the 2020 Democratic primary would feature a Jewish Poker* game of Medicare for All proposals? Or any of the other nutty things that came out of that cycle? Things have a way of building up to absurd crescendos in these primaries (to say nothing of the Republican ones)
*https://www.ephraimkishon.de/en/my_favorite_stories.htm
Would that that were the situation in Congress, where we had such a Jewish poker game for things that helped the people! Oh no healthcare, we can’t have healthcare 🙄
We are already seeing some insane policies being through out there like no taxes on the first $75k of income, or increasing taxes on fossil fuels, permitting, etc. Racing to the bottom is always stupid and populism is a cancer.
Sadly, I think the no taxes on tips or overtime are here to stay, despite their being terrible policy. Too many people are going to benefit from that. I know I’m going to happily deduct my OT this year, despite my knowing it’s dumb policy.
I dunno; if AIPAC gets involved just tweet pictures of dead American soldiers at them.
I feel like AIPAC knows that they are at the end of their own era.
If they thought that, they would act with more restraint.
Being able to bulldoze your opponents for four decades is not great for self awareness or humility.
Think about Trump's cabinet at the moment. They are all getting theirs while the getting is good. I imagine a lot of AIPAC is looking at the current moment like that.
It’s like the last hours of the Titanic.
That’s been the feeling just living in America this past year too
I think that there's an impregnable position on Israel for any candidate smart enough to take it:
-- non-cooperation and non-support of Netanyahu and the Israeli Far Right;
-- insistence that any Israeli government return to support of a two-state solution and removal of all obstacles, including settlements in the Occupied Territories, that make a two-state solution non-viable;
-- unquestioned support for the legitimacy of the State of Israel in domestic politics and international forums;
-- absolute rejection of anti-Semitism in all its forms and guises.
Listen you haven't been paying attention if you think there hasn't been a decades long push to make #1 a violation of #4.
Of course there has been, and there's a technical term for that push: it's called "a lie". "Live not by lies" is as good advice for political life as it is for moral life.
OK, to take another hypothetical, #3 and #1, so let's say the far right does what they want and does kick out the Palestinians from another big chunk of the west bank or Gaza. Maybe there will also again be tens of thousands of unfortunate deaths as well.
Then can someone in America say Israel, the state, is illegitimate? Maybe it wasn't before, but it has become so through their own elected leaders and actions?
The politics on this are not as easy as the 4 points suggest. (They aren't bad points, but I am thinking of the practicalities of it)
I didn't say that the position I suggested was "easy", I said that it was "impregnable", by which I meant "very difficult to attack effectively", because it's legally, morally, and ethically coherent, and outlines a path of action that's I think is executable, legal, and politically smart.
With respect to this particular question, of course individuals can "say" what they want -- it's a free country. The real question, I think, is what does the Government of the United States DO? My answer is, what it's done many other other times that a member of the United Nations has committed a serious violation of international law in its view: impose sanctions. The issue is never with the legitimacy of the state actor -- that's assumed. It's with the legality of the action, and the appropriate response.
So we are also having #5 as well. "The US will stop issuing blanket UN vetoes on Israel's behalf."
Yes
Any time a country does what America doesn’t want, they slip into illegitimacy
Jeff Mauer released a 30 minute monologue staking this out in detail and arguing for it. As someone far more right wing on Israel than him or Matt or most people here, I do wish candidates would figure this out and adopt it. It’s not my policy preferences clearly, but it’s a much healthier policy and attitude than any we’ve had for the past 20+ years and is quite fair. Or, let me put it differently: 90% of even strongly pro-Israel Americans would be put at ease.
Realistically this won’t happen: the primary candidates will realize they can throw activist chum at anti-Israel fanatics (see: Gavin Newsom’s recent moves) and just quietly revert to the norm once in office while occasionally throwing out some more activist chum when convenient (see: the entire Gulf, who all adopt this tactic - besides Qatar, who really are that malicious.)
“removal of all obstacles, including settlements in the Occupied Territories, that make a two-state solution non-viable”
The majority of Palestenians do not favor a two state solution.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/695582/peace-distant-prospect-israelis-palestinians.aspx
How do you propose removing that particular obstacle?
In all honesty, I propose doing it by force, if necessary.
Tearing all the happy talk, doubletalk, and outright lies aside, the Palestinian leadership position from the time of the notorious Mohammed Amin al-Husseini to the October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas has amounted to pogroms on the scale of a Holocaust 2.0. The Israeli position under Netanyahu amounts to ethnic cleansing -- "transfer of populations" if one prefers the sanitized term that the Allies favored in the immediate postwar years. Neither is acceptable to me.
There exists the possibility that new leadership on both sides will embrace the opportunity for a genuine solution of two sovereign states living side by side in peace -- friendship is probably too much to ask for in the lifetime of any of us who are currently adults, but peace and democracy will do. I'd certainly welcome that, from either or both sides. If not, it should be imposed, probably with an impenetrable barrier between them and an extraterritorial link between the West Bank and Gaza. We know how to do all that, the two Germanies and West Berlin lived that way for 44 years.
Not ideal, but better than the status quo.
“The Israeli position under Netanyahu amounts to ethnic cleansing…”
Considering the number of Palestinian there are in Israel who are full citizens, at all levels of society including members of the Knesset, Netanyahu seems to be doing a truly dismal job at his “ethnic cleansing.”
I’d rather be an Arab Israeli citizen than one in a refugee camp in Gaza, but they are considered second-class citizens. It’s not as bad as Jim Crow, but it’s adjacent.
The Israeli Supreme Court has been absolutely heroic in its defense of the rights of Israel's Arab citizens and, to give the devil his due, Netanyahu hasn't been as serious about that as his far Right supporters have been: if he had, he would have pushed his Court "reforms" even harder, in spite of public outrage. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir make no secret of their desire to expel the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, and Netanyahu has been more ambivalent -- at best -- about that. He certainly hasn't stood in the way of settlement expansion. Those two also seem to be intent on denying Israel's Arab citizens their full citizenship. If Netanyahu decides that the only way he can hold onto power is by upping his game on ethic cleansing and lining up more fully with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, does anything in his history suggest that he wouldn't do it?
You wrote, “The Israeli position under Netanyahu amounts to ethnic cleansing.” Now you’re saying that was a fantasy?
Surely you do not think this should be the position of the next Democratic candidate, though, right?
I think that my original four-point post in response to Matthew's post at the head of this thread should be the position of the next Democratic candidate. So should the OBJECTIVE I've stated: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace, independence, and freedom.
The specific form of the two-state solution immediately above that you're responding to is strictly my own. I think that may turn out to be the only viable approach in the end, but statesmen and -women will want to explore every other possibility that they can imagine, and I'm in favor of that. One of them MIGHT work.
Understood, I think that's fair.
While I largely agree with this, #3 is going to be a bridge too far for a lot of people (myself included) that see no particular reason to support this particular fascist authoritarian pseudo-democracy over any of the hundred other fascist authoritarian pseudo-democracies that exist in the world today. It implies that we should stop trying to make Israel abandon apartheid in a way that we should not do for, say, China.
Since I don't consider Israel to be guilty of "apartheid" -- words mean something, and that word doesn't mean what you apparently think it does -- that's not an issue for me.
Do you think being Californian would in and of itself be a significant liability for Gavin Newsom as a presidential candidate?
Liked this because I think it's a very important question that's not getting much in the way of attention in these discussions of potential 2028 Dem candidates. I think being Californian (and not just any Californian--San Franciscan) is a HUGE potential liability for Newsom, just like being a New Yorker is a huge potential liability for AOC. There's a significant regional angle to Dem struggles in Presidential elections, and nominating a candidate from one of their coastal bastions would be just about the stupidest thing the Dems could do.
Yes - my kind-of-insane litmus test for 2028 is that I won’t vote for a blue-state Dem in the primary.
There’s a big list of candidates from purple or red states (Shapiro, Ossoff, Warnock, Gallego, Kelly, Whitmer) who have proven records of winning tough contests. You could even convince me on Klobuchar just because she overperforms fundamentals so much.
I waver on this. For one, my "independent" (but solidly red) parents, have HATED and looked down on California since the beginning of time, so I understand how rabidly some people hate that state. They'll never swing tho.
On the flip side, I find Gavin interesting because when you hear him talk, he's decidedly NOT what people imagine a Californian to be. He's more moderate on trans issues, policing issues, immigration issues. He's just not the far left wacko that people like my parents imagine every Californian to be. I do think there's something refreshing and compelling about that- makes him feel "different". And it makes his more moderate (but still left-leaning) takes feel more moderate than they really are, just because of the comparison point of expecting him to be far left.
And re Vlad's comment here, in the opposite way, AOC is very left and that matches with the perception of NYC, so she has less of those mitigating factors imo.
In the end, it's probably still a big liability, but I do think there are some mitigating factors there for Gavin.
I guess the question is, do people listen and agree with you that he's not a lefty wacko in time for him to get traction, or does he get lost in the snowstorm of a big early primary race?
Yeah, I think you want someone stronger and more moderate in GA, NC (fingers crossed!), AZ, etc.
I honestly would like to know we have a huge group of moderates on this board. What is the big picture vision for why we want to elect moderates?
Like you’ve achieved every political goal you have the presidency and 67 Senators and a 50 seat majority in the house. What are you doing? What is the spoils because all I ever hear about is how the left is bad.
More housing, more efficient healthcare provision, less crime, reduced carbon emissions, less attention being paid to the news.
Inject this into my veins!
Matt's whole blog is basically an answer to that question. Some that come to mind:
Immigration: Strengthen border security, don't look the other way on asylum loopholes and understand that it's *good* if an illegal immigrant (or even green-card holder) that gets caught shoplifting is deported.
Housing: Do whatever Ezra and Matt Y. would do. Don't be Dean Preston or whatever.
Large Gov't Bills: Do big stuff (IRA, etc.), but don't everything-bagel it. Focus on getting the stuff done, not appeasing workers, unions and non-profit lobbying groups.
" it's *good* if an illegal immigrant (or even green-card holder) that gets caught shoplifting is deported."
What if it turns out a majority of Democratic primary voters don't agree with that proposition (which is likely true).
Then our odds of winning in 2028 aren't especially good.
I actually don't think the 2028 election will be determined on whether or not Democratic candidates will bravely say some college kid here on a green card should be deported if they steal some makeup from a Sephora.
I agree, but I think whether the candidate has normie vibes (which includes being fine with deporting criminals) will matter a lot.
Good news for Dems is that JD Vance doesn't have normie vibes. But we should nominate someone who does.
I mean, if you would've told me in 2003 that two of the people w/ 'normie vibes' by election results were a black constitutional lawyer from Chicago named Barack Obama and Donald Trump, I would've laughed you out of the room, so maybe deciding who can have normie vibes isn't something somebody should decide right away.
Like, I'd actually argue AOC has the most normie vibes among possible 2028 candidates but at the same time, Bernie never really had normie vibes but that was part of the reason he got support from surprising people.
I think that’s possible - it’s a major drawback of the primary system.
I wasn’t listing things that I thought made candidates more electable in primaries.
Yes, I know, things would be so much better if both parties unaccountable elites could force down faceless centrists who stand for nothing onto the populace.
You’re arguing against policy positions - that’s not me standing for nothing, that’s you disagreeing
Just to nitpick, we shouldn't be deporting green-card holders over minor offenses.
yeah I agree, I overstated. I was thinking more "professional shoplifting ring person" vs. "got caught shoplifting once" there, and green card/PR should offer a lot more protection than illegal immigrants get.
I will say, simply boxing the more extreme economic left out of power and keeping them from trying to implement policies that would ruin the engine of economic growth that is American capitalism is a good thing.
For a more affirmative vision though:
- Raise taxes on the wealthy through higher inheritance taxes, eliminating the step up basis, and raising capital gains taxes to expand the EITC and cut the deficit.
- Eliminate trade barriers (particularly Trump’s tariffs) with our allies in Europe, East Asia, and in the Western hemisphere generally.
- Invest in more medical research, particularly vaccines and pandemic preparedness.
- Improve our immigration system to simplify the process for global talent to come and contribute to our research institutions.
- Eliminate regulatory hurdles to construction of new transmission lines and solar/wind farms.
- Reintroduce the health care insurance mandate with more teeth, create a national risk equalization fund, create a national healthcare market place, and change the tax code to encourage employers to pay employees to find their own health insurance rather than purchase it for them to get us closer to the Netherlands model and establish universal healthcare.
The big picture vision for me is that if Vance wins in 2028 it's all over for the American experiment.
If AOC was more likely to beat him then I'm on Team AOC. I don't think the nation would vote her in which is why I'm on Team Gallego. But any strong, compelling case you can make for any potential Democratic nominee (like Gavin) and I'll listen. If it's all based on hope and vapors then I won't waste my time.
There also need to be investigations to make sure our institutions get cleaned up and that such crimes are prevented from happening again.
The next restoration/reform president can be a happy warrior, but he needs a ruthless streak (or at least a deputy chief of staff with one).
I just watched the Nuremberg movie and was thinking “yeah, like that”
I think Rubio is more likely to get the GOP nomination than Vance. Trump has put Vance in a very difficult position right now vis a vis the Iran war. Very hard for him to pivot back to America First when he was VP of an admin that started a war in Iran. He's either an ineffectual pussy or a sell out.
I was listening to some of the folks on The Dispatch podcast say this morning they think that's a real weakness for Vance, and I took heart. I hope they're right. And I hope the next Republican nominee isn't worse than Vance.
I think you've hot the nail on the head with this one. Before you answer, moderates, think about how what Biden did didnt get across to the electorate. Also think that this is an electorate somewhat tired of your type and expecting something big. Its not the electorate of the 2000s, there's a lot of discontent and there are a lot of change voters these days.
Moderate Dems must convince America they deserve to govern.
What is your evidence for the proposition that the electorate is expecting 'something big?' I think that's often asserted without much to back it up.
The American people like to hear really big ideas and don't want you to actually try to implement them.
I reference Trump first and foremost. His anti-eliteist, change messaging is often underconsidered imo.
Secondly, the fact that Bernie came out of nowhere in 2016 shows that Democrat progressives aren't just a reaction to MAGA.
Third, voters have big discontent with the "establishment" of both parties. Progressives consistently out poll the Democratic party as a whole right now.
Comparing voters today to voters of decades past, I think the "change" demand is obvious enough.
"Progressives consistently out poll the Democratic party as a whole right now."
Can you show me polls to that effect? I can see individual politicians both centrist or progressive being more popular, but do "progressives" poll more popular?
The question of what is true and the question of what is compelling are two separate ones. It's well and good to say that people are not convinced by a desire to not have Republican governments, but the past 10 years have demonstrated precisely why that is a bad opinion.
It is important to inspire voters because it's important to win, but it's also clear to anyone with any sense that avoiding a sociopathic lunatic for a president is an end in itself.
To be absolutely clear, I think many realise it's reason alone to elect moderates to win elections and prevent lunatic right wingers from implementing their lunatic policy. Even if the rest of US history was just totally bland centrists who did nothing to improve the country from the baseline of, say, 2008 it would still clearly be superior to the alternative of Republican governments.
That isn't moderation; it's doctrinaire conservatism, a political philosophy that the global developed-nation electorate is clearly uninterested in (see the pathetic recent performances of center-right parties in the UK, France, Australia, etc.). It's a proven failure.
A strange response which contains a category error. I am not saying that my position that moderate candidates are worthwhile even just to prevent the worst excesses of Republicans is "moderation", I'm saying it's my position on what electing moderates is for.
I think Matt's popularism, which includes moderated positions on certain issues is clearly not a proven failure, and it's rather telling that literally all three of your examples are, as we speak, run by centre left governments with heavy moderation while the US is run by the worst President in history.
Remember, some people contort reality and substitute alternative arguments that the ones you propose so that they can assert a rhetorical “victory.”
Debasing language to call Australian and UK labor parties “center right” is silly. Then declaring how theses parties have successfully kept right wing parties from power (or in the case of France the center right blocking the far right) as “failures” is absurd.
All to assert that appealing to a larger group of the electorate wouldn’t have prevented Trump?
You and I have seen this exact dynamic twice over the past 24 hours, in fact! Still, I'm new to posting here so not sure of the etiquette and trying to engage in as good faith a manner as I can.
I agree with your assessment, though - it's not a good argument, though I think Zagarna is referring to the actual centre-right parties like the British Conservatives who have indeed imploded. That's a stranger argument still, because we're talking about the centre left party in the US and what it should do to succeed!
That said, I suppose your interpretation is equally possible. Here in the UK people have been calling Labour a centre-right government on the internet since I can remember. Usually as a cudgel. I think this is partially a consequence of the belief particularly prevalent on the internet that there is some objective compass on which you can map each party and person and say they sit on the right or the left (in fact there's a website that does this very neatly and completely misleadingly for you!).
What I think is the closer reality is that right and left are constantly evolving hyperobjects which emerge from the sum of their parts (voters and activists) and really can mean only what the relevant actors do in a given context (here 21st century western politics). It makes as much sense to say that the Conservatives are centre-left because they're pro minimum wage and anti-absolute monarchy as it does to say Labour are centre-right because they don't hold entirely anti-market/anti-capital views.
Got on my soapbox a bit there, but that's what we're here for.
Most people here are respectful and try to have productive discourse on this board. This is why when certain people try to bring in Twitter-like rhetorical strategies like “substituting in alternative claims not made” or “pretending words have different meanings than they do” it stands out and gets ridiculed. It’s fairly normal for people to walk back or admit their claims were wrong or overly broad or inaccurate on this board. Truth and learning is valued.
Zagarna is addicted to “winning” an argument. That results in people taking his claims with less credulity. I just don’t like dishonesty and casual mendacity. It comes off as silly (e.g. is Mitt Romney really a fascist?)
"Remember, some people contort reality and substitute alternative arguments that the ones you propose so that they can assert a rhetorical “victory.”"
You mean like calling the Tories, Republicans, and Australian Liberals "labor parties"?
No, I get that. What I'm saying is that if you say to voters "you should elect moderates to prevent the worst excesses of Republicans" the electorate will be like "nah." "Four years of things not getting worse" messaging is a complete flop.
(Side note: Both France and the UK are also governance disasters heading straight for far-right takeovers at the next election, so I would not be taking any strategic advice from their center-left parties, either.)
"No, I get that. What I'm saying is that if you say to voters "you should elect moderates to prevent the worst excesses of Republicans" the electorate will be like "nah." "Four years of things not getting worse" messaging is a complete flop."
I don't endorse this messaging, though it has paid dividends in France and is categorically not a proven failure. It obviously wasn't successful in the latest US election, though parsing how much of the loss is due to that messaging and how much of it is due to other things is a matter of continued debate - still, I am not arguing that should be the approach for the next Democratic candidate.
More importantly, though, the question was what are the reasons to win elections, not what are the reasons Democrats should run on.
"Side note: Both France and the UK are also governance disasters heading straight for far-right takeovers at the next election"
Labour are bouncing between being the bookies' favourites and second favourites to win the next general election. Of course, they are not in an incredible position but it's false that a Reform win is anything close to guaranteed. You correctly note that the governance, not the level of moderation, is what is harming Labour. Macron has persistently held off an extremely popular far right. These are not successes to ignore.
In fairness to France, Macron's snap election is what screwed his centrist government. Should've left well enough alone.
Not to be flip, but are you new here?
I literally have subscribed to Matt’s Substack since it was created and have been following him for years.
I don’t have a strong sense what he builds if he’s not thinking tactically about picking up more seats in the next election. Like what does a prolonged comfortable majority that no longer is operating strictly for tactical advantage in the next contest or two want to deliver other than housing abundance.
Ok, did you read his Common Sense Manifesto? https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-common-sense-democrat-manifesto
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1668023482
One billion Americans! ;-)
OK, you don't have to take that literally, but I'd prioritize comprehensive immigration reform with an eye toward massively expanding legal immigration (in the law, not just in executive orders), ditching most of the broken asylum system, and bringing in refugees in pre-Trump or greater numbers; pronatalist reforms to the tax code; and asking Jessica Riedl personally to advise me on federal budget balancing with the goal of not crashing Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.
(I know this is too large an agenda! Maybe pronatalist tax reform, rebranded to emphasize the value of helping young families thrive and retirees keep their benefits, would be the place to start.)
The reason I don't mention housing abundance is that you can already get this in uncool regions of red states. It's nice!
Is it better to build a thriving hive city or to purchase a house in a municipality that has no business continuing to exist?
I moved from the latter (in the Rust Belt) to the former (Sunbelt) and voted with my feet. I loved a lot of things about my tiny town in the Rust Belt, but it's a Sisyphean task to try to make a life for your kids in a region where most of the parent-aged people have already moved away.
ETA: Between two red states, choose the one with the growing economy and lots of children, IMHO. :-)
A healthcare in every pot and a cost-effectively built, driverless subway under every street
Here's one write-up answer:
https://granzo.substack.com/p/the-most-important-things?r=2hsld
I'd like to get on the record as not wanting Newsome OR AOC.
Similar to the discussion around the Talarico/Crockett race, I would like someone who presents as moderate/mainstream but has a sincerely liberal heart. A good communicator who can connect with a majority of the country, but also someone who can do math and think about actual budgets - not just make wild assertions about impossible dreams.
Got any leads?
I think Buttigieg would govern as a true pragmatic moderate with a sincere liberal heart. But I worry that he won’t do enough vocal stiff arming of the left in the general election. And he also has Biden administration baggage.
I think he could govern, and he would be a good prime minister - if that were our system.
But I worry he misses on the "connect with the majority of the country" part. He doesn't have that "person you'd like to have a beer with" vibe. Not convinced he will be a good candidate.
Some variation that is "Buttigieg, but a cool guy" would be tempting though!
I disagree on that, Buttigieg has quite a good personal manner on podcasts and seems like someone who voters (maybe only White voters) would like to have a beer with. Maybe he seems less presidential because of his height and inexperience, but his personal interactions are good.
"Maybe he seems less presidential because of his height" made me laugh because it is true!
We gay guys have a different way of measuring size ;-)
Something that Josh Barro brought up that I didn't realize about Buttigieg is that he didn't come out until he was like 33, and then ran for president at 38.
Like, it's weird he didn't come out until so late in life, right? As a gay guy how does that come across to you?
Plus he has been going on Fox News and doing very well in those situations. He codes as pretty traditional aside from, you know, having a husband. He’d wipe the floor with JD Vance in the general, if he can get through the primary.
He was very good on the Andrew Schulz podcast which is very "have a beer with" coded.
I don’t think I could survive having a beer with Andrew Schulz and I mean that as a compliment toward him.
Well yes, if you can seem like you'd enjoy a beer with Andrew Schulz, you are doing a very good job at seeming relatable. Likewise this would be a bridge too far for me.
This Ultra Dark MAGA Republican wouldn’t mind seeing a Mayor Pete/JDV match up. Then Mayor Pete could explain why he was more concerned about racist roads and why he discriminated against white male air traffic controller applicants.
Not sure if you are kidding or serious, but Mayor Pete's comments about the racist placement of highways back in the day are very true, at least it is every place that I have lived, which are all in the Northeast and Midwest. But, yeah, the sound bites probably won't play well.
I know a retired Army Colonel whose son had gone through AF ATC school nd could not get hired by the FAA because he was the wrong race.
I believe you. Why would anyone lie about this? But these stories astound me, given the huge shortage of air traffic controllers. Why would we even need preferences? They can use anyone qualified that they can get.
Tracing Woodgrains did an investigation, air traffic control jobs scandal is more complicated,more corrupt and less woke. But also mad, they counted having a scientific background as a negative in applications.
Whatever happened 50 years ago, the folks in those ghettos have largely moved on -- and tearing out those roads today is largely a real-estate scam (leading to gentrification), fronted by astroturf "racial justice" groups.
You know what would play well (to all but the poodle-walk-and-latte-class)? A(n electric) car in every garage!
You're obsessed with this, lol. Basically every normie I know wants to own a car, but basically all of the ones who live in cities or suburbs also like when they don't need to use it for everything because they know it makes traffic worse. The ideal state is Munich- or Amsterdam-level transit provision, along with everyone being able to afford a car. The latter is already the status quo in the US outside the densest parts of the densest cities, what further policy intervention is required?
As for the highways, Philadelphia gets very little per-capita federal transportation funding and would love to cap the gaping slash I-676 cut through some of the nicest, densest, most walkable neighborhoods in the country with a nice park. Is that too woke for you?
By all means, cap the road -- but don't tear it out -- and don't convert it to a congested, surface-level "boulevard" that would add more pollution (and be more hazardous to pedestrians) than what's there now. (That's what they have in mind for 980 here in Oakland.)
Oh, I'm sorry -- did I say "congested"? I meant "vibrant" -- the mandatory term when dealing with the poodle-walk set.
The densest, most walkable neighborhoods are, indeed, nice for a Friday-night or Sunday stroll -- but that doesn't require living in an urbanist theme park, as long as there's parking nearby or underneath.
I’m normally against the freeway lid proposals but 676 is really a prime candidate for that
Isn't that going to be a problem for any Democrat who was around in 2020? Look at Talarico's issues with his tweets.
I firmly believe that you can move on from bad tweets, especially from when you're young, but you have to like, actually apologize and say you've changed your mind and say what you now believe. If you pretend the question is in bad faith and you haven't changed but the way you're talking now is what people should focus on, you'll be Kamala in 2024 and people will have no idea what you really believe. I will be interested in what Talarico does, because as of now he's basically Texan Tim Walz (a liberal loved by liberals for giving off what they imagine to be red-state vibes). But he's young and ambitious and he could easily redefine himself to be more palatable to the Texas audience if he thinks he needs to. Otherwise he'll lose by 5+ points
I don't care what people say when they are 17 or that much what they said when they were 22, but he was 31. It is also just weird, dishonest and unpleasant in a way that doesn't give him an excuse.
It's called hicklib.
He also has no demonstrated ability or track record of winning general elections. The one time he ran in a general election, he lost by 25 points (to Richard Mourdock no less) in the same year that the Democrat at the top of the ticket lost by only 15. Yes it's a small sample, but it's the data we have. Of course nobody could have expected him to win in Indiana, but he did poorly even if you adjust for that.
His impressive overperformance in the 2020 primaries has zero value since 99% of the people who voted in those primaries will vote Dem no matter who in the general election. All Buttigieg showed in those primaries was that he's very good at impressing highly educated voters spanning the spectrum of social progressivism from only moderately progressive to very (but not the very most) progressive. I guess that's a nice feat, but it's not going to win you a general election.
Well he also showed that he could go on Fox News and other non-friendly media and have quick and competent responses to challenging questions, unlike a certain 2024 nominee.
Which is why his highest and best use is as a Democratic Party operative, akin to James Carville. Have him be a great spokesman -- he's good at it.
There are law schools full of people who have quick and competent questions. It’s a skill, but it’s not a unique skill. Why Harris wasn’t good at it is a mystery, given her history and even demonstrated competence in Senate hearings. It’s also worth remembering that Fox et al aren’t that unfriendly. They are in the business of entertaining their audience, not in rabidly tearing down their guests. He could get a very different treatment if that’s what they wanted to do.
Ok. But so what? That's valuable if it causes you to be good at winning elections. It seems like it ought to cause you to be good at winning elections. But ultimately what matters is whether you actually achieve the end result of being good at winning elections, and there's no data that shows that Buttigieg is able to do that.
I'm not saying it's impossible. Maybe he's gotten better at winning elections since 2010 - that was a long time ago. Maybe if we gave him a chance, his "good combine stats" would translate into general election votes. But why put your chips on that when there are multiple other potential candidates who've actually done it before (i.e. run ahead of the fundamentals and won elections in purple/red states)?
I'm gay, and I like Pete -- but he's too glossy and slick for the blue-collar types. That's why (for electability) I prefer Kelly or Gallego.
I don't get the impulse to pretend that Buttigieg is a viable general election candidate. Is it intended to signal that the person saying it is not homophobic? It doesn't make sense since most people suggesting that are not in danger of being accused of homophobia.
It's the super obvious elephant in the room that left leaning media refuses to acknowledge about why he has single digit polling with blacks and latinos
Well he seems like the most "technocratic" person in the mix. I think that is the appeal. But I would not say it is the mood of The People at the moment, sadly.
I think you're underrating the likelihood of being accused of homophobia regardless of what one's objective track record is.
Nonsense! I'm gay, and I like Pete -- but he's too glossy and slick for the blue-collar types. That's why (for electability) I prefer Kelly or Gallego.
And the "queerer-than-thou" folks (those most inclined to pounce on "phobias") don't even like Pete; they consider him an "assimilationist" and (thereby) "heteronormative."
People think he's a viable candidate because he is extremely smart, a great communicator, and comes off as very likeable.
Why do you think he isn't possibly a viable general election candidate? I think if the question is one of electability because he's gay/lacks support from minority voters - I think the reasoning is that
a) there's some evidence that people overrate the extent to which personal identity influences other people's votes and supporters are recalibrating on those grounds and
b) People expect there may be a watershed moment where being gay stops being remotely relevant quite rapidly in the same sort of way that there were no Black presidents until there was.
gay, nerd, surname begins in "butt", etc
Well, I've covered the gay thing and am interested if you think it's compelling.
I don't think he comes off as that nerdy and he served in the Navy. The Butt thing is only an electoral winner. People love butts.
cope
He worked at McKinsey. Like Romney with Bain, a lot of people really hate McKinsey and for excellent reason. Those guys (and I've worked with plenty of them, and at two companies they decimated) are smart, technocratic, and sociopathic - their job is to make the machine go, the fact that it destroys people pointlessly isn't their problem.
I want a happy warrior who loves the flag, hot dogs, and fireworks. I am tired of people being so down and negative about this country. Also being back Rock.
Flags, hot dogs, fireworks... Yevgeniy Prigozhin?
How did Prigozhin get into this?
Putin’s chef and caterer was a hotdog vendor. He successfully franchised during the 90s.
Hot dog sales
THE Rock? As a candidate?
Chris Rock
"Conservative on crime, liberal on prostitution!"
Rock has disappeared from new popular music. It’s fragmented.
Insufficiently Metal, friend, insufficiently Metal.
Also fireworks bad (pretty!), but very bad (fires bad). Flags, hotdogs, and Metal, all great.
Dead or alive?
A 'moderate' like Talarico who has said:
-''white skin gives me and every other white American immunity from the virus [racism]. But we spread it wherever we go..."
-"Black Americans in a church. Mexican Americans in a store. Asian Americans in a spa. Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country."
-"Prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity...it's a painful process'
Turning to policy
-Abortion is biblical and should have no restrictions at all
-God is non-binary, no restrictions on youth gender transitions
-Supports all the same gun laws as Beto
-prisons are 'state violence', anti law enforcement
-Southern border should be a front porch with a giant welcome mat, has tweeted tips on how immigrants can avoid ICE - EDIT: he always accompanies describing the border as having a welcome mat but also a lock, however, no fear for leftists he is very very pro-immigration and supports efforts to evade ICE, etc., the second part is completely accurate.
-As liberal as you get fiscal policy.
The reader of slow boring have just turned their brains off when it comes to Mamdami and Talarico, they are both just bad candidates with bad ideas. Talarico doesnt stand a chance but Mamdami is going to be eaten alive by this group within the next couple years.
Yes, people seem to confuse being congenial with moderation
It reminds me of Kamala, very focused on vibes rather than what is this person actually saying/proposing. Isn't the lesson of 2024 supposed to be that we should actually care about the historical record of this guy?
Wow.
"-Southern border should be a front porch with a giant welcome mat,"...AND A LOCK ON THE FRONT DOOR. He never says the one without the other.
Are your tweet "quotes" similarly selective/incomplete/out-of-context? The first one, Charlie Crooke made lots of hay over; I'm curious how many like that there actually are.
your criticism of that quote in particular is fair, you're right, that one was deceptively edited, the rest of the quotes are not edited, they are from full tweets, I will edit my note to reflect. thanks.
To be clear, it wasn't me that deceptively edited it! It was the source doc, that was the only comment that wasn't printed in full so I should have followed up.
Ossoff. I'm very doubtful he can climb his way into the top tier, but in my view he ticks all the boxes.
I am pulling for Shapiro until he disappoints me!
Any of the people who hold statewide office in purple or red states and get mentioned a lot (Shapiro, Kelly, Beshear, Gallego, maybe someone else I'm forgetting) would probably be fine. That is a big problem! It's tough to win out of the so-called "centrist" lane to begin with. If you split it multiple ways, then there's no chance.
Rahm!
Mark Kelly?
I mean, I tried to watch some of his speeches and he seemed kind of dull? I want to like him but not so sure...
Yeah, I think he’s a great American but he may not have the rizz when it comes to public speaking. On paper everything is great though
Tim Curry going “Space”
is the rizz we need.
Like I say, it would work if every time JD Vance went on the attack he said “fuck you, I’m an astronaut. Are you an astronaut? No, then sit the fuck back” but I think he’s too squeaky clean for that
That person does not exist and could not survive in national dem politics.
I think the closest thing is Shapiro, and if he acts on national ambitions, he will immediately be DOA (or change himself into an unconvincing progressive).
I think Shapiro is best poised to roll his own base (part of his base at least) of pro-Israel Democratic moderates into accepting a turn away from Mideast involvement as the best worst outcome for Democratic party politics re: Israel. He should just say things like "Why are we underwriting the political aims of Israel's right wing parties with billions in American money and the full weight of our Mideast diplomacy?"
He would just have to decide that it's beneficial for him to evolve in this direction.
What is he going to say when AOC or somebody says on stage, "do you agree with the 70% of Democrats who think Israel has committed a genocide?"
Either (1) he has the honesty to say that no, they have not committed a genocide or (2) he folds in the face of a lie, same as the Republicans who folded in the face of the "stolen election" lie (believed by 70% of Republicans). Either way, we will know who he is.
The thing is, Shapiro's base is like 2% of the dem primary electorate. Even among the vocal moderate dems my twitter diet overindexes on, 9 out of 10 arguments for him are "this guy's moderate enough to trick independents into voting for us!" rather than "this guy has good ideas".
"could not survive in national dem politics"?
Is that because they would be cut down by both the left and the right? or some other reason?
because the electorate of dem primary is not interested in candidates with those traits.
Really glad for this post. As someone who is likely to the left of you (although definitely not as lefty as say Bernie or Bernie super fans) I’ve come to accept that even just for just for pragmatic political reasons you need to moderate strategically. But I’ve come to really frustrated with “Moderate” voices in general partly because I find I real smugness in rhetoric but also because I’m continually underwhelmed and quite frankly disappointed with “moderate” policy ideas being put out.
Case in point. Please see the latest tax plans put out by Senator Van Hollen and Senator Booker. Someone on social media described the plans as almost “perfect” Democratic tax plans; policies cosplaying as for the working class that actually benefit the upper middle class. Also, for the first time in decades we have real concerns that high deficits are putting upward pressure on interest rates and you want to make it worse?! Also, there’s a reason your Democrats. And one reason is recognizing that the unique circumstance of 1980 haven’t applied for decades which means blind devotion to tax cuts is idiotic and has only become more idiotic over the past 25 years.
I could go on, but man o man is it not a good look for the moderate faction to a) try to moderate on an issue where public is actually probably on your side b) putting our policy proposals that would genuinely make people’s lives worse give what this would likely do to interest rates c) just have a complete lack of understanding of what issues are actually the best issues to be moderating on.
There’s actually more I could criticize about this plan but I just want to say to Matt that stuff like this is why people like me have had reasons to at least be skeptical of moderate Dems since late 90s.
Good point to reference the “smugness” aspect. We can’t complain when leftists wag their finger, morally lecture people etc. when the moderates etc. do the same thing too, BUT right after complaining about leftists lecturing people etc
It's important to point out that Chris Van Hollen is not part of the moderate faction. He is one of the ten most progressive senators.
It's really a tough call to be a pragmatic moderate and do what's necessary (if it's even possible) to right the ship overloaded with $40 trillion in debt, inflation, crazy housing, and such. Maybe that's why extreme politics is de rigueur: it's a form of denial to have weird fantastical policies like defending police, overarching DEI, bleeding borders, or on the other side, Trumpism ( it's a casino mentality and we've long since bet away our disposable income). It's almost like wait for the extremists to sink the ship and THEN get someone with some pragmatic balls to see our way forward.
My personal politics are pretty far-left, but I recognize my goals are not achievable when government is ineffective and people don't trust it. That's why I have tremendous respect for Shapiro fixing the highway ahead of schedule and Whitmer filling the potholes.
I've heard slogans like "make shit work," "public excellence," and "make public services great again" (we probably won't use that last one).
While achieving this will involve slaughtering some sacred cows, I think the overall message is both pragmatic and progressive.
I give Shapiro credit for getting so many people to call him a hero for the rapid repair of I-95 but you know who else did the exact same thing? Newsom! A huge fire did damage to an I-10 overpass in 2023 and Newsom cut through red tape, involved the federal government and got the repairs done in an unbelievably short time.
So call this one a wash between the two of them.
https://lamag.com/travel/fire-damaged-i-10-freeway-reopen-before-thanksgiving/
This may be giving him too much credit, but I wonder if Newsom doesn't talk about this is because he's waiting for a primary debate because that bridge may become his version of Guliani's a noun, verb, and 9/11 to use this example on Shapiro.
A few thoughts.
Obama left a huge hole in the Democratic Party. This hole got filled by committees and we get this long list checkbox like set of policies but no real direction or message.
Rank and file elected Democrats are risk adverse and the tumult of Sanders’ insurgent campaign reinforced that risk aversion.
Progressives like the current govern by committee and weak moderates for factional reasons. It is easier for them to exert influence or extort concessions (e.g. why do NGOs only protest Democrats who support their stated aims?)
Finally, Obama had a level of technocratic elitism. He thought Harvard educated people and professors were the best experts and filled his administration with these types. That has to have affected the priorities of the Democratic Party. That also probably feeds into how many Democrats snub non college educated voters, culture, and challenges.
It's interesting that Matt slags on California with its soft on crime attitude toward shoplifting, with its recently passed law making any such theft under $950 a misdemeanor, and compares it unfavorably to his experience in Charleston South Carolina.
Where shoplifting under *$2000* is defined as a misdemeanor.
Those softheaded liberals in South Carolina, man.
Right, the difference is not the theoretical maximum penalty, it's that SFPD spent three years afflicted with "blue flu" because the cops were mad about people saying they shouldn't kill black drug users willy-nilly, and Charleston PD apparently did not. (I guess the power of police to kill black Charleston drug users is unchallenged.)
As a result, even though actual shoplifting remained quite rare, organized groups were able to hit stores in a highly visible way with zero police response, generating horrible-looking clips of brazen criminality for the local news.
Misdemeanor shoplifting in South Carolina is very different from misdemeanor shoplifting in California-especially misdemeanor shoplifting in extra blue cities. Hell, there's video of shoplifters in California realizing what it means going from one jurisdiction to another. The primary benefit for bumping misdemeanors to felonies is to require all jurisdictions to arrest criminals, instead of issuing a summons.
>I think the people most likely to do that in a compelling way are purple-state politicians like Josh Shapiro and Ruben Gallego, but Newsom could do it and so could A.O.C.<
I was looking at some polling a few days ago—sorry, no time to rustle up a link at the moment—but Shapiro performs *much* better vs. hypothetical GOP nominee J.D. Vance than Newsom does. The latter's numbers nationally are not...wonderful. Neither are Harris's. Nor Buttigieg's for that matter. I suspect the Gallego/Ossoff/Kelly/Beshear/Whitmer tier would similarly poll more strongly than the Establishment Libs vis-a-vis Vance (the poll indicated they're not sufficiently well-known nationally to generate a meaningful result).
Newsom *could* win it, sure. But why risk going into the general without the strongest possible nominee?
EDIT: Here's where I saw that polling:
https://x.com/OpenSourceZone/status/2030679753632428121
I mean, you know the answer: every marginal point you get by moderating is a platform plank you’ve “sold out” on. If you’re going to win anyway, it doesn’t actually matter if you win by .1 or by 20 points. And have you ever met a political party operative that’s pessimistic about their chances of winning? It’s like meeting a religious person who thinks their religion’s eschatological vision won’t play out.
"it doesn’t actually matter if you win by .1 or by 20 points."
This drives me crazy. It really does matter whether you win by a lot, because if you do you have coat tails that makes you actually able to legislate. Its also means you have a good amount of room before your losing in the polls when things go wrong - and something always goes wrong.
RE: it not mattering how much you win by.
America’s executive doesn’t quite work out that way is my response. Increased implied win percentage is more important than it typically is in lots of systems given the level of personal latitude.
Well, yeah-- this is a fairly obvious corollary of the fact that politics is about maximizing long-term expected policy value, not about narrowly maximizing your probability of winning the next election. The latter is Starmerism, which...[gestures across the pond]
I'm impressed with Gallego thus far in that he seems unafraid to go against the left, while being stridently anti-Trump and anti-Iran war. I even saw him ding Janet Mills on a podcast just for being old. So he's a moderate "fighter" that isn't yet part of the Establishment and doesn't talk like a career pol. He could end up being the right guy in the right place at the right time. Yet, he's actually not that articulate nor charismatic. I'm wondering if this could end up being an advantage though, boosting authenticity while not coming off as slick.
Newsom just isn't as likeable as much of the other contenders. He's clearly teeing himself up for a run but I think the more exposure he has leading up, the less popular he will become.
I think the depressing evidence is that a political brand is very hard to renovate.
Mannequins get bleached and brittle remarkably quickly when exposed to sunlight. ;-)
Especially with the Iran war (unless the regime falls quickly, with a rapid transition to democracy -- a highly unlikely prospect, to say the least!) -- I dread the thought of Shapiro running against Vance -- much as I like almost everything about Shapiro.
Springtime for Hitler! That's where Vance finally breaks with Trump. The undercurrents are already unmistakable -- "Israel dragged us into this" -- among friends to whom Vance has already given the nod (and then some), declaring, "No purity tests." And this, in turn, will even appeal to certain elements of the "woke" left.
Against Vance, I'd put my money on Kelly, with Booker, perhaps, as VP -- though I also wouldn't mind seeing Gallego run over a crowd of latte-sipping urbanists with his big-ass truck. ;-)
PS: With Kelly, we get a Jewish first lady -- but with Vance, we get a Hindu, which (in that instance) might help neutralize the Jew-baiters in his campaign.
All of this leaves me withthe question of what is winning for? Is it just to prevent the next Republican from continuing with or exacerbabing Trump's defict, immigrtion restrictions and tariffs by being slightly less bad on these same issues? If so, is Newsom any worse than Gallego?
I'd like to see Democrats with a positive vision of growth with equity -- low deficits, high immigration of skilled people, low import restrictions except from adversaries, and low cost reductionsin CO2 emissions -- and measures to restrict Executive powers vis a vis Congress.
"[W]hat is winning for?"
That depends on whether you think MAGA is an existential threat to the American republic. I think it is, so, yes, literally the only point of winning is to prevent the next Republican presidential candidate from being the winner. I will acknowledge that isn't a very motivating campaign slogan, especially for swing voters, so I wouldn't recommend anyone formally run on that platform, but it is the lens that any candidate should be viewed through and it is the objective that any candidate should have in mind.
Agreed. I meant that if that were one’s ONLY concern, then politicl positions hardly matter; it’s electability all the way down.
While there are many benefits to winning, many of which are elucidated throughout this thread, do you genuinely not think that simply preventing the worst impulses of the Republican party is sufficient reason to want Democrats to win?
Isn't that kind of the malignant ping-pong we've been playing since Obama, conflating the duality and each side demonizing each other to win the election and feel "safe"?
But the duality is real. Especially with Trump and the current Trump/MAGA dominated Republican party. There is zero chance the Republican party is going to nominate a Romney like figure. If that was the possibility on the Republican side than we'd be arguing about optimal marginal tax rates, and the size, scope, and efficacy of social welfare programs.
But those aren't the issues. Today's Republican party has top to bottom demonstrated a comfort, and in its majority, support, for autocracy, corruption, and a disregard for the rule of law.
I agree with your slippery slope esque argument, just that we’ve already slid down and we’re at the bottom. The new Conservative-Socialism of Vance et al. is worth opposing on its own.
Yeah, no. Both-sidesism ain’t gonna fly on this here comment thread, where most of us, while certainly not super-lefty, are very, very clear on which of the two major political parties in America is a cesspool inside a snake pit wrapped in a Dumpster fire.
They both look like cesspools to me (the far left and Trumpers--not the left and right center folks). The far left are in a way more insidious because they take the moral high ground as "do-gooders" but have zero self- reflection on how they could have lost to a pathetic, worst in a century, candidate like Trump. That doesn't mean I don't vote for them, out of necessity, so in that regard you're ultimately right concerning the Trumpers. But my feeling is almost wishing for a third party to break these chains we've created.
Hmm, perhaps, though I don't think the problem with the current American political predicament is that Republicans weren't demonized enough.
I take the point about a sort of spiral race to the bottom, though, and I'd say that just because I'm advocating that as a clear reason to vote to keep Republicans out in a space like this does not mean I endorse it as a public electoral strategy.
By the same metric, a sincere evangelical Christian who believes abortion is murder is perfectly rational in voting to keep Democrats away from the government at all costs, it's just that we don't agree with their views. By the same metric, a sincere liberal is perfectly rational in not wanting the government to be controlled by...well...the Republican Party.
They were demonized plenty; they weren’t *imprisoned* enough!
But isn't that just reactionary voting still? Somehow the anti-abortionist and the anti-Trumpers have to sit at the table and reach some compromises.
That's a better reason to win big (as distant a possibility as that may seem)... the only long term solution is to crush the Republican party and get it to reconstitute or change its ways. The worst people shouldn't be participating in politics at all except at the lunatic fringe.
I also think it could and should be mentioned, especially for how many times we criticize or “punch left”, the time that the person establishment or party leaders were wrong policy wise, “vibes” wise, picking candidates etc.
Definitely not saying the party shouldn’t moderate in some aspects (policy, perception, slogans etc.). But makes me a bit cynical when one moment the party is wagging their fingers at the “left” (very vague or open ended definition in this context) to tell them they’re not popular or large in numbers, but then almost instantly blame them for every loss (they can’t be the reason every time).
But overall, I agree with the article. Sometimes, it’s not just the activists or left who have their priorities in the wrong order
Every time this topic is the explicit headline of an article, as opposed to the subtext, every nutjob "destroy the welfare state" neocon and every nutjob "the people demand revolutionary change" left-entryist turn up to bitch.
I am nonetheless impressed that MY can count members of both groups among his subscribers.