Eh. I am going to maintain that Charles Lehmans article on disorder is at the core of Trumps victory, or should I say the Democrats loss.
A majority of people did not vote for Trump, they voted against “disorder”.
Of course, people feel like the economy is bad when they see homeless people laying around the streets doing drugs. (yes I know this is only a small percentage of homeless… But it’s the majority of the visible homeless).
Of course, people think crime is up when they see mass shoplifting operations on TV and then go to their store and see their deodorant locked behind plexiglass.
Of course people are frustrated when they see millions of migrants claiming asylum because they were in danger… but knowing full well they were here for economic reasons.
If Democrats want to win, they need to advocate for policies that make society, more orderly, organized, fair, and rule driven.
And I did not vote for Trump, but the majority of my friends did… And I know why.
I think disorder was important, but gun to my head inflation was the biggest factor. I think it explains the fairly uniform swing to the right basically everywhere because everywhere has inflation but real disorder like you describe was more variable geographically.
Yes disorder is important. But every narrative of this election needs to include inflation and a terrible electoral environment for incumbents across the world as key reasons too. And I’d probably list them as more important than disorder because that is something that is disproportionately felt by blue city residents.
Agree that inflation probably outweighed the effect of disorder. That said, the quality of blue state/city governance is a gaping wound in the narrative of why Democrats should be trusted with the levers of power.
I live in Santa Cruz County. Beautiful weather and scenery; I am fortunate to live here. Hemmed in by the ocean, mountains, Silicon Valley, and the NIMBY majority, housing prices here are totally out of reach for a typical 2 earner family. The quality of public goods (parks, streets, schools) has degraded significantly since the Obama years. Somehow, the nonprofit and government sectors continue to grow headcount. The homeless population continues to grow and periodically sets up mass camps and open air drug markets in public parks and on major intersections. It's impossible to use the bathroom at any downtown business without getting a code or a key. Most of the time I go downtown, there is at least one person screaming at the top of their lungs in the street.
This is a 75% Harris county per the results. There are zero Republicans with political power.
None of this made me vote for Donald Trump, and it's my choice to stay here. But does it feel like a well-governed place? Absolutely not. And why would anyone in a growing metro in a red state think this is an example to follow?
yes but Florida had the hardest right swing of all states and Miami has a Republican mayor and they were one of the parties to move almost the furthest to the right. Was Miami mismanaged? Ft Worth similarly. I do think blue cities and states need to look a hard look at how they are delivering services to people but out of thousands of cities almost all of them shifted right and most did not have the governing issues you describe IMO.
To be more clear, my claim is not "poor governance in blue cities made voters in cities swing right", it is "poor governance in blue cities sets a poor example for voters anywhere".
It’s funny you mentioned Florida, because in the sun belt, Democrats had a double whammy of inflation caused by increased inflow of people from blue states combined with the fact that these ‘emigrants’ were more right leaning than the nominal SF democrat. So while disorder and NIMBYism should be addressed on their own merits, its impact is more emigration related than direct polarization .
“It's impossible to use the bathroom at any downtown business without getting a code or a key.” This makes me crazy and I always think that people who live in these neighborhoods essentially live in a different country than most of us who talk about these issues. Los trust to the nth degree l.
I think the other missing piece of this that I would guess will take a long time to unpack is the way that domestic migration wove together with frustration over public disorder. It's not just that California swung right (through some genuine conversions and a lot of moderate voter apathy) - it's that the people who were MOST fed up with the state of affairs in California over the past 4 years moved en masse to other states (including/especially Arizona and Texas), and those voters were disproportionately right-leaning to begin with. In other words, LA's experience helped swing Phoenix right, too.
I'd hoped before the election that the net effect of all this would be to move Republicans from blue wall states to red states, and lead to maybe a loss of Arizona and Nevada but higher margins up north. But now I wonder if it's actually obscuring how disastrous this frustration has been for the party politically; one has to wonder what the collapse in margins in the NY Metro, for example, would be like if nobody had moved to Florida since 2020.
Also, to be clear, we're all still talking out our asses here. It's gonna be months before we have granular enough data to know who turned out to vote and why.
The counties who've reported 99% are enough to draw some "ecological" conclusions. Those should always be done cautiously, but we can safely say big metros swung the most to the right, although parsing who, within them, swung right is much more harder without granular data.
Well, as you say, we have ecological data. I know Matt warned us about cross-tabbing at this stage, but it's not like all guesstimates are going to be way off. Looking at the data out of the Bronx (to cite one example) it's really hard for me to imagine Trump didn't make (yet more) inroads with Hispanic voters.
I agree, and I'd add that he might have done well with immigrants of all stripes, especially less educated immigrants. That's my read of the ecological results.
Combining exit polls, and pre-election polls and voter reg dat suggests to me that he may have done even better with immigrants than it appears at first glance. The other data sources say white voters barely shifted, and so the shifts across rural america have to be counterbalanced by white voters somewhere moving left. That might have been in the big cities and suburbs.
But we'll have to wait for more granular data to check that hypothesis.
Yeah I warned about over extrapolating from exit poll data a few days ago. I’m glad you brought this up. Exit poll data is often really flawed. I brought it up a week ago but if exit polls were right John Kerry is president in 2004. Now with the increasing partisan split in same day voting vs early voting exit polls are even more trash.
The international comparison is where "it's the inflation, stupid" seems to the big story here (given our economic performance, I didn't want to say "economy").
I think it was Matt who noted a conversation he had with old hats in the Democratic party who are partly responsible for the 2009 stimulus being undercooked. Matt ultimately was right; low interest rate, high unemployment environment is exactly the time to go big on stimulus. But they came back to him and said "you don't understand how much voters hate hate hate inflation" almost as this PTSD from the 70s. I think he said he was more inclined to get what they were talking about after seeing public opinion last 2 years despite an objectively good economy.
Both can be right to an extent. Stimulus should have probably been a bit bigger in 2008.
But that 1.9 trillion stimulus should have been a LOT smaller (or not at all). And then once we started to see signs of inflation, we should have pulled back on the stimulus.
Another valid criticism of the 2009 stimulus that I've heard is that it was not front loaded enough. The economy was hemorrhaging jobs when Obama became President and they decided that 20-50$s in every paycheck will lead to a more efficient way to distribute the money (because people are more likely to spend all of it) instead of a one time 500$s.
I'm sure at some point there will be such a loss of institutional memory on the subject, but I suspect this lesson is going to persist beyond your lifespan unless you're a kid simply because it's so stark. Carter had some other major PR problems in 1980 besides inflation (e.g., Iran hostage crisis) and Reagan was a successful "big state" governor who, while he was utterly hated by a certain segment of the population for being exceptionally conservative (for the era), otherwise was a decent human being, and (to the best of my knowledge) ran a skillful campaign. To put it another way, even absent any issues with inflation, Reagan should have been a strong challenger to Carter. Trump '24, on the hand, was a dumpster fire of both a human being and a campaign. That Trump not only won, but substantially increased his vote share over his two previous runs across the board demographically and geographically, is pretty clearly due to inflation.
>But I think what it demonstrates is that Matt was totally wrong and the olds with inflation PTSD were spot on<
They both could be right. It's possible we could have done enough stimulus in 2009-2011 to support the economy but not ignite worryingly high levels of inflation. There was a LOT of slack in the economy. And yes, the grizzled veterans from the 70s were obviously right, as well, about voter distaste for price increases.
Honestly, I hope the lesson we take from this is to not do fiscal stimulus during a massive recession. I agree that inflation is politically toxic at high levels like we saw in 22-23 but:
1. The inflation was a global phenomenon despite widely varying levels of fiscal support during the pandemic so our fiscal and monetary response to the pandemic was not the only reason (or probably even the primary reason) for the inflation.
2. Even if we assume otherwise, the level of physical and monetary stimulus in 2020 was really staggering (like WW2 level shit) and there is a A LOT of room between the relatively meek response to the FGC in 2009 and dumping 6T dollars of fiscal stimulus and g-d-only-knows how much monetary stimulus into the economy over a 10 month period.
3. It worked! The recovery from the initial pandemic recession was really staggering and we're genuinely vastly better off for it. We need to consider the counterfactual here where we were too timid and instead of inflation we had four years of high unemployment and anemic growth. Would the democrats really do any better in that environment?
Hard agree on all of this (except that I don’t think many of my friends voted for Trump). The locked-up toiletries thing comes up in conversations with surprising frequency. And no matter how good economic indicators are, it’s impossible to feel good about the state of the country when they see the kinds of things Rory describes (which I do).
It’s kind of ironic that Trump, who flagrantly breaks laws and destroys norms, ran on a kind of law-and-order message. I do not have high hopes that the next administration will move us toward a more orderly, fair, and rule-driven society, which I also desperately want to see. I’m already disappointed to see people I respect and admire, like Ken White, advocating for incivility. It’s going to be a challenging few years.
- Crime goes up during Trump's administration: Democrats get blamed.
- Crime goes down during Biden's administration: Democrats don't get credit.
- Democrats run a prosecutor who highlighted law-and-order themes, don't get credit.
- Trump gets convicted of crime, has a history of violent sexual assault in a major American city, brings chaos to our nation's Capitol: returns to power.
I also wonder if the Trump administration's handling of early Covid in cities when Kushner was calling it a Blue State virus played a key role in making crime worse. My sister's description of 2020 living in a major city was heartbreaking.
It’s underrated among democrats in how much the combination of a year long “abolish the police” campaign and images of inner city homelessness and open drug use really drove this entire thing.
Democrats point to charts and graphs and some mom in the Great Lakes region points to a picture on social media of a group of homeless people smoking fentanyl next to a woman pushing a baby stroller.
We did this to ourselves. We did it openly and with pride. I’ve seen the results of liberal criminal reform policy in my city and voted against all the democrats who implemented it this year. It was almost all bad and implemented poorly and now they want more money to double down on it, no thank you.
Oh, yeah I'm talking about the royal "we" of California democrats. I also voted for Harris and Prop 36. I've gotten heat both on here and in real life from liberals for supporting Prop 36 though. I would say those people also don't support "public disorder and crime" but they are willing to pay that as a price to "reduce justice disparities" or whatever.
The loopy CA liberal is a true minority though. Often very loud. No way a middle class Chinese American family in Sunset or Richmond is going to be okay with crime in the name of justice disparities.
It came 4 years too late and I'm still not sure that they'll enforce the law. The limit for shoplifting being whatever is no excuse for not investigating or booking people for people committing crimes/misdemeanors.
It's kind of sad too because Clinton as president and Joe Biden as a senator was about as good as the Democrat Party (or any party really) has ever been on law enforcement. A good balance of accountability (the 1994 crime control act enabled the DOJ to investigate problematic agencies) and support (100k new cops and the creation of helpful federal services for policing).
Certainly not perfect as they had to make some political considerations that we not 100% ideal in the form of being more punitive. Still, as a team they did about as good on crime policy as could be expected.
Clearly the Dem party is capable of being very good on crime. They just seem to lose their minds on certain things and cannot control the worst excess of the hard left. Had Harris not lost her mind in 2019-2020 and stuck with the principles she articulated in Smart on Crime, she might have been able to follow this up and position herself much better for 2024.
You can't juice murder stats, and murders have gone down a lot, so there actually are good things happening. But it's been a gradual process and people's memories are long.
I live in a big city and have witnessed the crime surge first hand. It’s true that:
A) violent crime is noticeably down.
B) the city still feels significantly less safe and more hostile than it did pre Covid/Floyd.
I hear far fewer gunshots than I used to, and no one has had their wheels stolen on my block for a while, but I still regularly encounter hostile people / drug addicts / homeless and sociopathic drivers at a much higher clip than I did pre 2020.
It’s good that cities have finally, begrudgingly started addressing crime again, but there’s still a huge amount to do to get back to the Obama era baseline.
Urban police have prioritized serious, violent crime with their more limited workforces. And so, it's gone down. But they've deprioritized crimes of "disorder" like speeding or DUIs or drugging out on the metro and yelling at people, so that's gone up.
The murder rate in 1990 was just over 9 per 100k. It was cut in half and hit bottom at something like 4.4 or so in 2014. Interestingly, 2012 to 2014 was when Justice Reinvestment was getting rolling and by 2014 it was being implemented in a ton of places.
From 2014 to about the early 2020's the murder grew by nearly 50% to over 6 per 100k. This basically undid about a quarter century of near continuous improvement and took us back to mid 1990s in terms of the murder (which is when I got into policing).
The mid1990s was still a trainwreck in terms of violent crime and I can remember literally going to multiple murders and shootings on the same night in the summer of 1996. This was not good and a lot of people died unnecessarily.
Fortunately, a lot of that bump appears to be due to the crazy of 2020 and over the last year or two rates have fallen a ton.
That said, if you want to see just how deleterious 2020 was on homicides check out Portland's open data (https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/portlandpolicebureau/viz/New_Monthly_Neighborhood/MonthlyOffenseTotals). They have a great dashboard with data going back to about mid 2015 so you can look at over a decent stretch prior to 2020 and the data are updated so you can generally get good data to within a couple months of the current data (FBI data is hugely old). Jeffery Asher has a good Substack as well and has set up a promising tracking system using open data from a bunch of larger cities (https://jasher.substack.com/).
Which is funny, because if you live here, you will recall that they tried to imply that that is who did it, and many would still do this if you tried to bring it up.
"run a prosecutor who highlighted law-and-order themes"
She highlighted them for like 3 months! Where was that highlighting during 80% of her time as VP, or during her primary campaign? You can't just go "oh I'm tough on crime" and expect people to go "oh, well sure, if you say so".
It’s simple. Trump can do whatever the fuck he wants; Democrats must be perfect and no matter what they do, it will never be good enough. At this point I can only conclude that Trump literally sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success.
I don't know, I think Democrats are pretty far from perfect. Trump was born wealthy and did luck into some sweet real estate situations at exactly the right time in the NYC real estate market. As happens to most rich people, he has gotten "lucky" often. He has just been in a position to seize on opportunity then it presents itself, this is the key advantage of the very rich, they can take more risks and accept fewer trade offs to get what they want.
As my momma said when I was a kid "life isn't fair" and that has remained true.
I think Ezra Klein's podcast this morning was excellent. We are in a realignment. Republicans are running as like Wario versions of 90's Democrats and Democrats are running as if the Presidency is President of Harvard. There is a realignment happening and, right now, Republicans have a winning formula and Democrats do not.
I listened to it too. I love Ezra ... buy my goodness did he tiptoe around Harris (e.g., "great debater", "ran a great campaign", "thrown into an impossible situation"). It's okay Ezra -- she's not your boss.
Thanks for flagging the EK pod, I'm trying not to focus too much on this stuff (obviously I am not doing a good job given that I am here!). But I saw it in my feed this morning and thought it looked interesting.
TBH I have been waiting for a realignment for quite some time and somewhere in my jaded and broken heart there is an ember of hope that the process has started for real and at some point, we will come out of this in a better place. If that happens, I hope I'm still around to see it...
This is my most optimistic perspective. People are in fact better informed these days and that is leading to some undesirable outcomes in the short term due to the types of information they are consuming from various bubbles. I do think that there is a chance for a smarter, post racial realignment that is less blue team/red team/Cold War coded and more results driven.
There is also a chance it goes off the rails like a miner cart in an action film and we all plunge into the depths.
I haven't listened to the Klein podcast yet (if ever) but I would caution about throwing the term "realignment" around too easily. Once all the votes (mostly from California) are counted, the popular vote will be a lot closer to 50/50. Realignments don't happen when votes are 50/50 and have basically been around there for the past quarter century. Do voting blocs shift? Yes, they do that all the time, as parties swap groups of voters. But that's different from a 1932 style major realignment.
We're clearly seeing a different Republican party and a Democratic party now struggling to figure out what its makeup is, but it's too soon to be calling it a realignment.
Whatever the count, Dems lost traction with growing segments of the population (younger voters, minorities) and gained with shrinking segments (whites, older voters).
I know the counts not fully in, but both polls and voter registration numbers were pointing to these same trends all year long, so I feel pretty confident saying they are real.
To make matters worse, it's blue states that are set to lose EC votes after the next census and red states that are set to gain them. And you already know about the Supreme Court and the Senate. It's hard to see how the Dems remain competitive without a realignment or a great deal of luck.
i think he sort of meant it as Obama's political legacy and the energy behind those ideas were ending. i wouldn't expect the 2028/2032 maps to look all that different from 2024, but the energy and emphasis will be different. similar to how 2004 -> 2012 there was not a big change in the electoral map but obviously Obama represents a hard break from Kerry (the Clinton era).
And Trump represents a hard break from the Bush era (signified by beating Jeb in '16). The Republican party had much more continuity though with Romney being a natural successor to W, who was the natural successor to his dad and Reagan.
it is a little hard to know what might happen. I think a lot of what happens on the left will be a reaction to what goes on in Trump Administration 2, similar to how Obama rose partially due to political talent, partially due to identity considerations, but also in a big part because he opposed the Iraq war.
Thank you. I have been watching this too, noting that Trump has not yet exceeded his 2020 national vote total and likely will not exceed it by much of a margin -- certainly no "landslide" or "realignment". Meanwhile, Harris is dramatically under-performing Biden's vote total from 2020 and will not make it all back in California (she's down 13M votes and there are not close to that number of ballots still out still out).
Trump can only be this successful because Biden and Harris have sprinted further towards the Progressive-leftwing. So much of the early days of the Biden administration - and again, I'll repeat ... just re-read all his Day 1 EOs - were about how "Biden is the most Progressive President ever". Welp ... turns out very few Americans support those policies.
OK you have a point, but during her election campaign, Harris tacked HARD to the center, and it seems she gets no credit for it. I was legit ASTONISHED by how little she emphasized her race and gender, or how devoid her speeches were of the typical lefty "America baaaad" narrative. Her DNC speech was, "My parents came to this country as immigrants because this is the greatest bestest country in the world and I am the living embodiment of the American dream!" Does anyone even remember Biden's first-day EOs? Does anybody care?
I think that's the point tho ... she "tacked HARD". No one believed it. She was and is a California Progressive. She can't escape her 2020 run. That's who she is at her core. And while I might be the only person in America who's read all of Biden's EO -- the public narrative that first week was a broad reversal of all Trump's immigrations policies and a tidal wave of woke, DEI policies. I think that sense has stuck with the general public and is also accurate. It was a massive misstep and one we all paid dearly for.
"Does anyone even remember Biden's first-day EOs? Does anybody care?"
For sure many remember. more importantly, Harris's weird 2019-2020 public comments were practically played on a loop in the GOP ads I received. and you can't really run the counterfactual...maybe she would have lost by 2 or 3% more if she hadn't tacked hard to center. But I agree with David that it wasn't particularly credible to most voters.
lol yeah, Democrats won the popular vote 4 times in a row (lost by 1.5 points on tuesday and .5 points in 2004) and now everyone is acting like they don't know anything about the common man.
That's because they lost "the common man" vote by worse margins, yet again.
If, by common man, we mean non college degreed people (especially, well, men) of all races. They can clearly still connect with college educated voters. White college educated voters are one of the few demos that shifted left.
sure but again I think its frustrating because all the discussion in the media is by college educated voters bashing other college educated voters for being "unable to connect," but in reality we all have the same authentic beliefs lol.
I think the progressive stuff might be behind the inflation and Covid stuff. If inflation had come down rapidly and Covid been managed better I think it’s possible the Democratic candidate could have had a chance, the woke wars didn’t help though!
Yes, even if everything the poster states is true, Republicans are vocal that they don’t like it, Democrats seen to hand wave it away and try to explain how it’s all downstream of structural inequities that comes across line defending antisocial behavior.
I see what you're both saying, but Trump is also the only major Republican to basically oversee a riot. We're not talking about Larry Hogan or a former police chief here. The fact that Trump himself is a criminal is the part that is most depressing.
I HATE everything about January 6th and find it disqualifying. However, some would say it was an acute, one day event and a lot of the perpetrators have been arrested and punished. The petty crime and disorder in my neighborhood is something I have to deal with everyday in perpetuity.
I agree regarding Trump...however the commitment to law and order on the part of the Democratic party is kind of tarnished by the year or so rioting, things like the CHAZ where parts of cities were handed over to armed groups for extended periods of time and the general lack of response to things like political arsons.
Not saying they are equivalent, but it makes a lot of concerns about political violence, insurrection, and rule of law less genuine and makes it appear more tactical.
This is a good point. My instinct these past few months was to push against Trump's anti-war message by saying "but he's the *Republican* candidate! Ever heard of the Iraq War or the bombing of Cambodia?" But the truth is that Dick Cheney's daughter was a Harris surrogate, which only emphasizes the narrative that the Dems are now the endless wars party.
The sad thing, as an Ohio boy at heart who has lived abroad and lived on the coasts, Democrats no longer seem to understand most people. Education polarization gives them tunnel vision.
No, I DO NOT understand people who have a choice between a sane, decent, competent woman who talks about how we’re one America and there’s more that unites us than divides us, on one hand, and a crude, misogynistic, petty, vengeful, pathological liar and lawbreaker who tells us to be afraid, very afraid… and who say, yup, the liar-felon-rapist with fascist-y tendencies is the guy I want! I do not understand it. Yeah, yeah, disorder, homeless people, illegal immigrants, inflation, yadda yadda. It doesn’t make sense to me on a visceral level, it goes COMPLETELY against what I thought America was about.
Sorry, I know this isn’t a helpful comment, but I’m grieving. My heart is breaking for the people who voted for Harris and who don’t deserve this shit. Not to mention people who had no chance to vote, like Ukrainians whom Trump is about to screw over.
The way I understand this is a lot of people in the US don't care if the president is personally awful as long as they deliver something for them. It is purely transactional and borderline cynical. They also don't necessarily trust or believe in anything a politician says. We seem to be transitioning to a lower-trust society, which is bad in a number of ways. It is in fact against what many of us thought America was about. But trust can go down as well as up. The way to build up trust is to do what you say you are going to do and mean what you say.
I get it. I really do. But they don't care what he says. They care what happens in reality, and they evaluate relative to their personal situation. Remember, low trust, so they don't believe anything anyone really says. So it doesn't matter. He's just there for entertainment. They measure vs what they see.
I don't know if you will take any comfort in this, but having been through a lot election cycles by now, I think it's hard to over-estimate the extent to which people vote in order to punish politicians and political parties for the past, rather than to make the best or most prudent choices for the future. It's fundamentally irrational, but deeply human, so it's also the primary lever political parties (and their media ecospheres) push during campaigns. So I agree with the analytical frame that says this was more about Biden's real and perceived political failures and personal shortcomings, rather than Trump's "appeal". Like you, I have no idea why Trump appeals to Republicans -- he is repellent in every dimension, and it makes me question the judgment of every Republican I know. But in this environment, many Republicans could have beaten Biden or Harris, while only a few Democrats might have been able to overcome the public's desire to punish them. Harris was just too attached to Biden, too unwilling to break with him and too easy to characterize as "woke" to pull it off. Could Whitmer or Klobuchar or Shapiro or Buttigieg have done it? Not at all sure.
But Biden did a lot of good things, the CHIPS act, getting the economy back on track after the pandemic. On foreign policy he did pretty much the best he could with a really bad situation (Israel/Palestine is a no-win scenario). And he’s getting punished because he didn’t magically make grocery prices return to 2019 levels.
All true. And to a similar extent, Trump got blamed for COVID, which I think he mis-handled, but did not create. Think of IRA, CHIPS Act, etc. as Biden's version of Project Warp Speed -- good policy that still wasn't enough to prevent him losing by 5M votes.
I will say I found the administration’s response on grocery prices pretty lackluster. Some grandstanding about price gouging, corporate greed, and monopoly concentration in an industry with razor thin profit margins, that could never have helped, even if it had been more than just cheap talk. Increases to SNAP benefits are good, but to be pragmatic, how many SNAP recipients vote?
If they were really taking voter concerns about grocery prices seriously, they would have pursued real supply side policy here. Kill subsidies and mandates for corn ethanol, kill the conservation reserve program which pays farmers to take land out of production, kill export promotion programs and subsidies, and plow all the savings into farm subsidies purely focused on higher production. Deliberately try to cut the bottom out of domestic grain prices and then watch the lower prices percolate through to bread, dairy, eggs, meat, etc.
It’s fits a classic America archetype of the asshole boss/inventor/creator/artist.
Steve Jobs was a notorious asshole and has reached Saint levels of respect in pop culture. Look at any number of “Diva’s” whose entire brand is shit talking other artists and preening on social media.
People are just willing to accept the fact that being a total asshole can be a key personality trait in a very successful person. I think that is a terrible thing but it helps explain the American mindset here.
But… it’s not just being an asshole to your staff or something. The man broke the law, broke his oath of office by trying to steal a goddamn election in 2020, culminating in a riot that he instigated. And that’s considered ok now. Sorry not sorry, I have absolute contempt for this mindset. This is not the America I thought I knew.
I get the feeling we're due for lots of sanewashing of Trump, his legacy, and his presentation of self in order to fit these results into something that people can accept without themselves going insane.
He won; we lost. Terrible. But he and his acolytes will not change who and what they are and there is a strong chance that those who bought him will feel terrible buyer's remorse.
"Yeah, yeah, disorder, homeless people, illegal immigrants, inflation, yadda yadda". People see the effects of these things every day, I don't think you can just yadda-yadda them away. I agree that Trump and Republicans are not the answer here and this election represents a real hit to my vision of and expectations of what America can be, but Democratic policies absolutely made the path to victory easier for Trump.
Democrats talk down to people, especially men. Noah Smith had a good piece on how activist framing of people as blocks others them and makes them not feel like Americans.
I see a lot of the activist brainworm things through work and it jades my perception of things.
Harris never talked down to people! I listened to her speeches, she was always like, let’s come together, as POTUS I will work hard for you!
Again the asymmetry: Harris is blamed for all crazy shit a lefty activist posts on Xitter, but Trump and his acolytes spout all sorts of deranged crap and nobody cares.
Her speeches were good and I think she is a genuinely talented, sincere and decent politician and human being. She just did not have enough time to close the deal on that basis.
I think Democrats unfortunately pay a price for the entire culture of the last 10 years. They aren’t responsible for it, but they didn’t separate themselves from it either. If we’re going to associate Republicans with Qanon, it’s certainly fair to associate Democrats with the Great Awokening.
I give the Republicans credit for knowing how to enflame significant parts of the population with bile, resentment, and hatred. Our Democratic leaders are sadly lacking in that politically valuable skill.
That's why if the Republicans are evil geniuses, they should do whatever they can to cause crime (which has been going down lately) to rebound in urban areas, whether that's by defunding cities, doing trolly pro-police brutality messaging, or what have you. I don't know how effective any steps like that would be necessarily, but to the extent they were effective in moving the needle in a negative direction, the blame would fall on Democrats because it is more believable to attribute crime increases to the politicians who share the same coalition as the anti-police radicals of 2015-2020, than to assume there's any connection to federal policy under a GOP trifecta.
(The good news is that Trump doesn't think like this at all, it's not his style. The bad news is that Vance absolutely does think like this, so it will be interesting to see if Vance is able to cast a spell on Trump and puppetmaster him, or whether Trump will start to resent Vance as he often did with underlings last time around.)
SCOTUS has only struck down gun control legislation in the last 16 years. It was rather infamous in lower-case "L" libertarian circles that SCOTUS refused to take any Second Amendment cases after U.S. v. Miller in 1939 until D.C. v. Heller in 2008. (I guess you could count U.S. v. Lopez in there -- the Gun-Free Schools Act case -- but that was still just from 1995.)
There is a larger point in this remark. Democrats nationally get blamed for the political mistakes of Democrats locally. Joe Biden never "defunded the Police" or mandated a DEI seminar, has near zero effect on homelessness and shoplifting/loud mufflers and public use of marihuana, excessive business and school closures during COVID.
Oddly, this is sort of the parallel to the Administration getting blamed for inflation and unemployment. We need to get better at surfing these waves.
The one big policy mistake was not to have proposed (as they finally did, but too late) some border control measures that Republicans woud oppose at their peril. A smaller one was giving in to effort of activists to oppose specific fossil fuel development and transportation projects.
I think you're giving upper-level Democrats too much of a pass. The 2019/2020 Democratic Presidential candidates (and certainly Democratic Congresspeople) said fairly radical things about decriminalizing illegal immigration, eliminating ICE, and defunding the police. It's not unreasonable to associate national Democrats with these policies, even if they rapidly backed away from them.
We on the left immediately memory hole this stuff, we’re very good at it. People outside our circle aren’t incentivized to forget this stuff immediately when it becomes politically inconvenient to us.
Her confirmation went 50-50 in the Senate, with VP Harris casting the deciding vote in her favor. She was a controversial appointee because as a DA, she’d released a memo outlining her policy to no longer prosecute certain offenses, including shoplifting.
You are correct that this appointment in itself didn’t have any concrete impact on shoplifting in US cities.
But if you reward the “political mistakes” of local Democrats with new appointments, then I think it’s fair for voters to think you might not consider those things mistakes.
DEI growth absolutely is a federal phenomenon. My anecdotal case is a close friend who is an ER doctor who had to take off several days of work to attend DEI training so he could pick up occasional shifts at the VA ER. This alone cost his and his wife's vote. He detests Trump but has concluded it is the Dems that in the end are totalitarian.
OK, I'll bite. What was so terrible about DEI training? Some of it is silly and frankly a lot of it should go without saying, and "several days" seems pretty crazy (in tons of private sector settings, it's now on Zoom anyway, I think) but that's roll-your-eyeballs stuff, not "Dems are totalitarian"?!?!?! Jeez, they're not putting him in jail for not doing the training or doing it wrong or something, are they?
What John from FL. says below plus it's such an obvious waste of time that you get the feeling it is an exercise designed to demonstrate power. I don't think personally it it that bad. My friend however if from a former Soviet bloc country who moved when he was a teenager. To him it had the stench of iron fisted government mood control which he knew in its real form. I'm not so sure it's as bad as he believes, but there is a huge part of the electorate that feel this way. And everything that John said in reply to you is probably true. Your reply of what so bad about it, is what is exactly what is hurting the dems on the ballot. Ineffective government interference is poorly accepted.
I guess what I am trying, and failing, to express, is my honest puzzlement that the concept of trying to suggest that particular sensitivity to the histories and lived experiences of groups of people who have, on the whole, and historically, and take all the exceptions you please, been poorly treated compared to the white middle and upper classes, and perhaps merit special solicitude for that reason, seems to incite backlash, rather than regarding such experiences philosophically and even, sadly, as a probably inevitable bit of rough-justice turnabout-is-fair-play that is just going to be part of the landscape for awhile. More the question why it is so hard to look at the DEI moment, even acknowledging the sorts of excesses described in the Michigan story, with a bit of detachment and tolerance as comprising an effort to instill social consciousness and as the kind of thing that inevitably happens in a society in which the contentiousness of black equality has been central to the nation's political dialogue for its entire existence. Experiencing this as a white person, and trying to understand other white people's experience of DEI generally as a driver of their politics, I am left wondering frankly why Luke 7:1 ("judge not that ye be not judged") and Nick Carraway's father's advice in the opening lines of The Great Gatsby about remembering that not everyone has had our advantages, might be a sensible alternative posture, even if there is non-trivial silliness in many aspects of the modern DEI "industry". Certainly I confess to not understanding why, even if someone dislikes it, it would lead them to vote for a presidential candidate as manifestly unfit for office as Trump. "[A]nti-white bias" simply isn't that big a social problem.
Despite you're moral appeal It is not a popular view. A majority does not agree it is either right or even possible to "engineer" society in such a granular fashion. There is a popular view that civil rights can be enforced but they must be in a general sense, not handicapped for certain identities. If it was not clear before, it should be now with Trumps gains among Blacks and Hispanics. Even in border areas, a majority of Hispanics are voting for Trump. The election is a resounding defeat for DEI and identity politics.
One quibble, there actually has been a bunch more DEI stuff across the federal workforce since Biden took office, especially since this Executive Order came out in June 2021:
I have front row seats to efforts at AI regulation, and from what I can see, my honest opinion is:
The major aspect of AI they concern is racism and bias.
They have no idea how to find or limit such harms
But they are going to spend a lot of money, hire a bunch of regulators, and force insurers, banks, etc.. to spend a lot of money on proving their AI isn't racist, whatever that might mean.
All of this stuff will have the impacts of stifling innovation and raising costs where it's implemented, and it's mostly being implemented in Blue states. In response, some businesses are pulling out of Blue states.
But if I interpret your comment as thinking Generative AI deserves some attention, thought and concern from regulators, I agree. That sort of AI is very new and introduces novel potential problems.
However, regulators and lawmakers are having difficulty defining exactly what is "AI" vs computation or automation. And because they can't figure out how to define it well, most attempts at AI regulation have decided to regulate "Math".
So, if you have a spreadsheet excel macro model that adds 2 columns together, that's "AI". A linear regression is "AI". In both cases you do a bunch of extra reporting and work and get lawyer sign-offs, etc. to show it's not racially biased.
They mostly haven't decided what racially biased means, either, but that's another problem.
Re: homelessness, I would note that the solicitor general appointed by Biden filed an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case arguing that localities could not criminalize sleeping outside if there weren’t shelter beds available:
In the event, SCOTUS disagreed with the administration’s position, so you are again correct that this had no concrete impact on the problem, but I can understand why people concerned about urban disorder might be worried that Biden doesn't share their priorities.
If you issue a mass pardon for everyone previously convicted of marijuana possession, I guess you're right that that probably does have "near zero" effect on public use of marijuana in practice, but on the margin I'd guess it encourages people to take existing laws against public use of marijuana a little less seriously.
"it encourages people to take existing laws...a little less seriously"
This, to me, strikes at the heart of the problem. It seems as if virtually everyone, in virtually every domain, is taking laws (speeding, red-light running, smoking on the subway, shoplifting, etc etc etc) as well as norms (don't blast music without headphones, control your dog, pay attention to other people on the sidewalk rather than drifting all over the place while you scroll, don't hang a flag on your property saying "f***" the candidate/elected official you don't like, etc etc etc) less seriously. At the same time, many people seem to be spending most of their time alone and now appear unwilling to tolerate, in person, any inconvenience to themselves and *any* annoying quality in other people. I'm trying to maintain a positive/constructive mindset but it's hard for me to not view this state of affairs as a serious fraying of the fabric of society.
I feel like the median member of society's sensitivity to "my mom would be horrified if she found out I did X" has dropped dramatically, to the detriment of us all. That little voice in our collective heads shaming us for being anti-social is a lot quieter nowadays, and it seems like a lot of social function relied on that voice's strength and basically nothing else.
I mean, if you really boil it down, Republicans promoting mass resistance against COVID restrictions had the effect of promoting flouting other, unrelated laws, just like Republicans promoting COVID vaccine skepticism led to a resurgence of antivax sentiments in general.
And this blog has *very frequently* taken the side of the COVID "reckoning."
Liked and largely agree but the one point I think really hurt him was embracing "transitory inflation." I may be over weighing this because I was literally screaming mad at the time that we were not addressing inflation more, also, the way my finances are structured really makes me vulnerable to inflation (even after hedging as much as I can). So this was really salient to me.
Either way, I think I would have been much less angry about inflation had Biden come out and said it was a problem, and he was going to do everything in his power to address it...even though I know intellectually that this would have changed little. I think for many people playing down inflation initially was seen as causing it...an inaccurate but powerful perception.
I agree. After living in Denmark and coming back to DC and NYC I have seen how the quality of these places have dropped.
It is stark in Tucson, where I spent a lot of time. I see it in the new city I live in. My sister and her friends all abandoned Portland because it got expensive and the quality dropped immensely.
Definitely agree disorder is a huge factor in the urban swing. Nothing has made me more sympathetic to Trump voters than seeing people just bring bags to a pharmacy, take tons of things off the shelves, and then walk out, which I have seen 5+ times since 2020.
But the fact that the swing is so uniform across demographics and geography doesn't track for me. Is it something like rural areas were madder about inflation but urban areas were annoyed by the disorder?
Did big cities shift across all demographics? If only Hispanics were bothered by disorder but not Blacks/Whites to the same level, then there are other factors here.
I'm getting the impression that immigrants of all ethnicities shifted right, especially lower education ones. I feel like all the polling and crosstabs really misses something by not separating Black/White/Asian/Hispanic immigrants from Black/White/Asians/Hispanic whose families have been here for generations.
Blacks and Whites may have well shifted by nearly the exact same amount, if you control for education. I'm definitely getting into speculative territory here, but this pattern would explain which cities and rural regions shifted more than others pretty well, and could square with the exit polling that does exist.
In my local election, the number one thing driving my vote was who seemed more committed to unfucking the one drug corner a few blocks from my house. It quite literally looks like Hamsterdam from the Wire - just an absolute zoo, with dozens (hundreds?) of junkies milling about. Utter chaos. My bus to work stops across the street from it, and everyone on it (mostly professional types and older immigrant grandmas) literally holds their breath waiting to see if some lunatic screaming at the top of their lungs or about to smoke fentanyl ON THE BUS is about to get on. At least as often as not, this is exactly what happens.
A friend tried to claim to me that crime is down. No, the murder rate is down. I am not worried about getting murdered (the drug corner seems surprisingly safe from a violence perspective), but I would really like to not have to move about my city in this heightened state of anxiety. That's the main thing depressing my and my family's quality of life.
I ultimately (and enthusiastically) voted for Harris, and at the local level our elections are "non-partisan" so I guess I voted for Democrats there too, but in every race my vote went to the candidate relatively more focused on law and order, with almost no other considerations.
I agree with pretty much all of those points. I feel like the Dems should have leaned into hanging the chaos of 2020 onto Trump's lack of leadership in ads, like literally hit him from the right.
In the intervening years Trump's inner circle has become evermore of a Traveling Freak Show. And voting for Donald Trump and the crew from the Star Wars bar because you want order doesn't seem like a recipe for achieving one's goal.
> nobody would have believed that. This was a big city problem egged on by left leaning politicians
That is just not true. The increase in crime at least was a national problem and affected urban and rural areas. The three states with the largest increase in murder rate were Montana, Kentucky and South Dakota. Not exactly progressive strongholds...
I try to buy shaving cream at a Walgreen's, see that it's locked behind a panel, press a plastic button so someone can unlock it for me and then no-one comes. That's the one moment I understand why people vote for Trump.
It absolutely does negate your point, you think Democratic officials will be tougher on prosecuting shoplifters than Republicans? Your point on the deficit is 100% correct though, since there it *is* Republicans who are worse on the issue.
My point was a different and was this: voters have misattributed blame to Democrats, believing that law and order started distintegrating under their administration. in fact it was under the previous president.
Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans perceived to be the better party of law and order is a separate issue I’m not making.
A person who votes for Jeb Bush or Haley or Brian Kemp because of that, I get it. A person who votes for Trump because of this is off their rocker and has no proportionate sense of judgment.
I don’t know that these markers of disorder give Trump an easy win absent inflation, but they do offer coverage for the claim that Trump sows disorder and chaos himself. Harris was also uniquely poor at projecting that she “had the situation under control”. Looking back at Hillary Clinton’s day-long Benghazi hearing, I just don’t think Harris ever could have matched such a performance. And, of course, Biden projected incompetence in limited but fatal ways of his own: by mis-judging his own health and viability in the election, and failing to act on immigration. So, with Harris as the candidate and the Biden replacement, these local markers of disorder proved to be a greater liability.
I think this at least explains why metros swung harder for Trump than rural areas.
I also think that the observation Ezra Klein made in his "Hidden Politics of Disorder" of whether the government is perceived to be doing everything they can to fight disorder or whether they're tolerating it is key to this. I'm a yellow-dog Democrat and even I got irritated with people telling me that crime wasn't a real problem because of the statistics when I had 5 theft attempts on my car in a single year and saw blatant shoplifting at my grocery stores. The Democrats spent too long denying that inflation and disorder were problems. They perceived the Republicans as being as mad about inflation and disorder as they are, whereas the Democrats never quite convinced people.
I'll say one thing that I've brought up in other posts and going to repeat here; we're making a lot of assumptions based on what's going to be a 1% Trump victory. Vote is 2% left there's a decent chance Harris wins.
Point being, I actually think you're take as merit (I "liked" it for a reason). But I would really really caution against overinterpreting what is ultimately still a pretty narrow victory for Trump.
But doesn't the fact that Trump won at all make it an even bigger deal. if Republican primary voters were smart at all they would have nominated Nikki Haley, then we would be looking at 10+ point swing.
Yeah, Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 by a much bigger margin than Trump is going to win it now, and she obviously lost and the Dems lost Senate seats in places like PA (deja vu) and seats in the House. And Biden in 2020, at around a 4.5% win, barely had enough coattails to hold on to the House majority. But the Republican coalition spacial advantages means a 1% Republican win is a resounding, trifecta-winning result--a win so big it redefines America, a wave so large it defies any expectation, etc etc.
"But violent crime is down!" is frankly an unsatisfying answer to somebody whose car was just broken into and they're being told by some "progressive" prosecutor that George Soros bankrolled that this isn't a big deal.
It took me a moment to understand what was going on in this comment. How could anyone vote *for* Trump while being *against* disorder? But I see that this is about the sorts of petty disorder like shoplifting and homelessness, not the big disorder of national policy lurching from attempted immigration ban to tariffs to undoing nafta to all the military leadership resigning.
note I think large parts of the public are fine with attempted immigration bans. They even seem to be fine with mass deportations, though that would probably change if they were actually enacted.
Either way they want illegal immigration and the catch and release of asylum stopped. And TOTAL immigration brought WAY down
I would add that the situations in Israel and Ukraine add to a sense of disorder, more broadly defined than what Lehman uses. Obviously homelessness and Russia’s invasion are unrelated but I think they both push in the same direction to make people feel like order is falling apart
It's interesting how many responses to this post say, "I don't believe it, it was inflation."
The article says that demographics explain more of the shift in voting than economics. I'm more confident in a simpler argument that Harris focused on issues and Trump focused on culture, with the battlefield turning out to be all about culture. By culture, I mean general masculine/fight for me/outsider/screw the status quo image that Trump has earned intersecting with the groups he seems to have outperformed with, such as male hispanics.
Disorder fueled voters' desire for change. Inflation fueled voters' desire for change. They both signaled to people that their world was out of control and neither Biden nor Harris showed that they got that.
Trump's big innovation, in partnership with right wing media, is to manufacture a sense of disorder and grievance regardless of whether it's real. Republicans have done this for decades, but nothing like Trump.
Like you, I know so many people who were put on tilt by unpunished shoplifting. None of them experienced any disorder themselves. I'm not saying that the shoplifting didn't happen -- it did. But crime has gone down.
>Places with higher unemployment and a higher cost of living swung more toward Trump
Stimulate harder -> raise particularly salient CoLs -> get hammered on "inflation"
Muddle through with half-assed austerity stimulus -> weak recovery -> get hammered on "unemployment"
Macroeconomically damned if you do, damned if you don't...the best possible situation seems to be inheriting a strong economy someone else already paid the price for fixing.
Just gonna say that in a media landscape with just some really horrifically bad election takes, I'm proud to work at a place that is producing data driven journalism like this. Thank you all for reading and engaging with is piece.
While this is true, things clearly went better for us in Scenario 2 (lower wages + lower prices + higher unemployment) than they did in Scenario 1 (higher wages + higher prices + lower unemployment). The people want lower prices, full stop - overall economic health is less important. That seems unwise. But nevertheless, I think the Democrats' attitude, if they ever face this dilemma again, needs to be that the customer is always right.
Also, I remember that right when inflation was peaking and there were online debates among Democrats about whether interest rates should be raised, there was a pretty furious coordinated backlash from left-wingers accusing rate increase proponents of deviously wanting to throw working people out of work and impoverish them because they cared more about Wall Street investors who are hurt by inflation than they cared about fast food workers who were benefiting from it. To those leftists: thanks a lot, jerks! The damage had already been done by that point, but this election would have been even worse if they'd gotten their way.
But you don't think Jerome Powell and the Fed Board were taking advice from leftist twitter do you? I agree that the overall lesson on the political side is to take inflation much more seriously as a beast that can unexpectedly escape its cage. There may be merit in the idea that the target rate should be closer to 3% than 2%, and there were obviously signs read by the Fed suggesting the initial hikes were "transitory", but I doubt we will see another "maximum employment" strategy again, or a refusal to raise rates for as long as they did in '21-'22.
I think the biggest damage here was having the argument out there at all, because it made it seem like Democrats didn't take inflation seriously as a problem.
I think the Fed was (1) genuinely convinced it was a transitory post-COVID burst of inflation in early 2021, and (2) genuinely concerned about not providing enough stimulus to power out of a recession quickly, as we had failed to do last time. That made it too easy politically to go along with "team transitory" and to not take aggressive policy actions that might have led to a lower peak rate and a faster decline. Just have been seen to be taking it more seriously would have made Biden seem more vigilant in protecting the interests of the Great America Middle Class, which was his whole pitch in 2020.
This is exactly the problem. If the message had been "We believe this is temporary, but if inflation doesn't come down by x date, we will take y measure", then people wouldn't feel like they were complacent about it. The White House was just very passive about taking anti-inflation measures and was content to leave everything to the Fed, and unfortunately, people interpreted that as not caring about grocery costs.
On the Republican side, the equivalent to them is at the top of the ticket. Tbd if he is focused and motivated enough to follow through on his atrocious economic policies.
To be clear, increases in the unemployment rate are still bad, especially if it goes through the roof. My point is simply comparative: It's better to have unemployment go up 1 pp than inflation go up 1 pp, etc.
I think it makes more sense to compare 2024 to 2012, not 2016. 2016 was a try for a third term, which is more difficult than a try for a second term. Also, it was Hillary Clinton, who I'm not going to hate on here, but she is a very unique political figure who inspires all kinds of weird passions on both sides, it's confounding for any comparative analysis.
It’s been mentioned before but Reagan’s reputation for deregulation actually rests on stuff Carter did. Reagan reaped the long term benefits. And it was GHWB who helped cut the deficit. And by 2016 the economic recovery was almost complete (and turns out was not quite done).
If Trump actually oversees permitting reform and doesn’t idiotically try to repeal stuff like the CHIPS Act he actually may get a real tailwind from Biden’s policies. Again put in the weird position of hoping he actually listens to Musk.
Look there is a definitely a "tallest dwarf" aspect to this take for sure. In an ideal world, Musk isn't anywhere near the White House.
In regards to Medicaid cuts, I'm counting on the fact that the GOP majority is likely to be extremely small. Only a few defections would tank any bill. I have to believe there are at lest a handful of GOP House members from swing districts would recognize that Medicaid cuts would be extremely damaging to re-election prospects in 2026.
Hopefully. My concern with that (and with ACA) is that unless the Republicans find a way to Orbanize future elections, their frontline House members have to know that because of thermostatic effects they're doomed in 2026 no matter what they do, and nothing left to lose means nothing to fear. If I were the GOP, I'd approach these members and say "Look, you're probably going to lose no matter what. But if you stand tall we'll take care of you afterwards with a cushy right-wing think tank job."
One thing that has been clear to me the last 10 years is that politicians value keeping their House and senate seat way more than we realize; whether its the sense of power, importance, the cushy perks, the chance to go TV etc.
I think in 2016 there was expectation of more GOP defections for this very reason. Stand up to Trump and you're "punishment" is cushy cable news gig or sitting on the boards of multiple companies and playing golf all day. And you get to bask in the feedback of people telling you that you took this brave stance. And yet with a few exceptions it hasn't happened.
Point being, I doubt this line of argument would sway swing district House members. They want to keep their seat full stop.
This may be, but depending on how much Trump pushes people, if he starts saying that if you don't support X, then he'll support a primary opponent, then lot of people are going to fall in line because they have more to fear in the primary than the general election.
"I have to believe there are at lest a handful of GOP House members from swing districts would recognize that Medicaid cuts would be extremely damaging to re-election prospects in 2026."
I'd like to think that, but, man, I wouldn't count on it. Keep your fingers crossed for a narrow Democratic House majority.
I suspect any permitting reform the Republican Congress passes and Trump signs will explicitly exclude that aimed at integrating renewables into the grid.
I also suspect that high on his agenda will be reversing any and all Biden policies just because.
This is where we have to remember that every presidential candidate has a laundry list of policies they want to implement and every administration only passes a small portion of it usually in a pretty modified form. Even if we got rid of the filibuster tomorrow, it still takes quite a while to put together complicated bills. Only so many bills are getting passed in a given year.
One thing that has been noted is the GOP can actually put pressure on Trump when they want (judges a big one). Part of why their actions last 10 years is cowardly; they had the power to stop this. Chips Act actually passed with bipartisan support. It seems likely there would be at least a handful of GOP senators who would be resistant to repealing a bill they helped pass.
But bigger one is priorities. Trump clearly doesn't actually care all that much about legislative priorities. And as Matt points out over and over again, the top three priorities for GOP is tax cuts, tax cuts and tax cuts.
I just have a hard time believing that repealing Biden policies is going to take priority over other issues (not sure it will pass but there are tons of true believer pro lifers who are going to press their luck to get a full abortion ban passed for example).
Most likely scenario is the tax cut bill contains particular provisions that repeal some of the clean energy subsidies; not great but also probably not disastrous to transition to green tech.
I think we have no concept for how completely supine this Republican Congress will be. Above all, politicians respect winners. And to have Trump come back from the dead and lead them to the smashing victory they just achieved, well, it's hard to imagine anyone outside of Lisa Murkowski saying no to him on anything.
After that whole winter power fiasco they have been moving to connect more with neighbors. As their grid greens the incentive to skirt EPA regulations disappears. The Texas GOP is surprising pragmatic and responds to businesses that want to export energy (they already did this with wind.)
Solar panels might be turning the cows gay but that doesn’t stop Texans from installing them if it makes them money.
The sad reality is that inflation hurts 100% of people a small, but visible amount. Unemployment hurts the people who are unemployed (say 5%) a huge amount, but everybody else (95%) feels very little pain. Politically, it pretty much never makes sense to allow inflation and the Phillips curve pretty much tells us that the tradeoff means higher unemployment when exogenous economic events occur.
We need to reject that trade off, it's objectively worse! There needs to be a better way to talk about and manage inflation but I don't know what that is.
I don't think that's the case. Best I can tell the more narrow cycles between lower and higher unemployment rates just create longer churn between jobs and the labor force participation rates follow longer, more macro trends.
That is Fed mistakes control everything. "Stimulus," fiscal policy generally, does not affect macroeconomic outcomes. although voter and many commenters on this Substack think it does. It affects the composition of demand between saving and investment and between sectors but not the total which the Fed controls as it operates a Flexible Average Inflation Target.
The echo of this I hear in the write up <<Yes, do bring this guy back AOAP>> is that the Biden Administration suffered first from the excess over-inflation in 2021-23 (specifically the failure to start raising the EFFR back in Sept 2021) and then again by the failure to start reducing the EFFR in December 2023 and the (still low and only up from record lows) increase in unemployment.
I don't know if a concerted effort by the Administration to distance itself from the macroeconomic results was possible. It seems that it would have been worth a try at least not to have seem to get drawn into the debate over whether inflation in 2021 was "temporary" beyond expressing confidence that _the Fed_ would make sure that inflation was temporary, no more than it thought necessary for the recovery. Also in retrospect I wonder if it was wise the to label the CO2 emissions reduction bill the "Inflation Reduction" Act. That sort of reinforces false public perception that the Administration can affect inflation.
Build an image as an outsider who "fights for you," and the policies are less important. Become seen as an inside and squish, there is no policy that will win.
Biden is the only "insider" coded presidential candidate to win since Bush Sr. in 1988. And he probably doesn't win without the combination of Covid and Trump fatigue.
That’s not my intent. I really dislike judging voters — the What’s the Matter with Kansas premise. In a democracy people can choose their candidate and the dimensions they use to choose between candidates. It’s condescending when people declare that everybody should vote on “the issues.”
I disagree with many peoples’ choice, but respect their right to choose however they wish.
Options are also hindered by how much the possible win-win scenarios are disbelieved or disallowed. Things like "Increase supply of X through targeted deregulation and automation and trade."
I think a possible difference now is that people in the past tended to vote along the lines suggested by the (relatively) intelligent writers of the newspapers they read whereas now more people vote along the lines of whatever shit they read on the internet. This could be a mechanism that makes voters effectively dumber.
I’m not a historian of political speeches but can anyone confirm that they have indeed gotten less sophisticated much like the grade level of the writing in newspapers?
I guess I can't answer anything about your specifics, but people were really dumb back then, too, and much more often illiterate and or drunk on top of that.
And going back to the 18th and 19th century, the press, as I understand it, operated a little more like the press of today than the press of 1990. Many highly partisan papers existed and used their reach to whip up riots. Robert E Lee's own father was the victim of one such Baltimore mob that was angry over an insufficiently patriotic response to the War of 1812. They poured molten wax into his eyeballs.
It was crazy in so many ways. One of the reasons Lincoln got almost no votes in the south is that county officials had to agree to put you on the ballot (or something like that). Of course we also know women and black people couldn't vote, and some states still had property owner limitations earlier on.
There was also a lot more actual, meaningful fraud where corrupt officials were just adding zeros, and stuff like that.
There was a close election in BC the other day where a couple of ridings went to automatic judicial recount because the vote differential was under 100. Good to see some progress over the decades!
I do think a male candidate would perform better. That is not why Democrats got a shellacking. Calling voters dumb stupid racist sexists shows how out of touch Democratic infospheres have become.
Yes, in this case. For we have no idea how they define "the economy" or what policies they think should be implemented to support their version of "the economy". Higher taxes, lower taxes? More regulation, less regulation? Either answer could be how they define their "interests".
Polling exists, but (as we have just seen), it isn't very good at sampling people who don't trust pollsters. And repeating the message that voters are too dumb or naive or misguided or whatever to vote for their interests is a bad tactic.
It exists in the sense that you have decided what other voters' interests are for them, which is probably why they don't vote for your preferred candidates.
We can see it. One example: people complain about the economy they’re currently in. They see the fix as Trump despite the evidence being that his tariffs, as proposed, would royally fuck those voters rather than continuing the Harris status quo.
Do you think that is true generally, or there was something special about this election?
> According to a meta-study by Susanne Schwarz of Swarthmore College and Alexander Coppock of Yale, voters (particularly if they are Democrats) marginally favour hypothetical female candidates.
Are there really a lot of "democracy is bad" takes coming from the left atm? What do they propose it be replaced with?
I apologize ahead of time for bringing this topic up, because it's led to some vitriolic debate at SB, but I do think it would be good if the left pulled back on "expand voting, always" mentality that's prevailed over the last half century. I don't think we should go back to poll taxes, but always encouraging everyone to vote whether or not they are mentally sound, have a felony record, or even have an opinion seems like it doesn't actually help democracy. Ditto with ballot initiatives.
That said, this might be a great time to begin pushing to abolish the ticking-time bomb known as the electoral college and replace it with the popular vote, or at least eliminate the possibility of faithless electors or legislatures overruling their own states' resuls.
Democracy is Bad isn't the headline but if you say the problem is voters are bad and elections allow stupid people to elect evil people you are implying Democracy is bad. It's a distraction from any sort of critical self analysis. So much of what I am seeing is just distraction and victimhood mentality. I mean, we can smell our own and liberals are real pro's at neurotic gender and race based analysis in place of actual work on stuff.
For the most part I agree, but as far as actual work, what is there to be done? Saying stuff like "voting against their own interests" sounds gross and snobby, but the people most dependant on Medicaid and social security just voted for the candidate and billionaire backer who've explicitly put it at risk. Maybe it was always true, but it's especially true now that the majority of voters really can't be reached through policy and issues alone.
The Democratic brand is just toxic now to middle-America and below. It's a problem of marketing, which I don't think the Dem party apparatus is currently constituted to handle well.
The problem is that Trump has "said" he is going to protect entitlements and, in fact, make them even better though smart business style management!
We interpret this as typical anti government schlock looking undermine the welfare state and I don't think we are wrong.
But it isn't true to say that Trump ran on bulldozing social security or entitlements.
I've said elsewhere, the perception among a lot of people is that Republicans are basically now more like old school Democrats and Democrats are college campus activists who tell you to call your abuela "Latinx".
But people extremely close to Trump openly said that they intend to go after entitlements.
Drive me absolutely crazy. Trump gets a pass even though powerful, influential people next to him say these things, whereas Harris gets tarred with something some Oakland CA council person or the head of What The Hell Is That think tank says.
That may be what Fox-influenced voters think but let's not perpetrate this absurdity here.
To be fair, Harris did say some absolutely crazy things back in 2019. That made it hard for her to separate what current crazies are saying from her campaign.
It isn't fair that Trump can just lie and people will take the bait but that's a common political ploy, he just does it in a far more offensive and mean spirited way.
I don't think I'm perpetrating absurdity, I clearly said that I think he is trying to undermine the welfare state.
Yeah, the problem with good marketing means basically being good at lying. He didn't openly run on bulldozing entitlements, but it doesn't matter what he openly supports, his voters will see whatever they want to see. But that $2 trillion in cuts can only come from one place.
And I think it's good that the Democrats at least on the surface try not to sink that low. Like you said, their problem is more the lies they tell themselves.
The question is which direction will the Dems go, Yglesian centrism or embracing their leftist populist elements? Some of whom hold politically toxic beliefs. Because this election shows that voters don't really trust Dems when they tack to the center either. It's a cultural gap that seems impossible to bridge, at least in the short term.
Yeah all these problems seem insurmountable in the short term. Just like Republicans felt in 2012 or in 2020. The thing is, they are not and the voters can be forgiving and coarse correct.
The essential question democrats have to answer is “who do we work for as a political movement”. If the answer is “we work for Vassar post grads” then we are fucked.
the thing is new suburban/educated democrats who casually follow politics largely believe the Orange Man is Bad, are you (or Democratic operatives, or whatever) going to tell them that's wrong or Democrats should trim their sails on it? Because it sure seems like the Orange Man is Bad to me. He seems pretty bad. Do you believe Trump is good? How can the party be marketed to people who think Trump is good?
A lot of people in "middle-America" think Trump is good, but I really don't see how you are going to get mainstream Democrats to trim their sails on something obviously correct to reach voters who are obviously wrong.
I think in the end this problem will go away because Democrats will win the midterms and then Trump won't win again. But I also get frustrated with people acting like Democrats are "out of touch" when they generally just hold sincere and correct beliefs about the future of the country.
I agree, he is bad. But a message of just orange man bad clearly doesn't work. Especially when he can just point the finger right back, and say we are bad in a way that marks us as clearly culturally the other to what resonates with middle and working class America. Framing this as good vs. evil just doesn't work when they have more affinity for Trump's vibes.
I agree that things will swing back, the problem doesn't fully go away when Trump does. The data shows these cultural divides are just getting wider. To your last sentence, I do believe that Democrats are directionally correct about the best way forward, but, to Matt Y's earlier made point, there are plenty of incorrect ideas and elite misinformation on our side too. Saying we're out of touch is more a call to acknowledge that we don't have the right to be as sanctimonious as some have been. Because normal voters hate it.
Sure. but i guess i have trouble calling people "out of touch" for correct ideas. Especially when they mostly aren't meaning to engage with politics as political operatives.
I don't think we'd make the same statement on immigration or free trade--if you are pro immigration or pro free trade those are correct beliefs but are essentially known to be politically unhelpful. So what we say in those cases isn't that economists are out of touch, its just that this is unhelpful for democrats to run on so we choose to talk about other stuff.
If Democrats were truly going to be ruthless about winning, they should be doing at least a little bit of voter suppression. Cutting down on early voting, being open to voter ID laws, etc. It's super clear high turnout doesn't benefit Dems now and probably won't for some time. I'm not saying they should do that... but maybe they should.
I'm not saying they should do it either. But in terms of spending limited political capital, there's better things to prioritize. Trade voter ID laws for something meaningful.
I've said here before that the experience of working as an election official really has changed my mind on the voter ID topic. In practice, I just don't get the impression that it is dissuading a lot of people (hell, we had over 90% participation of registered voters on Tuesday). If it has any meaningful effect in increasing trust in the process, it's probably a good trade IMHO.
It's relatively minor but has been a major place I disagree with the democratic party for a long time. Every normal person when asked if you should have an ID to vote just shrugs and says it makes sense. I understand there's a unique history here but it's not 1950 anymore.
The thing is that Republicans have moved on from voter ID to putting cameras in elections offices while ballots are being counted, that's their new version of trying to prevent Dems from "cheating."
I have no idea if this is the right strategy for the Democrats. But what I do admire about the Republicans is their ruthlessness about winning. I'd like for the Democrats to share some of that ruthlessness (within the law of course!) and not care so much about playing nicely.
In other words, for the Democrats to behave like the Republicans actually picture them doing.
I think there's nothing wrong with expanding the franchise, but there's a couple basic election reforms I'd like to see for people to have a fighting chance at being informed voters. Overall, I want to see simpler elections.
1: One election per year. The US just has too many special elections and other off-cycle elections. We should have our elections on the November day so that people don't just miss elections from having to keep track of March or June stuff. If that means primaries a year in advance of regular elections, that seems fine to me.
2. Fewer elected positions. I voted for Parks director, Water Board, and multiple transit agency boards in this election. It seems crazy that those are all elected positions when even relatively informed people like me develop an opinion on them by reading their profiles on vote411 over a couple minutes. It feels like these positions would be much better if they were appointed via an interviewing process rather than elected.
3. Reforms on initiatives and referenda. I'm in California and I had 10 ballot initiatives to vote on in this election, which is pretty normal for my ballots over the years. It's too many, and some of the ballot measures are really confusing. I don't know exactly what the reforms should be for this process, but I wish that at the very least, the ones that make it to the ballot were clear and easy to understand.
it's not that Democracy is bad, it's just that in a two party system party elites need to take some responsibility to avert the worst outcomes (and if these means taking a dive in a general election, those are the responsibilities of being an elite). Behavior of Republican elites through this whole thing has been absolutely despicable.
I think structural forces are being underrated. Once the internet existed the bipartisan consensus of the 20th century was going to break. Republicans just capitulated very fast in a frankly galling manner. Trump probably could've been averted in a number of ways, but something like him was going to happen.
No matter how mentally unsound you think a group is, I don’t think they’re going to be *anti*-correlated with getting at meaningful moral and social facts. (Sure, in any one election nearly half of people vote the wrong way, but I’m talking about correlations generally.) And it’s only if someone is anti-correlated that their vote makes things worse.
I personally think that ex-felons and people who don't have any ID are probably anti-correlated.
In general, less information, less mental soundness, less IQ, less wisdom or experience and more anti-social life choices ought to correlate less with moral or wise choices.
I feel like the above is fairly uncontroversial, if you were looking for life advice on a decision, you'd prefer to go to an informed, mentally sound, smart, wise person who has lived a good life.
Of course it's much more trouble than it's worth to try to limit voting rights on any of the above, but when we're debating marginal decisions, I think it's good to keep in mind.
I agree that those groups are going to be *less* correlated with good ideas. But I think they will still be *positively* correlated. Being actually *anti*-correlated is hard.
If I was only allowed to ask one person, I would obviously ask the one who I trust most. But if I have a chance to ask many people, with importantly different perspectives, then it’s very valuable to include even the ones that are noisy, particularly because there will be a few issues that they have importantly different perspectives on, and the ones they are noisy about they’ll just cancel each other out.
Multiple things can be true. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say sexism and racism were factors and that women and racial minorities are going to get hit harder by Trump administrative policies, and that that makes some women and people of color feel unprotected and abandoned by the electorate.
I don't dispute that there were voters, probably millions of voters, who were dissuaded by Kamala Harris's sex and race.
However, I think it's worth pointing out that in an alternate universe, the GOP ran their middle-aged non-white woman former administration official candidate against our super old white guy former president. In that universe, Nikki Haley beat Joe Biden by ten points.
Those are legitimate feelings and I don't want to under rate them. I'm just much more focused on the solutions part and how to win back the electorate. The anger, fear and sorrow are understandable but, at least for me, generally useless for clarity in motivation.
I think it’s just really fresh because we’re two days after the election. Jumping straight into problem-solving mode is admirable, but I don’t think it needs to come at the expense of calling people stupid for having those feelings or at the expense of recognizing that sexism and racism were factors.
That's a fair point but how you react in loss is often well remembered by your opponents. We should just be mindful of that fact and not rush to call all Trump voters racists and sexist. We are going to need some of these people to win future elections.
I just don’t think you’ll make friends or get traction telling women they shouldn’t say the truth (sexism was a factor) because it’s politically inconvenient. Identity politics seems to be the only factor in this loss where centrists are saying “it’s true but you shouldn’t SAY it” and that makes the sexism and racism seem even more pronounced.
I think you can say it without saying those are broadly supported ideas within the Trump coalition. I think that’s a minority of weirdos and lord knows we on the left have our own weirdos too.
Meanwhile, Trump just announced Susie Wiles will be his Chief of Staff -- the first woman to serve in that role. I assume you will be happy with this? Or is your solidarity with "women and people of color" dependent on them agreeing with our politics?
It is time we abandon the demographic dissection of the citizenry and talk about people as people rather than as mere representatives of their sex/race/nationality. It is turning people off and losing support for our policies.
I don’t think being glad that individual women are having some opportunities in Trump’s admin negates that this was a loss for women generally, facilitated by a disregard for women’s rights broadly.
That wasn't my question. Are you happy with Susie Wiles being named as Chief of Staff? Or do you look at it as I do -- a MAGA person was named as Chief of Staff and the fact that she is a woman is irrelevant.
Her chromosomes don't matter to me. Her policies are what matter to me. But when we frame the Harris loss in terms of "sexism and racism", it doesn't interrogate why we lost. It is copium. Margaret Thatcher is revered on the conservative side. So is Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Amy Coney Barrett, etc. To varying degrees, I think those people are wrong on important topics. But their wrongness isn't related to their sex or skin color.
This is a really simplistic and binary conception of sexism. It’s not just “women can’t get ahead.” It’s “women are judged differently than men and their needs and rights are deprioritized,” as I explained above.
Sexism and racism are two of many factors in an multicausal loss, but they are factors. That isn’t copium. Copium is pretending sexism and racism weren’t factors because idpol is lame.
I feel like I’m the only person who thinks this fairly “uniform swing” is good news for Dems. It means there are lots of persuadable voters who will come back in 2026 when they get fed up with Trump!
While it certainly would provide a nice narrative to say “the problem was that [group X] drifted away from the Dems” - the uniform swing (especially when combined with relatively strong Dem downballot performance) suggests this was just one of those “fire the head coach” nights. As Matt has pointed out many times, incumbents worldwide are losing - everyone is mad about the rate of inflation and general handling of post-COVID society. Harris was a mediocre candidate, tied to an unpopular president, in an anti-incumbent environment. Sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand.
Right. The bigger problem for Dems is continued racial depolarization. There aren't enough educated voters to make up for continued attrition of minorities. But that's a good thing is every other possible way, and politically, might open up the GOP to immigration sooner than we think.
According to exit polls (so take with a grain of salt) age depolarization is also a problem. CNN says the youngest voters shifted right while Dems won the over 65 vote. But 20% of those voters will not be around in 4 years.
Racial depolarization poses one challenge for Democrats. Another is if, as seems to be happening, Trump makes it acceptable once again to be a Republican in good standing and also be pro-choice on abortion.
For a long time, Democrats have been able to essentially hold hostage voters who can’t stomach the Republican position on abortion and gay rights, but otherwise would prefer Republican policies on economics. By breaking the 40-year logjam on abortion and returning that issue to state elected officials, and forcing Republicans in many states to pay a price for being too far from popular opinion on abortion, in retrospect it may turn out that Trump did the Republican Party a big favor.
I don't think that the GOP is going to be able to fully extricate itself from abortion as an issue. It will continue to be a problem for the party at the federal level.
Trump has unique protection on that point because voters understand that he's a philandering New York billionaire who obviously does not give a shit about "pro-life" and never has. But when genuinely tradcath JD Vance steps up to the plate, does he get the same leeway from voters? I'm not so sure.
A big part of Trump's success has been that he can pander to religious voters without alienating non-religious ones because religious voters like the pandering & non-religious ones (correctly) perceive it as insincere pandering.
This sounds like a good problem to have in the grand scheme of things. If the GOP adopts every broadly popular Democrat position many Dems may well vote for the GOP, but in exchange you get the Democrat policies.
This is also why, politically, it's been a huge mistake for Democrats to let voters have Democratic priorities piecemeal via ballot initiatives. Why vote for Democrats when you can vote Republican to stick it to the libs and also protect abortion access by voting for a ballot initiative?
Honestly a good thing. Spoils and patronage systems are bad, and it would be better for everybody if Democrats genuinely prioritized everybody instead of salami slicing demographic and interest groups.
Sure, but my point is that it turns out there wasn’t actually much difference in the swing among racial groups (though it seems like Hispanics may have moved toward the GOP a bit more than others). Everyone moved against the Dems - white, black, Asian.
You could read that as racial depolarization, but more realistically it’s just an unhappy electorate. Personally I think the latter is a much better outcome than if we had seen (eg) black voters move away from Dems while white support remained the same.
I take your point, but pre-election polling, exit polls and voter registration data has all been point towards racial depolarization. White voters may have actually remained the same, or at least did much less than other groups.
Here's CNN's exit polls for example, which show black voters moving away from Dems while white support remained the same:
Fair, and to be honest I thought there was going to be more depolarization than there was. But looking at Jed’s table it does seem that most types of communities moved toward the GOP at roughly the same rate.
We won't know for sure until we get more granular verified voter data. For now all we can do is guess based on what social scientists call "ecological" signs. For example, if an all white county moved right, we can be pretty confident it was white voters going right, whereas, it wouldn't necessarily tell us if men moved more than women or vice versa.
But when I mentally combine the "ecological" county and state shifts with pre-election polling, exit polling and voter registration data, it seems likely that the real story is immigrants and / or 2nd generation folks moving right. Probably more so than by what we might guess "ecologically" just by looking at how much the Bronx or LA moved.
My logic is I see from polls that white support overall remained about flat, yet many all-white rural counties shifted right a little bit. So some very significant share of whites must have moved left. But they don't show up on the map because their POC neighbors, especially in immigrant communities, moved much farther right.
Wait for the granular exit data to see if that's correct, but that's my guess.
That is good news. The bad news is that a lot of damage will be done, some of it irreversible, before the Dems get that chance. Twenty years after the GWB trifecta, we're still living with the consequences of their worst policies, and this trifecta could well be worse. Also, I would expect the Republicans to use this opportunity at least try to Orbanize future elections (guys like Vance and Musk in particular will be focused on this project), though I'm not sure how successful they'll be.
yeah this is what I was telling my kid this morning. My wife is a more casual politics follower than I am and relatively catastrophic about the whole thing. I was like we have had really, really bad presidents in the past. We will likely get past it. But when we have especially bad presidents they have permanent effects. At least for me it's really about the terrible policies they are trying to implement that might be impacting us for decades than about the psychic scars of "who we are as a country." Because the median voter doesn't really know anything about politics and is pretty fucking capricious with their vote choice.
Yes of course, it’s always better to win an election than lose one. And I have many of the same fears.
But in terms of winning the next election, I think the Dems would be worse off if the loss was solely attributable to (e.g.) white suburban college educated voters defecting back to the GOP. That would suggest they’ve got a more intractable problem. The fact that it was nearly everyone, everywhere (other than exurban Atlanta?) says it was more of a general malaise, and the thermostat can turn quickly on who gets blamed for that.
Right, but that's precisely why a guy like Vance would take a particular interest in this. Maduro has zero charisma but he's been able to stay in office long after Chavez's demise.
If I were aspiring Orbanist, I would try to do this by getting the media (both the big internet platforms and the networks) to play ball, partly through cajoling their executives and partly through legal and regulatory threats.
Based on recent numbers, our media is so despised and distrusted that it’s falling apart and being replaced with no assistance from government officials. It seems to be getting replaced by something much more atomized.
Having seen the actual election results now, how much of our media was telling us anything helpful or realistic? Were they focused on important issues that affect large numbers of Americans, or Liz Cheney firing squads and Haitian house pets?
Republicans still have enough animus for them that they may do something overt, but the smart thing to do would be to stand aside and watch them keep digging the hole they find themselves in.
Over a 8-12 year time period, this is definitely better for dems
1) A Harris victory would likely have led to getting killed in the 2026 midterms followed by a republican president in 2028. Now, dems will probably be favored in both (at least in the House in 2026)
2) The strength of Trump's victory will (hopefully) require a reckoning among democrats. A victory would have rewarded some of their worst instincts
3) It's clear that having open primaries without a candidate preemptively clearing the field is essential for either candidate to find the best candidate. A Trump win means that the democrats will have a true competition in 2028 but the republicans may not (depending on how Vance performs and is perceived in the future). A Harris win would have led to no real primary in 2028 and possibly 2032 (if she somehow eked out a 2028 win)
Making people fight it out in primaries refines candidates and helps the cream rise. That’s how we got our most popular candidates, in 1992 and 2008.
They cleared the field in 2008 and Hillary nearly lost to what started out as a protest candidacy. Harris fell flat on her face in a primary, then ended up being the nominee anyway and the results are what they are.
I think Democrats in general need to get over this notion that any disagreement of discouraging word will sink the whole enterprise. When it comes to primaries, if you want to find out who the best players are, you have to roll the ball out on the court and let them play some games.
A 3% change is small as a percentage of the total electorate, but it’s large as a percentage of swing voters. Because of this, I don’t see the left’s current path leading to a win in the near future.
Democrat victories since 2016 have largely been reactions against Trump, not positive affirmations of their vision or policies. This election was different and democrats should be honest with themselves about that.
Under the circumstances I think it does. There's a difference between losing by that margin to Bush in 2004 (who was still popular at that point) and Trump in 2024 (a two-time popular vote loser who was deeply unpopular.)
Funny you mention that...I think this was a trap election. Basically, whoever won it has a huge and unmanageable budget deficit. They have to manage this on the tail end of huge economic upswing with uber low employment, going into a demographic situation that will likely create a high interest environment (increasing the cost of borrowing) and will also have to figure out how to fund all the entitlements (think medical insurance, SS, Medicare, Medicaid) and somehow find money for defense.
Basically, this was a no-win situation for whichever party won.
If the Democratic Party can move back to center (I am not saying far right...just maybe like Obama in 2012 or so), they can be positioned to absolutely clean up.
My fear is that I have zero faith in the party to do that. They seem to be unable to resist their leftward nut jobs and the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders/Lina Khan crowd (not I am not saying that Warren is nut...I disagree with many/most of her policies but she is presents at least legitimate views).
So what I think we will end up with is a crazy Dem party that vacillates between defund the police/anarcho-protesting/Warrenesque economics and a populist/authoritarian Republican party. The only thing the two will find common agreement on is bad/populist economic ideas.
The biggest problem I have seen through work (White House directives and memos) is how much Democratic leadership and priorities is dominated by activist mind worms. Democrats don’t even have an ear for people without college (Harvard) degrees any more. The party needs to stop listening to the self anointed intelligentsia.
“ One Harris aide called for more diversity among decision-makers, pointing to a far too-white leadership makeup of Harris’ campaign and Biden’s former campaign. The campaign did have campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and former Rep. Cedric Richmond as a senior adviser, among others.
“There was a huge gap in leadership of color, up and down the system that I think played to some of these blind spots,” the person said. “I just want to see more honesty and a little less whiteness ... I think that if we are able to kind of look within ourselves and see the talent that is already there, then there can be a new generation of leadership. But it’s going to be tough. This feels like a decade loss. This is really bad, and we have to decide where we’re going to go from here. We have to restructure the whole thing.”
Yes, my precious darling insufficient DEI in the Harris campaign was surely the problem.
There's actually a grain of truth there since (as Matt has written) white Democrats are further left than blacks or Latinos. So having more of the latter might help you develop more moderate, normie-friendly messaging.
You can get a staff with all of the races, skin shades, and sexualities on God's green Earth together and it won't matter one wit because they all went the same Ivies and/or SLACs.
That is a very fair point and I certainly exaggerated. I do think that the observation stands, that no matter how racially diverse a group of college grads may be they are still most likely to share the perspective of college grads, and not be particularly in tune with the attitudes and interests of non grads with the same racial background.
This morning in my inbox, the student newspaper blames Democrats poor showing on their "treating people from marginalized communities as props instead of people." The list includes the usual alphabet soup and now also Palestinians.
I get it, I was young an idealistic once. But if your takeaway from this election was that Democrats lost because they used Palestinians as a prop, you are living in a reality that is distinct from my own.
There's a failing on the left in not realizing how much more things like education, income, neighborhood, religion matter in comparison to race. Like BZC said, if assuming someone has a diverse opinion because of their census category is sort of kind of racist in itself, and it's terrible to watch the left fall into that trap again and again.
Given that educational polarization increasingly seems to be THE fundamental root of Democratic underperformance, I think the single most effective strategy the Party could undertake would be to increase the ranks of non-college-grads at any every level - candidates, staff, and Party leadership. Maybe someone's already suggested this, but if so I haven't encountered it.
Sounds like a good idea. Alternatively, I keep in mind that GOP leadership is also largely very college educated. They are mostly ivy-league lawyers, too, but somehow they’ve figured it out. I don’t know how to copy them so I like your plan better, but it’s worth noodling on the trick the GOP has pulled off.
Of course, but it's broadly acceptable enough. For example, I work with this lawyer who always talks about diversity in this way: "If your team all looks like me, you have a diversity problem."
And that always offends me because of how essentialist and reductionist it is. Does my multi-racial child count? Does she look sufficiently different to be on the team? Or too white to count as diversity? Do the adopted Black kids in my neighborhood count as diverse, although they're growing up in white families in one of the best school districts in my state? It gets icky and people feel like it's perfectly acceptable to say in left wing circles.
David Plouffe? Stephanie Cutter? Jennifer Dillon? All those people who supported the campaign's outreach to Liz and Dick Cheney, and featured Republicans all over the place?
Who were these leftist campaign people who sunk the Harris effort?
I'd say that some anonymous (fourth-tier?) campaign aide complaining that the campaign wasn't diverse enough shows how far from a DEI campaign the Democrats ran.
Again, maybe they couldn't overcome an inbred view of Democrats among the electorate on this marker in one election and it will take longer to change people's minds, but we have to admit that the campaign really really tried to do so.
Yeah, but she tried to spend three months being a completely different person than she was in 2020, by bringing on board one of the least popular names in American politics. How much did anyone believe any of it? Do even Democrats feel like they know who she was going to be? She was going to be not-Trump, but beyond that?
I think her shifting from her 2019 positions may indeed have hurt her, perhaps less because she was hiding her true self and more that voters didn't know what version of her to believe. (My opinion: the 2024 version is truer to her positions than the ones she was probably forced to take in 2019).
The 2019/2020 Democratic primary campaign really set the party back. I hope we never make that kind of mistake again.
The problem is that we have video evidence of the stances she took in 2019 and no evidence of her describing which stances she has changed her mind on and why. All we have are "sources close to the campaign" or reading the tea leaves to determine what she believes today that she didn't believe 5 years ago.
The only way to expunge the 2019 primary from our history is to confront those stances and explicitly repudiate them. Otherwise, they will remain stuck to the Party for a long time.
Yes. She should have strongly repudiated them. A terrible own goal.
You do it by starting off in a Reagan-like self-deprecating way: “Yes, those were some really bad takes on my part. And you can see how well I did in the primary with them. I almost made it to Jan. 1 and rolled up zero votes!”
And then, pivot: “In the past four years, I’ve learned a lot from our current President and from touring the country and talking to Americans in all ways of life, and after learning so much, I’ve changed some of my earlier positions. What do you do?”
It seemed like a reasonable strategy to me, to try to turn some of the remaining Reagan Republicans. It just turns out that there aren't any. The Republican party is MAGA through and through.
I was just speaking generically, not necessarily commenting on the specifics of the Harris campaign (even if that was what the original quote was about).
Another way to look at the Harris choice, though, is that she is just a classic ticket-balance/faction-placation choice. Black voters (still - the statistical movement there will turn out to have been tiny, unlike Hispanic voters) and women are the Democratic base. Presidential candidates of both parties have been using the vice-presidency to placate the presidential candidate's perceived weaknesses with one end or other of the base from time out of memory. E.g. Andrew Johnson for Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt for McKinley, John Nance Garner for FDR, Nixon for Ike, LBJ for JFK, Mondale for Carter, Bush for Reagan, Bentsen for Dukakis, Quayle for Bush. May be a good idea, may be a bad one, may end up with a vice president not anyone's ideal choice to assume the presidency - but who else was Biden supposed to pick in order to reassure his core constituencies?
And not from California. I love my state, but there is a reason the only presidents we've made were Republicans. Our Democrats are accurately perceived as further left than the country so it's always going to be a massively uphill battle for them on the national stage.
A very liberal friend has pulled his support of the groups. His theory is the relentless left wing advocacy has become counterproductive and serves to alienate voters and move them to the right. And obviously if you’re funding them to move the country left and they are moving it right - it’s time to pull the plug.
“The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly seems to be between professionals associated with ‘knowledge economy’ industries and those who feel themselves to be the ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy – including growing numbers of working class and non-white voters.”
I think this analysis is persuasive and deserves some amplification.
I started reading his book last week (which that post is an excerpt of), after he barnstormed my podcast feeds, and it crystallizes the criticisms I've heard from across the ideological spectrum by describing "symbolic capitalists" as a like-minded cohort. What's great about that framing is that it is cuts across the familiar groupings of race, class, income, political ideology, etc.
What's great about it "symbolic capitalists vs. physical capitalists" is that it groups people by how they participate in the economy and then points to a pattern in how they respond to major shifts in society throughout history. It's not just an analysis of the modern knowledge economy and it is more specific than economic winners and losers. He argues that even wealthy physical capitalists feel like 'losers' in a world increasingly dominated by symbolic capitalists, who are themselves captive to an elite group of super-progressive activists.
And yet Nicholas Kristof in the NYT is preaching the importance of donating to these groups. I don’t think the groups are going anywhere. These groups thrived during Trump 1 and I’m sure they will do the same in Trump 2.
The problem isn’t their funding, the problem is a lack of Dem elected officials and staffers with the cajones to tell them to go kick rocks when they show up at their office claiming to represent millions of voters
Or just less explicitly partisan organizations. Getting involved with a YIMBY group that isn't explicitly left just improves the country and bankshots into better politics from both right and left.
I'm probably not the right person to ask. I think it means various progressive non-profits, especially ones that seem to have outsize influence relative to their actual popular support among the people they claim to represent.
From what I understand, they often operate similarly to lobbyists. A senator or congressman wants to know what Black people think, so they call up the NAACP. Or the NCAAP calls them to complain, on behalf of Black voters. Is the NAACP an accurate reflection of the interests of Black people in the year 2024? I don't know the specific answer, but I could imagine they could easily not be. It's not like every Black person votes on what the NCAAP does every year, or donates to them en masse.
Who knows, maybe the NCAAP is very much in touch with Black people, but surely at least some of "the groups" fit this out-of-touch description, especially given that working in a non-profit governmental org is not a standard career or interest.
There is also the billionaire funding angle. Many of these groups are funded by rich people with their own peculiar set of issues. And if you have enough money it’s easy enough to make it feel like that issue is more important to voters than it actually is.
I wonder how much this change of approach will take hold. I interact with actual conservatives, moderates and normies sometimes and it seems clear to me that the progressive wing's approach over the last eight years *isn't producing results*. Everything they've gotten has been from spending down political capital earned by being normie.
Harris is going to end up with 8-10 million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020. Trump's vote total will be pretty close to his 2020 total. What was it about 2020, the pandemic, or Biden himself that motivated millions more people to vote for Biden who couldn't be bothered to vote in 2024?
I'm not claiming there was any fraud in 2020. But those MAGA people beg the question, if Dems could easily cast millions of fraudulent votes in 2020 why couldn't they do so this year?
I was hoping that a positive take away from 2024 was that we just solved Election Fraud and that it was a one time card trick in 2020. Trump started in early on Tuesday night about massive fraud in Philly, but I think someone told him to cool it because it was apparent early on that he was going to win. But this WHERE ARE THE MILLIONS OF BIDEN VOTERS question will be the kernel that keeps it in play for future use. Like if Shapiro trounces Vance in 2028 will the ITS RIGGED play work again? Are Democrats so inept that a tightly coordinated nefarious conspiracy of thousands of cheaters can only be coordinated every eight years?
The answer of course is that Biden's left-wing policies engaged millions of low-propensity voters, and when Kamala Harris swung back to the center those voters stayed home.
I think 2020 was a pretty energized year for the Dems. Add to that the fact that COVID basically created a period where Dems were more likely to have free time (living in areas with lockdowns and more stringent social controls) and Reps were more likely to be living more or less like they did before COVID (granted with higher mortality) and it seems like getting more people voting Dem was probably going to be a given.
I know in Portland at the time there were tons of people who really appeared to be at the protest to drink, eat BBQ (they had a BBQ truck most nights at the downtown protests) and pick up on members of the opposite sex...it was a social justice bar scene. When there was nothing else to do, and people felt very unempowered, things like voting, protesting, were probably pretty appealing.
Now that we're a day in, two pieces of anec-data I've been seeing:
- In 2016, everyone I knew went to Facebook to complain about racism, sexism, etc., etc.
- In 2024, there are still plenty of those, but half are "Democrats really screwed up this time..."
People aren't as surprised this time because they're able to see how others made the leap.
And there has been no shortage of people over the last year saying "I've always voted for Democrats, but I'm fed up and no longer in that camp".
Given that Kamala would have held the blue wall if she had swayed 1 point of the electorate (thereby gaining 2 points), I think Woke hangover + bad candidate quality is easily enough to explain this.
I know the economy has been tough, but I think a better candidate could have won even with that disadvantage.
Hard to see what a better candidate could have done if they were a Democrat. Democrats were happy with what Joe Biden did, how would a Democratic candidate succeed in denouncing everything the Biden administration did and promising a complete break without losing some enthusiasm among Democrats? The fact is that working people have different priorities, they are not impressed with fighting global warming. At this point they don’t seem to care much about health care, maybe they don’t believe in it, they don’t believe in government. They were clearly just mad, not the sort of thing a better candidate could have overcome. Obama would have lost.
"denouncing everything the Biden administration did" is a strawman.
Gretchen Whitmer:
- Didn't support decriminalising the border
- Didn't support banning fracking, an important industry in a swing state Harris lost by 2 points
- Is the Governor of MI, a swing state Harris lost by 1.5 points
- Wasn't VP to a President with a -18% net approval rating
I'm not sure if that'd've been enough. But I find it hard to be sure it wouldn't have been. And if not Whitmer, other Governors were available.
I don't mean to dump on Harris. I feel she should take pride in the campaign she ran. She just carried a lot of liabilities that ultimately proved insurmountable.
i like walz myself, but am surprised ``she should have picked shapiro'' isn't more of a thing right now (not even coming from silver). he would have done better pushing back against vance during the debate, and they could have focused more on michigan and wisconsin. maybe we'll settle on this more once the final count is in.
i like whitmer a lot based on the few interviews i've heard with her, but yeah, she needs to go through a primary to see how that plays out. maybe next cycle?
Should Harris get a pass for accepting the nomination? When Biden stepped aside, he and Harry’s both had horrible approval ratings, Harris was tied to an unpopular administration, and Harris was complicit in covering for Biden during his mental decline. All of these vulnerabilities were obvious in July. Wasn’t it arrogant for her to think she was the best candidate?
i'm assuming the campaign had contingency plans for what would happen if biden was to step aside (or worse), and they went with something approaching that, which is why they were able to spin it up with her at the top so quickly (she would have been doing a lot of the campaigning even if biden was still at the top of the ticket).
based on what was going on after biden's debate, I'm also guessing that the only other person who had an appetite for trying to run at this late stage was newsom. he was the only one other than harris campaigning for biden after the debate, he did that debate with desantis, he was somewhat openly miffed that there wasn't more of an open process at the convention, etc. i'm pretty confident that he would have been worse.
the rest (shapiro, whitmer, ... ) showed no appetite for it and didn't seem to have a plan.
so no, i don't think taking responsibility for the hole the democrats found themselves in counts as arrogant.
biden, on the other hand, is a comically tragic figure. he had two jobs, to rid us of trump and to pass the torch. his arrogance led to a spectacular failure on both counts.
I don't think, by July, there was sufficient time, practically speaking, to pick anybody else. To get that, Biden needed to announce he wasn't running back in 2022, and allow a proper primary to take place.
When did it seem that she thought she was the best candidate? What I saw is that she was told she should be the candidate, no one else tried to do it (or even had a path to), so she did it.
As a Pennsylvania resident (granted in Philadelphia) I think about fracking zero percent of the time. People that care about fracking are probably just the frackers themselves in those rural areas that would vote for Trump anyway. I don't think PA voters are unique outliers with fracking at the top of their list of issues along with inflation and crime.
I rather doubt many voters were up on those specifics. Probably Harris’ greatest liability was the simple fact that she was an affirmative action hire, Biden choosing her (and his Supreme Court pick) on the basis of race and gender. A competitive primary starting in 2023 might have picked a stronger nominee (or it might have been Harris), we just don’t know…I think it’s happened in the past that a popular governor has entered the national stage and basically flopped right out of the starting gate, so we just don’t know. I suspect the GOP would find something to hang on Whitmer.
I just can't agree with this at all. She has a compelling story, is self made from middle class roots, and was elected as both AG and a senator from the most populous state. Or do you think all CA constituents vote based on DEI considerations? They just sent white guys to the Senate and the SF mayorship, so it seems unlikely
I’m not suggesting Harris wasn’t qualified, I’m saying that Biden announced that he would only choose a black woman and therefore made it look less like she earned it. I’m saying Biden did her no favors by making his pick some sort of payback for black women supporting him. It would have been better if he’d just chosen her as the most qualified person to be his VP.
I will add as a Michigan native who has followed Whitmer for over 20 years, the woman has an intuitive mastery of communicating with non-college voters (i'll abbreviate as NCV). "Fix the damn roads" got her elected in 2018 in large part because it was a simple message that signalled to NCVs that she understood them. Read her NYT interview: She's invariably plain-spoken rather than flowery and I think it comes across as authentic. If you've heard her speak, she also has a very strong Michigan accent which I think might serve as another nonverbal cue that "she's like us." I'm not as familiar with Shapiro, but I imagine he has similar communication traits.
- People wanted change, and Democrats ran the person with the _weakest_ claim to change: Biden's VP!
- The majority of Democrats have moved on from far-left policies, but there's no shortage of video clips where Kamala is beclowing herself.
- Kamala is a very poor off-the-cuff speaker, and it makes her come across as dim-witted and insincere.
If you picked (1) a sharp person, (2) who was not in the White House the last 4 years, and (3) didn't have such a terrible woke paper trail, that person could have run with _exactly the same positions Kamala ran with in 2024_ and not had any of her key problems.
There are governors who could have done this. (Not Newsom)
Just to elaborate your point, first, Kamala could have helped herself by being authentic and by explicitly renouncing her goofier past positions. She chose to do neither. And second, proposing Newsom as candidate feels like the B-grade horror movie where the girl decides to open the door to the basement. You just want to scream out "NO!"
As would putting literally any daylight between her and Biden. People kept saying they understood why she didn’t but, really, do they? Because, if so, we need to burn this party to the ground. Prioritizing cocktail party invites over winning the presidency is dumb as hell.
2008 Obama won because he was chosen through a primary process because they liked his vision for the country. If he were thrust into a campaign in July as a low-profile vice president with just the talent, not the vision, he probably couldn't have won either.
I really don't think it's the case that competitive primaries are always better. The competitive primary in 2020 was not helpful at all. Neither was the 2016 primary. I can think of examples going both ways in state elections. And the other thing is that you can't just conjure up a competitive primary. Somebody else has to want to run, and I think it's doubtful that anyone better than Harris would have challenged Harris.
it would have done many things, among them making the republican primaries more competitive and with trump emerging from them with less unified support, having to engage in debates and maybe even not emerging at all.
locking in a situation where the president is unable to communicate and his vp is perceived to be incompetent drove all kinds of support unto trump that he wouldn't otherwise have had. kennedy would have been defeated in a primary instead of taking his support to trump, and his grievances would have at least been aired if not addressed. the vp would have shown herself to be a good campaigner in 2022, driving the message on dobbs, and much more tech friendly than biden. shapiro, buttigieg, and whitmer would make their own pitches in their own ways. there would have been options for a bunch of tech and finance types to spread out their support instead of flocking to trump. even musk might have made somewhat different choices (as far as I can tell, he first supported desantis, then weighed his options, and did not go all in on trump until early this year). zuckerberg and bezos may have made different choices, as well.
pushing a good chunk of the country towards trump and then, only after they are all in, trying to drive home just how bad he really is, is a bizarre and divisive strategy.
Don't worry, the usual suspects will do more than enough race blaming to make up for the shortage elsewhere. (A certain segment of online left intellectuals appears to be going with, "Latinos are no bueno": https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1854105411395207440 )
Ehhh I don’t think this is true. People really seemed to want to punish the Dems at the presidential level for [insert grievance here]. “Whitmer woulda lost” is the new “O’Malley woulda won.”
DEI hiring needs to stop. Biden should apologize to America for choosing Harris based upon her race and sex. The Democratic establishment has betrayed us and must repent and clear the field for a new generation of elites.
<And there has been no shortage of people over the last year saying "I've always voted for Democrats, but I'm fed up and no longer in that camp".>
I'm seeing / hearing so much of this too. Shoot ... I voted for a Republican (US House seat #10) for the first time ever because Brad Schneider is such a woke evangelist.
I guess a losing candidate is by definition "bad" but I thought she ran a damn good campaign, especially given the immense time pressure she was under.
I know that story caught on since election night, but I've crunched the numbers, crudely, by putting them in a spreadsheet and eyeballing the vote shifts. I don't see it. The swingiest swing states have more or less the same results as their peers - ie, Arizona and Nevada swung like NM did, and Mich, Wis and PA swung similarly to Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota.
At the most their might be a 1% difference or so, but I fear this story will become conventional wisdom based on incomplete election night results and lead to mistakes down the road. It's definitely worth revisiting once full state results are in and being cautious about spread that narrative until it can be confirmed or disconfirmed.
What does your spreadsheet say about NY-22? I posted this in a top-level comment, but it seems to be a huge outlier in the narrative that everywhere Dems spent money (i.e. the IRA, CHIPS, etc) still shifted right. NY-22 flipped to blue and it wasn't particularly close, plus the district is a big recipient of CHIPS money. Micron is building a fab north of Syracuse that promises to bring thousands of jobs. This is my hometown and I'm keeping an eye on it with the idea of maybe moving back if things trend in the right direction.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest I have that level of detail. I was just looking at states to see if being a swing state mattered and to find out which big regions shifted the most or least.
Agreed that 1% is nothing to sneeze at. I just think it's good to properly weigh how much was spent vs what was achieved so that we're realistic about what's possible 4 years from now, and beyond.
Harris saying she would not have changed anything from the past four years was a massive mistake. Anyone could come up with something and make some type of argument on why.
The Democrats also need to take a real hard look at how they talk to voters, specifically their choice of words and their tone. Far too many continue to shame voters over the littlest things when often that person doesn’t know what they are taking about because they don’t spend 200 hours a week on social media. Harris was better than others on this, but far too many in the party made this job hard for her.
i think her disagreements with biden such as they were, were not in places where people would like them to have been (immigration, gaza, economic policy) but in biden shunning some traditional sources of democratic support (i.e. parts of the business and tech community). but yeah, her response on the view was a uniquely bad answer.
Interesting data! Since there is not a great correlation between local economic performance and the swing to Trump, I would propose voters who listed the economy as their top concern were either a) Republicans who had internalized Fox News talking points about the ecomomy, and b) voters still mad about inflation. As to the latter (why are they still mad when inflation is getting better?), I would propose that when an economic shock of any sort hits, voters look to punish the incumbents rather than to evaluate calmly the causes and who has a superior plan to address the issues going forward. Back in 2008, I don’t think people voted D on the strength of Obama’s economic proosals, it was just people mad about the economic collapse voting to toss out the incumbent party, and in this case it was largely the same. Lastly, the urban shift towards Trump to me says these were voters upset about crime/quality of life issues or voters reacting negatively to wokism.
People are mad about inflation because prices remain inflated, and barring massive regressive tax increases and interest rate hikes are not going to fall.
The economic shocks are pretty systematically correlated between urban and non-urban areas with a donut hole effect of higher percent increases in outlying areas than in the core. A large part of this is remote work and started in 2020, but urban disorder could have increased it as well. So teasing geography from economics and social issues is going to be extremely difficult
It was widely understood that voting for president only "mattered" in a small number of swing states. So for example voters who felt uninspired by either candidate may have been more likely to stay home in non-swing states. Might this be muddying the waters regarding what influenced vote shifts? Are the results unchanged if you consider only swing states?
I've looked at the numbers on vote shifts (but not turnout) state-by-state, and it appears to me that the swing states shifted very similarly to their less competitive neighbors or peers.
My question is: how much of this Hispanic swing is actually an immigrant swing? If we had the crosstabs, would we see Armenians, Koreans, Nigerians, etc... shifting just as much as Hispanics? Unfortunately, we tend to group people of all these disparate backgrounds into super "Race" categories that obscure as much as they illuminate. But in many ways a "white" Persian and a "black" Senegalese might have more in common with each other than they do with their census group.
These other ethnicities tend to live in many of the same places as Hispanics, so I think their vote shifts probably get missed and partly mistaken for the Hispanic trend. My theory is 2024 was more about working class immigrants, and especially their 2nd gen children, moving right. And that's why we see diverse areas like the Bronx, Maryland suburbs and Southern California move right, but less immigrant heavy metros like Seattle, Atlanta, Colorado Springs and Pittsburgh not as much.
This seems like an interesting point, especially given how many aggrieved online right-wingers think that any support for immigration is just a clever plan to ensconce democrats forever.
The real estate piece of this analysis, and overall economic is going to be confounded by the strong donut hole pattern in post-covid real estate and job growth. Due, in large part to remote and hybrid work, highly dense and long commute center cities have had lowest increase in real estate prices since the pandemic and less job growth since.
On the other hand the largest increases in real estate prices are places taking in educated remote and hybrid workers who are likely to disdain Trump and Dobbs.
Since this is pretty systematic across the country, it's going to be tough to untangle the economic and real estate causes from geographic.
Eh. I am going to maintain that Charles Lehmans article on disorder is at the core of Trumps victory, or should I say the Democrats loss.
A majority of people did not vote for Trump, they voted against “disorder”.
Of course, people feel like the economy is bad when they see homeless people laying around the streets doing drugs. (yes I know this is only a small percentage of homeless… But it’s the majority of the visible homeless).
Of course, people think crime is up when they see mass shoplifting operations on TV and then go to their store and see their deodorant locked behind plexiglass.
Of course people are frustrated when they see millions of migrants claiming asylum because they were in danger… but knowing full well they were here for economic reasons.
If Democrats want to win, they need to advocate for policies that make society, more orderly, organized, fair, and rule driven.
And I did not vote for Trump, but the majority of my friends did… And I know why.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecausalfallacy/p/its-time-to-talk-about-americas-disorder?r=3gj6y&utm_medium=ios
I think disorder was important, but gun to my head inflation was the biggest factor. I think it explains the fairly uniform swing to the right basically everywhere because everywhere has inflation but real disorder like you describe was more variable geographically.
Yes disorder is important. But every narrative of this election needs to include inflation and a terrible electoral environment for incumbents across the world as key reasons too. And I’d probably list them as more important than disorder because that is something that is disproportionately felt by blue city residents.
Agree that inflation probably outweighed the effect of disorder. That said, the quality of blue state/city governance is a gaping wound in the narrative of why Democrats should be trusted with the levers of power.
I live in Santa Cruz County. Beautiful weather and scenery; I am fortunate to live here. Hemmed in by the ocean, mountains, Silicon Valley, and the NIMBY majority, housing prices here are totally out of reach for a typical 2 earner family. The quality of public goods (parks, streets, schools) has degraded significantly since the Obama years. Somehow, the nonprofit and government sectors continue to grow headcount. The homeless population continues to grow and periodically sets up mass camps and open air drug markets in public parks and on major intersections. It's impossible to use the bathroom at any downtown business without getting a code or a key. Most of the time I go downtown, there is at least one person screaming at the top of their lungs in the street.
This is a 75% Harris county per the results. There are zero Republicans with political power.
None of this made me vote for Donald Trump, and it's my choice to stay here. But does it feel like a well-governed place? Absolutely not. And why would anyone in a growing metro in a red state think this is an example to follow?
yes but Florida had the hardest right swing of all states and Miami has a Republican mayor and they were one of the parties to move almost the furthest to the right. Was Miami mismanaged? Ft Worth similarly. I do think blue cities and states need to look a hard look at how they are delivering services to people but out of thousands of cities almost all of them shifted right and most did not have the governing issues you describe IMO.
I don’t believe we have county information from California yet do we?
To be more clear, my claim is not "poor governance in blue cities made voters in cities swing right", it is "poor governance in blue cities sets a poor example for voters anywhere".
We do. You can go to the Cal Sec of State site and link through to each of the county elections department sites.
It’s funny you mentioned Florida, because in the sun belt, Democrats had a double whammy of inflation caused by increased inflow of people from blue states combined with the fact that these ‘emigrants’ were more right leaning than the nominal SF democrat. So while disorder and NIMBYism should be addressed on their own merits, its impact is more emigration related than direct polarization .
“It's impossible to use the bathroom at any downtown business without getting a code or a key.” This makes me crazy and I always think that people who live in these neighborhoods essentially live in a different country than most of us who talk about these issues. Los trust to the nth degree l.
I think the other missing piece of this that I would guess will take a long time to unpack is the way that domestic migration wove together with frustration over public disorder. It's not just that California swung right (through some genuine conversions and a lot of moderate voter apathy) - it's that the people who were MOST fed up with the state of affairs in California over the past 4 years moved en masse to other states (including/especially Arizona and Texas), and those voters were disproportionately right-leaning to begin with. In other words, LA's experience helped swing Phoenix right, too.
I'd hoped before the election that the net effect of all this would be to move Republicans from blue wall states to red states, and lead to maybe a loss of Arizona and Nevada but higher margins up north. But now I wonder if it's actually obscuring how disastrous this frustration has been for the party politically; one has to wonder what the collapse in margins in the NY Metro, for example, would be like if nobody had moved to Florida since 2020.
Inflation was 5%, disorder was 5% more in big cities
Disorder is why turnout in many cities was down.
Also, to be clear, we're all still talking out our asses here. It's gonna be months before we have granular enough data to know who turned out to vote and why.
The counties who've reported 99% are enough to draw some "ecological" conclusions. Those should always be done cautiously, but we can safely say big metros swung the most to the right, although parsing who, within them, swung right is much more harder without granular data.
Well, as you say, we have ecological data. I know Matt warned us about cross-tabbing at this stage, but it's not like all guesstimates are going to be way off. Looking at the data out of the Bronx (to cite one example) it's really hard for me to imagine Trump didn't make (yet more) inroads with Hispanic voters.
I agree, and I'd add that he might have done well with immigrants of all stripes, especially less educated immigrants. That's my read of the ecological results.
Combining exit polls, and pre-election polls and voter reg dat suggests to me that he may have done even better with immigrants than it appears at first glance. The other data sources say white voters barely shifted, and so the shifts across rural america have to be counterbalanced by white voters somewhere moving left. That might have been in the big cities and suburbs.
But we'll have to wait for more granular data to check that hypothesis.
Yeah I warned about over extrapolating from exit poll data a few days ago. I’m glad you brought this up. Exit poll data is often really flawed. I brought it up a week ago but if exit polls were right John Kerry is president in 2004. Now with the increasing partisan split in same day voting vs early voting exit polls are even more trash.
So yeah thank you for posting this.
It's interesting that Jed can talk about results in urban places like Los Angeles when California has barely begun counting its votes.
The way to square this circle is inflation probably caused the 4 or 5% national swing, but disorder was worth another 5% in big metros.
Bingo!
Inflation is economic disorder, much more than, for example, a moderate rise in unemployment.
Agreed. But media makes those disorder concerns a national concern.
The international comparison is where "it's the inflation, stupid" seems to the big story here (given our economic performance, I didn't want to say "economy").
I think it was Matt who noted a conversation he had with old hats in the Democratic party who are partly responsible for the 2009 stimulus being undercooked. Matt ultimately was right; low interest rate, high unemployment environment is exactly the time to go big on stimulus. But they came back to him and said "you don't understand how much voters hate hate hate inflation" almost as this PTSD from the 70s. I think he said he was more inclined to get what they were talking about after seeing public opinion last 2 years despite an objectively good economy.
Both can be right to an extent. Stimulus should have probably been a bit bigger in 2008.
But that 1.9 trillion stimulus should have been a LOT smaller (or not at all). And then once we started to see signs of inflation, we should have pulled back on the stimulus.
Another valid criticism of the 2009 stimulus that I've heard is that it was not front loaded enough. The economy was hemorrhaging jobs when Obama became President and they decided that 20-50$s in every paycheck will lead to a more efficient way to distribute the money (because people are more likely to spend all of it) instead of a one time 500$s.
No need for stimulus with better monetary policy.
I'm sure at some point there will be such a loss of institutional memory on the subject, but I suspect this lesson is going to persist beyond your lifespan unless you're a kid simply because it's so stark. Carter had some other major PR problems in 1980 besides inflation (e.g., Iran hostage crisis) and Reagan was a successful "big state" governor who, while he was utterly hated by a certain segment of the population for being exceptionally conservative (for the era), otherwise was a decent human being, and (to the best of my knowledge) ran a skillful campaign. To put it another way, even absent any issues with inflation, Reagan should have been a strong challenger to Carter. Trump '24, on the hand, was a dumpster fire of both a human being and a campaign. That Trump not only won, but substantially increased his vote share over his two previous runs across the board demographically and geographically, is pretty clearly due to inflation.
We shouldn't assume this is so monocausal. Immigration was likely also a big deal.
>But I think what it demonstrates is that Matt was totally wrong and the olds with inflation PTSD were spot on<
They both could be right. It's possible we could have done enough stimulus in 2009-2011 to support the economy but not ignite worryingly high levels of inflation. There was a LOT of slack in the economy. And yes, the grizzled veterans from the 70s were obviously right, as well, about voter distaste for price increases.
It's almost like different economic circumstances call for different economic policies depending on circumstances.
If only there was a substack writer of some repute who's made versions of this argument in advocating for deficit reduction recently.
Honestly, I hope the lesson we take from this is to not do fiscal stimulus during a massive recession. I agree that inflation is politically toxic at high levels like we saw in 22-23 but:
1. The inflation was a global phenomenon despite widely varying levels of fiscal support during the pandemic so our fiscal and monetary response to the pandemic was not the only reason (or probably even the primary reason) for the inflation.
2. Even if we assume otherwise, the level of physical and monetary stimulus in 2020 was really staggering (like WW2 level shit) and there is a A LOT of room between the relatively meek response to the FGC in 2009 and dumping 6T dollars of fiscal stimulus and g-d-only-knows how much monetary stimulus into the economy over a 10 month period.
3. It worked! The recovery from the initial pandemic recession was really staggering and we're genuinely vastly better off for it. We need to consider the counterfactual here where we were too timid and instead of inflation we had four years of high unemployment and anemic growth. Would the democrats really do any better in that environment?
Hard agree on all of this (except that I don’t think many of my friends voted for Trump). The locked-up toiletries thing comes up in conversations with surprising frequency. And no matter how good economic indicators are, it’s impossible to feel good about the state of the country when they see the kinds of things Rory describes (which I do).
It’s kind of ironic that Trump, who flagrantly breaks laws and destroys norms, ran on a kind of law-and-order message. I do not have high hopes that the next administration will move us toward a more orderly, fair, and rule-driven society, which I also desperately want to see. I’m already disappointed to see people I respect and admire, like Ken White, advocating for incivility. It’s going to be a challenging few years.
Yeah, I'm not sure how you square the circle.
- Crime goes up during Trump's administration: Democrats get blamed.
- Crime goes down during Biden's administration: Democrats don't get credit.
- Democrats run a prosecutor who highlighted law-and-order themes, don't get credit.
- Trump gets convicted of crime, has a history of violent sexual assault in a major American city, brings chaos to our nation's Capitol: returns to power.
I also wonder if the Trump administration's handling of early Covid in cities when Kushner was calling it a Blue State virus played a key role in making crime worse. My sister's description of 2020 living in a major city was heartbreaking.
It’s underrated among democrats in how much the combination of a year long “abolish the police” campaign and images of inner city homelessness and open drug use really drove this entire thing.
Democrats point to charts and graphs and some mom in the Great Lakes region points to a picture on social media of a group of homeless people smoking fentanyl next to a woman pushing a baby stroller.
We did this to ourselves. We did it openly and with pride. I’ve seen the results of liberal criminal reform policy in my city and voted against all the democrats who implemented it this year. It was almost all bad and implemented poorly and now they want more money to double down on it, no thank you.
Who’s we, kemosabe? I am a staunch Democrat and I never supported public disorder or crime. On Sunday I voted for Harris and Prop 36.
Oh, yeah I'm talking about the royal "we" of California democrats. I also voted for Harris and Prop 36. I've gotten heat both on here and in real life from liberals for supporting Prop 36 though. I would say those people also don't support "public disorder and crime" but they are willing to pay that as a price to "reduce justice disparities" or whatever.
The loopy CA liberal is a true minority though. Often very loud. No way a middle class Chinese American family in Sunset or Richmond is going to be okay with crime in the name of justice disparities.
That is not what "royal we" means. (it is referring to oneself as "we," typically by a monarch). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we
It looks bad in retrospect that Kamala the cop wouldn’t offer any opinion at all on a proposition that got 70% of the vote.
It came 4 years too late and I'm still not sure that they'll enforce the law. The limit for shoplifting being whatever is no excuse for not investigating or booking people for people committing crimes/misdemeanors.
And 36 is currently leading 70% - 30%...
It's kind of sad too because Clinton as president and Joe Biden as a senator was about as good as the Democrat Party (or any party really) has ever been on law enforcement. A good balance of accountability (the 1994 crime control act enabled the DOJ to investigate problematic agencies) and support (100k new cops and the creation of helpful federal services for policing).
Certainly not perfect as they had to make some political considerations that we not 100% ideal in the form of being more punitive. Still, as a team they did about as good on crime policy as could be expected.
Clearly the Dem party is capable of being very good on crime. They just seem to lose their minds on certain things and cannot control the worst excess of the hard left. Had Harris not lost her mind in 2019-2020 and stuck with the principles she articulated in Smart on Crime, she might have been able to follow this up and position herself much better for 2024.
"Clearly the Dem party is capable of being very good on crime"
At least they were 30 years ago
A lot of liberal crime reform just seems to be juicing the numbers like police do in The Wire….
You can't juice murder stats, and murders have gone down a lot, so there actually are good things happening. But it's been a gradual process and people's memories are long.
I live in a big city and have witnessed the crime surge first hand. It’s true that:
A) violent crime is noticeably down.
B) the city still feels significantly less safe and more hostile than it did pre Covid/Floyd.
I hear far fewer gunshots than I used to, and no one has had their wheels stolen on my block for a while, but I still regularly encounter hostile people / drug addicts / homeless and sociopathic drivers at a much higher clip than I did pre 2020.
It’s good that cities have finally, begrudgingly started addressing crime again, but there’s still a huge amount to do to get back to the Obama era baseline.
This substack has a good explanation: https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/its-time-to-talk-about-americas-disorder
Urban police have prioritized serious, violent crime with their more limited workforces. And so, it's gone down. But they've deprioritized crimes of "disorder" like speeding or DUIs or drugging out on the metro and yelling at people, so that's gone up.
The murder rate in 1990 was just over 9 per 100k. It was cut in half and hit bottom at something like 4.4 or so in 2014. Interestingly, 2012 to 2014 was when Justice Reinvestment was getting rolling and by 2014 it was being implemented in a ton of places.
From 2014 to about the early 2020's the murder grew by nearly 50% to over 6 per 100k. This basically undid about a quarter century of near continuous improvement and took us back to mid 1990s in terms of the murder (which is when I got into policing).
The mid1990s was still a trainwreck in terms of violent crime and I can remember literally going to multiple murders and shootings on the same night in the summer of 1996. This was not good and a lot of people died unnecessarily.
Fortunately, a lot of that bump appears to be due to the crazy of 2020 and over the last year or two rates have fallen a ton.
That said, if you want to see just how deleterious 2020 was on homicides check out Portland's open data (https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/portlandpolicebureau/viz/New_Monthly_Neighborhood/MonthlyOffenseTotals). They have a great dashboard with data going back to about mid 2015 so you can look at over a decent stretch prior to 2020 and the data are updated so you can generally get good data to within a couple months of the current data (FBI data is hugely old). Jeffery Asher has a good Substack as well and has set up a promising tracking system using open data from a bunch of larger cities (https://jasher.substack.com/).
Baltimore is under 200 murders this year. It’s nice.
Check out the Abolition X podcast on Spotify. It's (unintentionally) the funniest podcast out there. And it had big corporate sponsors, like HBO!
The crime wave isn't Biden's fault, but voters know which SIDE to blame. Republicans didn't burn down police precincts in Minneapolis.
When Republican congressional candidates who didn't take part in 1/6 still paid a penalty for it in 2022, everybody understood why.
Which is funny, because if you live here, you will recall that they tried to imply that that is who did it, and many would still do this if you tried to bring it up.
https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2024/08/outside-agitator-narrative-by-walz-community-leaders-was-wrong-but-helped-quell-2020-george-floyd-protests/
Yeah, here lib reactions to the riots in Portland were split between "actually it was good" and "it was the other guys under cover."
Hell, the ballot box burning that had a "Free Gaza" message on the incendiary device is being called a false flag by every liberal I know.
Are you sure it wasn't? I mean, do we have any basis to understand who did this?
"run a prosecutor who highlighted law-and-order themes"
She highlighted them for like 3 months! Where was that highlighting during 80% of her time as VP, or during her primary campaign? You can't just go "oh I'm tough on crime" and expect people to go "oh, well sure, if you say so".
It’s simple. Trump can do whatever the fuck he wants; Democrats must be perfect and no matter what they do, it will never be good enough. At this point I can only conclude that Trump literally sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success.
I don't know, I think Democrats are pretty far from perfect. Trump was born wealthy and did luck into some sweet real estate situations at exactly the right time in the NYC real estate market. As happens to most rich people, he has gotten "lucky" often. He has just been in a position to seize on opportunity then it presents itself, this is the key advantage of the very rich, they can take more risks and accept fewer trade offs to get what they want.
As my momma said when I was a kid "life isn't fair" and that has remained true.
I think Ezra Klein's podcast this morning was excellent. We are in a realignment. Republicans are running as like Wario versions of 90's Democrats and Democrats are running as if the Presidency is President of Harvard. There is a realignment happening and, right now, Republicans have a winning formula and Democrats do not.
I listened to it too. I love Ezra ... buy my goodness did he tiptoe around Harris (e.g., "great debater", "ran a great campaign", "thrown into an impossible situation"). It's okay Ezra -- she's not your boss.
I think she improved a lot over the course of the campaign and she did destroy Trump in that debate.
Was Harris the ideal candidate? No. Did she absolutely the most that could be expected of her under the circumstances? Yes.
This entire thing is 1) Mitch McConnell’s fault for not dealing with Trump after Jan 6 and 2) Joe Biden’s fault for not stepping down sooner.
Harris is at fault but I view it as a much, much less her fault than others.
Did not have Wario on my bingo card.
You should always have Wario on your bingo card!
Thanks for flagging the EK pod, I'm trying not to focus too much on this stuff (obviously I am not doing a good job given that I am here!). But I saw it in my feed this morning and thought it looked interesting.
TBH I have been waiting for a realignment for quite some time and somewhere in my jaded and broken heart there is an ember of hope that the process has started for real and at some point, we will come out of this in a better place. If that happens, I hope I'm still around to see it...
This is my most optimistic perspective. People are in fact better informed these days and that is leading to some undesirable outcomes in the short term due to the types of information they are consuming from various bubbles. I do think that there is a chance for a smarter, post racial realignment that is less blue team/red team/Cold War coded and more results driven.
There is also a chance it goes off the rails like a miner cart in an action film and we all plunge into the depths.
I haven't listened to the Klein podcast yet (if ever) but I would caution about throwing the term "realignment" around too easily. Once all the votes (mostly from California) are counted, the popular vote will be a lot closer to 50/50. Realignments don't happen when votes are 50/50 and have basically been around there for the past quarter century. Do voting blocs shift? Yes, they do that all the time, as parties swap groups of voters. But that's different from a 1932 style major realignment.
We're clearly seeing a different Republican party and a Democratic party now struggling to figure out what its makeup is, but it's too soon to be calling it a realignment.
Whatever the count, Dems lost traction with growing segments of the population (younger voters, minorities) and gained with shrinking segments (whites, older voters).
I know the counts not fully in, but both polls and voter registration numbers were pointing to these same trends all year long, so I feel pretty confident saying they are real.
To make matters worse, it's blue states that are set to lose EC votes after the next census and red states that are set to gain them. And you already know about the Supreme Court and the Senate. It's hard to see how the Dems remain competitive without a realignment or a great deal of luck.
i think he sort of meant it as Obama's political legacy and the energy behind those ideas were ending. i wouldn't expect the 2028/2032 maps to look all that different from 2024, but the energy and emphasis will be different. similar to how 2004 -> 2012 there was not a big change in the electoral map but obviously Obama represents a hard break from Kerry (the Clinton era).
And Trump represents a hard break from the Bush era (signified by beating Jeb in '16). The Republican party had much more continuity though with Romney being a natural successor to W, who was the natural successor to his dad and Reagan.
it is a little hard to know what might happen. I think a lot of what happens on the left will be a reaction to what goes on in Trump Administration 2, similar to how Obama rose partially due to political talent, partially due to identity considerations, but also in a big part because he opposed the Iraq war.
Thank you. I have been watching this too, noting that Trump has not yet exceeded his 2020 national vote total and likely will not exceed it by much of a margin -- certainly no "landslide" or "realignment". Meanwhile, Harris is dramatically under-performing Biden's vote total from 2020 and will not make it all back in California (she's down 13M votes and there are not close to that number of ballots still out still out).
I agree that we need to wait another few weeks or months for final analysis. All takes now are prelim.
Trump can only be this successful because Biden and Harris have sprinted further towards the Progressive-leftwing. So much of the early days of the Biden administration - and again, I'll repeat ... just re-read all his Day 1 EOs - were about how "Biden is the most Progressive President ever". Welp ... turns out very few Americans support those policies.
OK you have a point, but during her election campaign, Harris tacked HARD to the center, and it seems she gets no credit for it. I was legit ASTONISHED by how little she emphasized her race and gender, or how devoid her speeches were of the typical lefty "America baaaad" narrative. Her DNC speech was, "My parents came to this country as immigrants because this is the greatest bestest country in the world and I am the living embodiment of the American dream!" Does anyone even remember Biden's first-day EOs? Does anybody care?
I think that's the point tho ... she "tacked HARD". No one believed it. She was and is a California Progressive. She can't escape her 2020 run. That's who she is at her core. And while I might be the only person in America who's read all of Biden's EO -- the public narrative that first week was a broad reversal of all Trump's immigrations policies and a tidal wave of woke, DEI policies. I think that sense has stuck with the general public and is also accurate. It was a massive misstep and one we all paid dearly for.
"Does anyone even remember Biden's first-day EOs? Does anybody care?"
For sure many remember. more importantly, Harris's weird 2019-2020 public comments were practically played on a loop in the GOP ads I received. and you can't really run the counterfactual...maybe she would have lost by 2 or 3% more if she hadn't tacked hard to center. But I agree with David that it wasn't particularly credible to most voters.
lol yeah, Democrats won the popular vote 4 times in a row (lost by 1.5 points on tuesday and .5 points in 2004) and now everyone is acting like they don't know anything about the common man.
That's because they lost "the common man" vote by worse margins, yet again.
If, by common man, we mean non college degreed people (especially, well, men) of all races. They can clearly still connect with college educated voters. White college educated voters are one of the few demos that shifted left.
sure but again I think its frustrating because all the discussion in the media is by college educated voters bashing other college educated voters for being "unable to connect," but in reality we all have the same authentic beliefs lol.
"governing as the most progressive President in history"
Da fuq?!? [/Ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt]
I think the progressive stuff might be behind the inflation and Covid stuff. If inflation had come down rapidly and Covid been managed better I think it’s possible the Democratic candidate could have had a chance, the woke wars didn’t help though!
Yes, even if everything the poster states is true, Republicans are vocal that they don’t like it, Democrats seen to hand wave it away and try to explain how it’s all downstream of structural inequities that comes across line defending antisocial behavior.
Guess which one voters are choosing?
I see what you're both saying, but Trump is also the only major Republican to basically oversee a riot. We're not talking about Larry Hogan or a former police chief here. The fact that Trump himself is a criminal is the part that is most depressing.
I HATE everything about January 6th and find it disqualifying. However, some would say it was an acute, one day event and a lot of the perpetrators have been arrested and punished. The petty crime and disorder in my neighborhood is something I have to deal with everyday in perpetuity.
You are rioting so you can steal laundry detergent from the CVS.
I am rioting to install a oppressive fascist dictatorship.
We are not the same.
I agree regarding Trump...however the commitment to law and order on the part of the Democratic party is kind of tarnished by the year or so rioting, things like the CHAZ where parts of cities were handed over to armed groups for extended periods of time and the general lack of response to things like political arsons.
Not saying they are equivalent, but it makes a lot of concerns about political violence, insurrection, and rule of law less genuine and makes it appear more tactical.
This is a good point. My instinct these past few months was to push against Trump's anti-war message by saying "but he's the *Republican* candidate! Ever heard of the Iraq War or the bombing of Cambodia?" But the truth is that Dick Cheney's daughter was a Harris surrogate, which only emphasizes the narrative that the Dems are now the endless wars party.
The sad thing, as an Ohio boy at heart who has lived abroad and lived on the coasts, Democrats no longer seem to understand most people. Education polarization gives them tunnel vision.
Ok, I’m a Democrat and I say, guilty as charged.
No, I DO NOT understand people who have a choice between a sane, decent, competent woman who talks about how we’re one America and there’s more that unites us than divides us, on one hand, and a crude, misogynistic, petty, vengeful, pathological liar and lawbreaker who tells us to be afraid, very afraid… and who say, yup, the liar-felon-rapist with fascist-y tendencies is the guy I want! I do not understand it. Yeah, yeah, disorder, homeless people, illegal immigrants, inflation, yadda yadda. It doesn’t make sense to me on a visceral level, it goes COMPLETELY against what I thought America was about.
Sorry, I know this isn’t a helpful comment, but I’m grieving. My heart is breaking for the people who voted for Harris and who don’t deserve this shit. Not to mention people who had no chance to vote, like Ukrainians whom Trump is about to screw over.
The way I understand this is a lot of people in the US don't care if the president is personally awful as long as they deliver something for them. It is purely transactional and borderline cynical. They also don't necessarily trust or believe in anything a politician says. We seem to be transitioning to a lower-trust society, which is bad in a number of ways. It is in fact against what many of us thought America was about. But trust can go down as well as up. The way to build up trust is to do what you say you are going to do and mean what you say.
But Trump never means what he says, he lies every time he opens his goddamn mouth, and his followers still trust him! JFC!!!!
[ifeellikeimtakingcrazypills.gif]
I get it. I really do. But they don't care what he says. They care what happens in reality, and they evaluate relative to their personal situation. Remember, low trust, so they don't believe anything anyone really says. So it doesn't matter. He's just there for entertainment. They measure vs what they see.
I don't know if you will take any comfort in this, but having been through a lot election cycles by now, I think it's hard to over-estimate the extent to which people vote in order to punish politicians and political parties for the past, rather than to make the best or most prudent choices for the future. It's fundamentally irrational, but deeply human, so it's also the primary lever political parties (and their media ecospheres) push during campaigns. So I agree with the analytical frame that says this was more about Biden's real and perceived political failures and personal shortcomings, rather than Trump's "appeal". Like you, I have no idea why Trump appeals to Republicans -- he is repellent in every dimension, and it makes me question the judgment of every Republican I know. But in this environment, many Republicans could have beaten Biden or Harris, while only a few Democrats might have been able to overcome the public's desire to punish them. Harris was just too attached to Biden, too unwilling to break with him and too easy to characterize as "woke" to pull it off. Could Whitmer or Klobuchar or Shapiro or Buttigieg have done it? Not at all sure.
But Biden did a lot of good things, the CHIPS act, getting the economy back on track after the pandemic. On foreign policy he did pretty much the best he could with a really bad situation (Israel/Palestine is a no-win scenario). And he’s getting punished because he didn’t magically make grocery prices return to 2019 levels.
All true. And to a similar extent, Trump got blamed for COVID, which I think he mis-handled, but did not create. Think of IRA, CHIPS Act, etc. as Biden's version of Project Warp Speed -- good policy that still wasn't enough to prevent him losing by 5M votes.
I will say I found the administration’s response on grocery prices pretty lackluster. Some grandstanding about price gouging, corporate greed, and monopoly concentration in an industry with razor thin profit margins, that could never have helped, even if it had been more than just cheap talk. Increases to SNAP benefits are good, but to be pragmatic, how many SNAP recipients vote?
If they were really taking voter concerns about grocery prices seriously, they would have pursued real supply side policy here. Kill subsidies and mandates for corn ethanol, kill the conservation reserve program which pays farmers to take land out of production, kill export promotion programs and subsidies, and plow all the savings into farm subsidies purely focused on higher production. Deliberately try to cut the bottom out of domestic grain prices and then watch the lower prices percolate through to bread, dairy, eggs, meat, etc.
It’s fits a classic America archetype of the asshole boss/inventor/creator/artist.
Steve Jobs was a notorious asshole and has reached Saint levels of respect in pop culture. Look at any number of “Diva’s” whose entire brand is shit talking other artists and preening on social media.
People are just willing to accept the fact that being a total asshole can be a key personality trait in a very successful person. I think that is a terrible thing but it helps explain the American mindset here.
But… it’s not just being an asshole to your staff or something. The man broke the law, broke his oath of office by trying to steal a goddamn election in 2020, culminating in a riot that he instigated. And that’s considered ok now. Sorry not sorry, I have absolute contempt for this mindset. This is not the America I thought I knew.
I get the feeling we're due for lots of sanewashing of Trump, his legacy, and his presentation of self in order to fit these results into something that people can accept without themselves going insane.
He won; we lost. Terrible. But he and his acolytes will not change who and what they are and there is a strong chance that those who bought him will feel terrible buyer's remorse.
I get it. It’s awful.
"Yeah, yeah, disorder, homeless people, illegal immigrants, inflation, yadda yadda". People see the effects of these things every day, I don't think you can just yadda-yadda them away. I agree that Trump and Republicans are not the answer here and this election represents a real hit to my vision of and expectations of what America can be, but Democratic policies absolutely made the path to victory easier for Trump.
I understand.
Democrats talk down to people, especially men. Noah Smith had a good piece on how activist framing of people as blocks others them and makes them not feel like Americans.
I see a lot of the activist brainworm things through work and it jades my perception of things.
Harris never talked down to people! I listened to her speeches, she was always like, let’s come together, as POTUS I will work hard for you!
Again the asymmetry: Harris is blamed for all crazy shit a lefty activist posts on Xitter, but Trump and his acolytes spout all sorts of deranged crap and nobody cares.
I’m gonna go cry in a corner now.
“Harris never talked down to people”
I’ll take your word for this. But there were plenty of prominent Democrats who were.
Her speeches were good and I think she is a genuinely talented, sincere and decent politician and human being. She just did not have enough time to close the deal on that basis.
I'm pretty sure Trump would be more popular if he and his friends toned down the crazy.
I think Democrats unfortunately pay a price for the entire culture of the last 10 years. They aren’t responsible for it, but they didn’t separate themselves from it either. If we’re going to associate Republicans with Qanon, it’s certainly fair to associate Democrats with the Great Awokening.
Preach it, sister.
I give the Republicans credit for knowing how to enflame significant parts of the population with bile, resentment, and hatred. Our Democratic leaders are sadly lacking in that politically valuable skill.
We did OK with it in 2020...
That's why if the Republicans are evil geniuses, they should do whatever they can to cause crime (which has been going down lately) to rebound in urban areas, whether that's by defunding cities, doing trolly pro-police brutality messaging, or what have you. I don't know how effective any steps like that would be necessarily, but to the extent they were effective in moving the needle in a negative direction, the blame would fall on Democrats because it is more believable to attribute crime increases to the politicians who share the same coalition as the anti-police radicals of 2015-2020, than to assume there's any connection to federal policy under a GOP trifecta.
Don’t give them ideas!!!
My bad.
(The good news is that Trump doesn't think like this at all, it's not his style. The bad news is that Vance absolutely does think like this, so it will be interesting to see if Vance is able to cast a spell on Trump and puppetmaster him, or whether Trump will start to resent Vance as he often did with underlings last time around.)
Odds are reasonably high that Trump will die in office and Vance will succeed him.
I mean, the Supreme Court has been doing this for 55 years or so by striking down restrictions on firearm ownership. It's been pretty successful!
Edit: I stand corrected, see below
SCOTUS has only struck down gun control legislation in the last 16 years. It was rather infamous in lower-case "L" libertarian circles that SCOTUS refused to take any Second Amendment cases after U.S. v. Miller in 1939 until D.C. v. Heller in 2008. (I guess you could count U.S. v. Lopez in there -- the Gun-Free Schools Act case -- but that was still just from 1995.)
There is a larger point in this remark. Democrats nationally get blamed for the political mistakes of Democrats locally. Joe Biden never "defunded the Police" or mandated a DEI seminar, has near zero effect on homelessness and shoplifting/loud mufflers and public use of marihuana, excessive business and school closures during COVID.
Oddly, this is sort of the parallel to the Administration getting blamed for inflation and unemployment. We need to get better at surfing these waves.
The one big policy mistake was not to have proposed (as they finally did, but too late) some border control measures that Republicans woud oppose at their peril. A smaller one was giving in to effort of activists to oppose specific fossil fuel development and transportation projects.
I think you're giving upper-level Democrats too much of a pass. The 2019/2020 Democratic Presidential candidates (and certainly Democratic Congresspeople) said fairly radical things about decriminalizing illegal immigration, eliminating ICE, and defunding the police. It's not unreasonable to associate national Democrats with these policies, even if they rapidly backed away from them.
We on the left immediately memory hole this stuff, we’re very good at it. People outside our circle aren’t incentivized to forget this stuff immediately when it becomes politically inconvenient to us.
Re: shoplifting – Biden’s appointee for US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts was Rachel Rollins:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Rollins
Her confirmation went 50-50 in the Senate, with VP Harris casting the deciding vote in her favor. She was a controversial appointee because as a DA, she’d released a memo outlining her policy to no longer prosecute certain offenses, including shoplifting.
You are correct that this appointment in itself didn’t have any concrete impact on shoplifting in US cities.
But if you reward the “political mistakes” of local Democrats with new appointments, then I think it’s fair for voters to think you might not consider those things mistakes.
DEI growth absolutely is a federal phenomenon. My anecdotal case is a close friend who is an ER doctor who had to take off several days of work to attend DEI training so he could pick up occasional shifts at the VA ER. This alone cost his and his wife's vote. He detests Trump but has concluded it is the Dems that in the end are totalitarian.
OK, I'll bite. What was so terrible about DEI training? Some of it is silly and frankly a lot of it should go without saying, and "several days" seems pretty crazy (in tons of private sector settings, it's now on Zoom anyway, I think) but that's roll-your-eyeballs stuff, not "Dems are totalitarian"?!?!?! Jeez, they're not putting him in jail for not doing the training or doing it wrong or something, are they?
1. It is ineffective.
2. It is infused with anti-white bias
3. It is forced upon people, who then resent it in a visceral manner, creating a long-lasting negative effect
4. It makes the problem worse, not better.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/magazine/dei-university-michigan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S04.GEE-.J763ek8ijlBq&smid=url-share
What John from FL. says below plus it's such an obvious waste of time that you get the feeling it is an exercise designed to demonstrate power. I don't think personally it it that bad. My friend however if from a former Soviet bloc country who moved when he was a teenager. To him it had the stench of iron fisted government mood control which he knew in its real form. I'm not so sure it's as bad as he believes, but there is a huge part of the electorate that feel this way. And everything that John said in reply to you is probably true. Your reply of what so bad about it, is what is exactly what is hurting the dems on the ballot. Ineffective government interference is poorly accepted.
I guess what I am trying, and failing, to express, is my honest puzzlement that the concept of trying to suggest that particular sensitivity to the histories and lived experiences of groups of people who have, on the whole, and historically, and take all the exceptions you please, been poorly treated compared to the white middle and upper classes, and perhaps merit special solicitude for that reason, seems to incite backlash, rather than regarding such experiences philosophically and even, sadly, as a probably inevitable bit of rough-justice turnabout-is-fair-play that is just going to be part of the landscape for awhile. More the question why it is so hard to look at the DEI moment, even acknowledging the sorts of excesses described in the Michigan story, with a bit of detachment and tolerance as comprising an effort to instill social consciousness and as the kind of thing that inevitably happens in a society in which the contentiousness of black equality has been central to the nation's political dialogue for its entire existence. Experiencing this as a white person, and trying to understand other white people's experience of DEI generally as a driver of their politics, I am left wondering frankly why Luke 7:1 ("judge not that ye be not judged") and Nick Carraway's father's advice in the opening lines of The Great Gatsby about remembering that not everyone has had our advantages, might be a sensible alternative posture, even if there is non-trivial silliness in many aspects of the modern DEI "industry". Certainly I confess to not understanding why, even if someone dislikes it, it would lead them to vote for a presidential candidate as manifestly unfit for office as Trump. "[A]nti-white bias" simply isn't that big a social problem.
Despite you're moral appeal It is not a popular view. A majority does not agree it is either right or even possible to "engineer" society in such a granular fashion. There is a popular view that civil rights can be enforced but they must be in a general sense, not handicapped for certain identities. If it was not clear before, it should be now with Trumps gains among Blacks and Hispanics. Even in border areas, a majority of Hispanics are voting for Trump. The election is a resounding defeat for DEI and identity politics.
One quibble, there actually has been a bunch more DEI stuff across the federal workforce since Biden took office, especially since this Executive Order came out in June 2021:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/06/25/executive-order-on-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-accessibility-in-the-federal-workforce/
I have front row seats to efforts at AI regulation, and from what I can see, my honest opinion is:
The major aspect of AI they concern is racism and bias.
They have no idea how to find or limit such harms
But they are going to spend a lot of money, hire a bunch of regulators, and force insurers, banks, etc.. to spend a lot of money on proving their AI isn't racist, whatever that might mean.
All of this stuff will have the impacts of stifling innovation and raising costs where it's implemented, and it's mostly being implemented in Blue states. In response, some businesses are pulling out of Blue states.
There are efforts at AI regulation? Do those involve full investigations of Sam Altman?
Isn't that an entirely different legal front?
But if I interpret your comment as thinking Generative AI deserves some attention, thought and concern from regulators, I agree. That sort of AI is very new and introduces novel potential problems.
However, regulators and lawmakers are having difficulty defining exactly what is "AI" vs computation or automation. And because they can't figure out how to define it well, most attempts at AI regulation have decided to regulate "Math".
So, if you have a spreadsheet excel macro model that adds 2 columns together, that's "AI". A linear regression is "AI". In both cases you do a bunch of extra reporting and work and get lawyer sign-offs, etc. to show it's not racially biased.
They mostly haven't decided what racially biased means, either, but that's another problem.
Re: homelessness, I would note that the solicitor general appointed by Biden filed an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case arguing that localities could not criminalize sleeping outside if there weren’t shelter beds available:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-175/302264/20240304183726571_23-175npUnitedStates.pdf
In the event, SCOTUS disagreed with the administration’s position, so you are again correct that this had no concrete impact on the problem, but I can understand why people concerned about urban disorder might be worried that Biden doesn't share their priorities.
If you issue a mass pardon for everyone previously convicted of marijuana possession, I guess you're right that that probably does have "near zero" effect on public use of marijuana in practice, but on the margin I'd guess it encourages people to take existing laws against public use of marijuana a little less seriously.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/presidential-proclamation-marijuana-possession
I do still think Biden was better than the average Dem pol on this issue, just wish he'd stuck to his guns.
"it encourages people to take existing laws...a little less seriously"
This, to me, strikes at the heart of the problem. It seems as if virtually everyone, in virtually every domain, is taking laws (speeding, red-light running, smoking on the subway, shoplifting, etc etc etc) as well as norms (don't blast music without headphones, control your dog, pay attention to other people on the sidewalk rather than drifting all over the place while you scroll, don't hang a flag on your property saying "f***" the candidate/elected official you don't like, etc etc etc) less seriously. At the same time, many people seem to be spending most of their time alone and now appear unwilling to tolerate, in person, any inconvenience to themselves and *any* annoying quality in other people. I'm trying to maintain a positive/constructive mindset but it's hard for me to not view this state of affairs as a serious fraying of the fabric of society.
I feel like the median member of society's sensitivity to "my mom would be horrified if she found out I did X" has dropped dramatically, to the detriment of us all. That little voice in our collective heads shaming us for being anti-social is a lot quieter nowadays, and it seems like a lot of social function relied on that voice's strength and basically nothing else.
2020 made a lot of people think, "I'm a sucker if I follow these bullshit rules, and who's gonna stop me anyway?"
I mean, if you really boil it down, Republicans promoting mass resistance against COVID restrictions had the effect of promoting flouting other, unrelated laws, just like Republicans promoting COVID vaccine skepticism led to a resurgence of antivax sentiments in general.
And this blog has *very frequently* taken the side of the COVID "reckoning."
Liked and largely agree but the one point I think really hurt him was embracing "transitory inflation." I may be over weighing this because I was literally screaming mad at the time that we were not addressing inflation more, also, the way my finances are structured really makes me vulnerable to inflation (even after hedging as much as I can). So this was really salient to me.
Either way, I think I would have been much less angry about inflation had Biden come out and said it was a problem, and he was going to do everything in his power to address it...even though I know intellectually that this would have changed little. I think for many people playing down inflation initially was seen as causing it...an inaccurate but powerful perception.
I agree. After living in Denmark and coming back to DC and NYC I have seen how the quality of these places have dropped.
It is stark in Tucson, where I spent a lot of time. I see it in the new city I live in. My sister and her friends all abandoned Portland because it got expensive and the quality dropped immensely.
Interestingly, Tucson was mentioned as one of the few places that shifted left.
Arizona's late votes lean right. I'm not sure Tucson will be shifting left when all votes are in.
Definitely agree disorder is a huge factor in the urban swing. Nothing has made me more sympathetic to Trump voters than seeing people just bring bags to a pharmacy, take tons of things off the shelves, and then walk out, which I have seen 5+ times since 2020.
But the fact that the swing is so uniform across demographics and geography doesn't track for me. Is it something like rural areas were madder about inflation but urban areas were annoyed by the disorder?
I'd tl;dr; it like this:
Inflation shifted the national electorate 5%. Disorder shifted big cities by an additional 5%.
Did big cities shift across all demographics? If only Hispanics were bothered by disorder but not Blacks/Whites to the same level, then there are other factors here.
I'm getting the impression that immigrants of all ethnicities shifted right, especially lower education ones. I feel like all the polling and crosstabs really misses something by not separating Black/White/Asian/Hispanic immigrants from Black/White/Asians/Hispanic whose families have been here for generations.
Blacks and Whites may have well shifted by nearly the exact same amount, if you control for education. I'm definitely getting into speculative territory here, but this pattern would explain which cities and rural regions shifted more than others pretty well, and could square with the exit polling that does exist.
I am extremely curious to see if Haitians also moved right, despite everything. I'm guessing they did.
In my local election, the number one thing driving my vote was who seemed more committed to unfucking the one drug corner a few blocks from my house. It quite literally looks like Hamsterdam from the Wire - just an absolute zoo, with dozens (hundreds?) of junkies milling about. Utter chaos. My bus to work stops across the street from it, and everyone on it (mostly professional types and older immigrant grandmas) literally holds their breath waiting to see if some lunatic screaming at the top of their lungs or about to smoke fentanyl ON THE BUS is about to get on. At least as often as not, this is exactly what happens.
A friend tried to claim to me that crime is down. No, the murder rate is down. I am not worried about getting murdered (the drug corner seems surprisingly safe from a violence perspective), but I would really like to not have to move about my city in this heightened state of anxiety. That's the main thing depressing my and my family's quality of life.
I ultimately (and enthusiastically) voted for Harris, and at the local level our elections are "non-partisan" so I guess I voted for Democrats there too, but in every race my vote went to the candidate relatively more focused on law and order, with almost no other considerations.
Man. I feel for you. I have several friends from Los Angeles who are going through similar things.
I agree with pretty much all of those points. I feel like the Dems should have leaned into hanging the chaos of 2020 onto Trump's lack of leadership in ads, like literally hit him from the right.
In the intervening years Trump's inner circle has become evermore of a Traveling Freak Show. And voting for Donald Trump and the crew from the Star Wars bar because you want order doesn't seem like a recipe for achieving one's goal.
"I feel like the Dems should have leaned into hanging the chaos of 2020 onto Trump's lack of leadership "
nobody would have believed that. This was a big city problem egged on by left leaning politicians
I believe it because it's true.
> nobody would have believed that. This was a big city problem egged on by left leaning politicians
That is just not true. The increase in crime at least was a national problem and affected urban and rural areas. The three states with the largest increase in murder rate were Montana, Kentucky and South Dakota. Not exactly progressive strongholds...
And there was also a corresponding surge in violent crime in rural areas https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251?mod=e2tw. Was that also the fault of lefty-politicians somehow?
Interesting article. I stand corrected.
Inflation as a form of disorder is a good take. Just a general sense of things being out of control.
I try to buy shaving cream at a Walgreen's, see that it's locked behind a panel, press a plastic button so someone can unlock it for me and then no-one comes. That's the one moment I understand why people vote for Trump.
Great example of the short and selective memories Americans have - this started happening under Trump during the George Floyd protests.
Oh yeah, I forgot that it's Republicans who are more lenient about shoplifting and public disorder. /sarc
That doesn’t negate my point. Americans also trust Republicans more on the deficit despite that party typically being the one driving it up.
It absolutely does negate your point, you think Democratic officials will be tougher on prosecuting shoplifters than Republicans? Your point on the deficit is 100% correct though, since there it *is* Republicans who are worse on the issue.
My point was a different and was this: voters have misattributed blame to Democrats, believing that law and order started distintegrating under their administration. in fact it was under the previous president.
Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans perceived to be the better party of law and order is a separate issue I’m not making.
Walgreen's stock is down 85% too. It's a death spiral. Tough way to end for a company founded in 1901.
Of mild, passing interest to me is the fact that CVS and Walgreens are getting hit by this more than grocery stores/Wal-Mart, etc.
Walmart checks your receipt at the door and has been doing it for years.
A person who votes for Jeb Bush or Haley or Brian Kemp because of that, I get it. A person who votes for Trump because of this is off their rocker and has no proportionate sense of judgment.
I don’t know that these markers of disorder give Trump an easy win absent inflation, but they do offer coverage for the claim that Trump sows disorder and chaos himself. Harris was also uniquely poor at projecting that she “had the situation under control”. Looking back at Hillary Clinton’s day-long Benghazi hearing, I just don’t think Harris ever could have matched such a performance. And, of course, Biden projected incompetence in limited but fatal ways of his own: by mis-judging his own health and viability in the election, and failing to act on immigration. So, with Harris as the candidate and the Biden replacement, these local markers of disorder proved to be a greater liability.
I think this at least explains why metros swung harder for Trump than rural areas.
I also think that the observation Ezra Klein made in his "Hidden Politics of Disorder" of whether the government is perceived to be doing everything they can to fight disorder or whether they're tolerating it is key to this. I'm a yellow-dog Democrat and even I got irritated with people telling me that crime wasn't a real problem because of the statistics when I had 5 theft attempts on my car in a single year and saw blatant shoplifting at my grocery stores. The Democrats spent too long denying that inflation and disorder were problems. They perceived the Republicans as being as mad about inflation and disorder as they are, whereas the Democrats never quite convinced people.
I'll say one thing that I've brought up in other posts and going to repeat here; we're making a lot of assumptions based on what's going to be a 1% Trump victory. Vote is 2% left there's a decent chance Harris wins.
Point being, I actually think you're take as merit (I "liked" it for a reason). But I would really really caution against overinterpreting what is ultimately still a pretty narrow victory for Trump.
But doesn't the fact that Trump won at all make it an even bigger deal. if Republican primary voters were smart at all they would have nominated Nikki Haley, then we would be looking at 10+ point swing.
Yeah, Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 by a much bigger margin than Trump is going to win it now, and she obviously lost and the Dems lost Senate seats in places like PA (deja vu) and seats in the House. And Biden in 2020, at around a 4.5% win, barely had enough coattails to hold on to the House majority. But the Republican coalition spacial advantages means a 1% Republican win is a resounding, trifecta-winning result--a win so big it redefines America, a wave so large it defies any expectation, etc etc.
"But violent crime is down!" is frankly an unsatisfying answer to somebody whose car was just broken into and they're being told by some "progressive" prosecutor that George Soros bankrolled that this isn't a big deal.
It took me a moment to understand what was going on in this comment. How could anyone vote *for* Trump while being *against* disorder? But I see that this is about the sorts of petty disorder like shoplifting and homelessness, not the big disorder of national policy lurching from attempted immigration ban to tariffs to undoing nafta to all the military leadership resigning.
Ezra Klein did a great interview with Lehman where he talks about the difference between improving violent crime rates and a sense of disorder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-charles-fain-lehman.html
Thank you for the link!
yes... I posted a link to the substack that described it.
Daily life disorder. But good point.
note I think large parts of the public are fine with attempted immigration bans. They even seem to be fine with mass deportations, though that would probably change if they were actually enacted.
Either way they want illegal immigration and the catch and release of asylum stopped. And TOTAL immigration brought WAY down
That was a great article, thanks for sharing it.
I would add that the situations in Israel and Ukraine add to a sense of disorder, more broadly defined than what Lehman uses. Obviously homelessness and Russia’s invasion are unrelated but I think they both push in the same direction to make people feel like order is falling apart
It's interesting how many responses to this post say, "I don't believe it, it was inflation."
The article says that demographics explain more of the shift in voting than economics. I'm more confident in a simpler argument that Harris focused on issues and Trump focused on culture, with the battlefield turning out to be all about culture. By culture, I mean general masculine/fight for me/outsider/screw the status quo image that Trump has earned intersecting with the groups he seems to have outperformed with, such as male hispanics.
Disorder fueled voters' desire for change. Inflation fueled voters' desire for change. They both signaled to people that their world was out of control and neither Biden nor Harris showed that they got that.
Trump's big innovation, in partnership with right wing media, is to manufacture a sense of disorder and grievance regardless of whether it's real. Republicans have done this for decades, but nothing like Trump.
Like you, I know so many people who were put on tilt by unpunished shoplifting. None of them experienced any disorder themselves. I'm not saying that the shoplifting didn't happen -- it did. But crime has gone down.
>Places with higher unemployment and a higher cost of living swung more toward Trump
Stimulate harder -> raise particularly salient CoLs -> get hammered on "inflation"
Muddle through with half-assed austerity stimulus -> weak recovery -> get hammered on "unemployment"
Macroeconomically damned if you do, damned if you don't...the best possible situation seems to be inheriting a strong economy someone else already paid the price for fixing.
Just gonna say that in a media landscape with just some really horrifically bad election takes, I'm proud to work at a place that is producing data driven journalism like this. Thank you all for reading and engaging with is piece.
While this is true, things clearly went better for us in Scenario 2 (lower wages + lower prices + higher unemployment) than they did in Scenario 1 (higher wages + higher prices + lower unemployment). The people want lower prices, full stop - overall economic health is less important. That seems unwise. But nevertheless, I think the Democrats' attitude, if they ever face this dilemma again, needs to be that the customer is always right.
Also, I remember that right when inflation was peaking and there were online debates among Democrats about whether interest rates should be raised, there was a pretty furious coordinated backlash from left-wingers accusing rate increase proponents of deviously wanting to throw working people out of work and impoverish them because they cared more about Wall Street investors who are hurt by inflation than they cared about fast food workers who were benefiting from it. To those leftists: thanks a lot, jerks! The damage had already been done by that point, but this election would have been even worse if they'd gotten their way.
But you don't think Jerome Powell and the Fed Board were taking advice from leftist twitter do you? I agree that the overall lesson on the political side is to take inflation much more seriously as a beast that can unexpectedly escape its cage. There may be merit in the idea that the target rate should be closer to 3% than 2%, and there were obviously signs read by the Fed suggesting the initial hikes were "transitory", but I doubt we will see another "maximum employment" strategy again, or a refusal to raise rates for as long as they did in '21-'22.
No I was not trying to imply that.
I think the biggest damage here was having the argument out there at all, because it made it seem like Democrats didn't take inflation seriously as a problem.
I think the Fed was (1) genuinely convinced it was a transitory post-COVID burst of inflation in early 2021, and (2) genuinely concerned about not providing enough stimulus to power out of a recession quickly, as we had failed to do last time. That made it too easy politically to go along with "team transitory" and to not take aggressive policy actions that might have led to a lower peak rate and a faster decline. Just have been seen to be taking it more seriously would have made Biden seem more vigilant in protecting the interests of the Great America Middle Class, which was his whole pitch in 2020.
This is exactly the problem. If the message had been "We believe this is temporary, but if inflation doesn't come down by x date, we will take y measure", then people wouldn't feel like they were complacent about it. The White House was just very passive about taking anti-inflation measures and was content to leave everything to the Fed, and unfortunately, people interpreted that as not caring about grocery costs.
Not to mention spending could have been reduced at that point. Instead of just jacking up interest rates
On the Republican side, the equivalent to them is at the top of the ticket. Tbd if he is focused and motivated enough to follow through on his atrocious economic policies.
This is a pretty terrible learned lesson. Concentrate heavy pain on a few people so the cost of eggs doesn't rise a few cents.
A few cents ... Used car prices are still up 30% vs. pre-COVID and insurance rates are up - I think - > 50%.
It's less than ideal to be sure. But the voters decide.
As James mentioned, how did things go better in scenario 1 when that's a part of how Trump got elected in 2016?
I don't know, mass unemployment seemed to go pretty poorly for republicans in 2008!
To be clear, increases in the unemployment rate are still bad, especially if it goes through the roof. My point is simply comparative: It's better to have unemployment go up 1 pp than inflation go up 1 pp, etc.
I think it makes more sense to compare 2024 to 2012, not 2016. 2016 was a try for a third term, which is more difficult than a try for a second term. Also, it was Hillary Clinton, who I'm not going to hate on here, but she is a very unique political figure who inspires all kinds of weird passions on both sides, it's confounding for any comparative analysis.
It’s been mentioned before but Reagan’s reputation for deregulation actually rests on stuff Carter did. Reagan reaped the long term benefits. And it was GHWB who helped cut the deficit. And by 2016 the economic recovery was almost complete (and turns out was not quite done).
If Trump actually oversees permitting reform and doesn’t idiotically try to repeal stuff like the CHIPS Act he actually may get a real tailwind from Biden’s policies. Again put in the weird position of hoping he actually listens to Musk.
Doesn't Musk also want him to cut billions from Medicaid though?
Look there is a definitely a "tallest dwarf" aspect to this take for sure. In an ideal world, Musk isn't anywhere near the White House.
In regards to Medicaid cuts, I'm counting on the fact that the GOP majority is likely to be extremely small. Only a few defections would tank any bill. I have to believe there are at lest a handful of GOP House members from swing districts would recognize that Medicaid cuts would be extremely damaging to re-election prospects in 2026.
Hopefully. My concern with that (and with ACA) is that unless the Republicans find a way to Orbanize future elections, their frontline House members have to know that because of thermostatic effects they're doomed in 2026 no matter what they do, and nothing left to lose means nothing to fear. If I were the GOP, I'd approach these members and say "Look, you're probably going to lose no matter what. But if you stand tall we'll take care of you afterwards with a cushy right-wing think tank job."
One thing that has been clear to me the last 10 years is that politicians value keeping their House and senate seat way more than we realize; whether its the sense of power, importance, the cushy perks, the chance to go TV etc.
I think in 2016 there was expectation of more GOP defections for this very reason. Stand up to Trump and you're "punishment" is cushy cable news gig or sitting on the boards of multiple companies and playing golf all day. And you get to bask in the feedback of people telling you that you took this brave stance. And yet with a few exceptions it hasn't happened.
Point being, I doubt this line of argument would sway swing district House members. They want to keep their seat full stop.
This may be, but depending on how much Trump pushes people, if he starts saying that if you don't support X, then he'll support a primary opponent, then lot of people are going to fall in line because they have more to fear in the primary than the general election.
"I have to believe there are at lest a handful of GOP House members from swing districts would recognize that Medicaid cuts would be extremely damaging to re-election prospects in 2026."
I'd like to think that, but, man, I wouldn't count on it. Keep your fingers crossed for a narrow Democratic House majority.
I suspect any permitting reform the Republican Congress passes and Trump signs will explicitly exclude that aimed at integrating renewables into the grid.
I also suspect that high on his agenda will be reversing any and all Biden policies just because.
This is where we have to remember that every presidential candidate has a laundry list of policies they want to implement and every administration only passes a small portion of it usually in a pretty modified form. Even if we got rid of the filibuster tomorrow, it still takes quite a while to put together complicated bills. Only so many bills are getting passed in a given year.
One thing that has been noted is the GOP can actually put pressure on Trump when they want (judges a big one). Part of why their actions last 10 years is cowardly; they had the power to stop this. Chips Act actually passed with bipartisan support. It seems likely there would be at least a handful of GOP senators who would be resistant to repealing a bill they helped pass.
But bigger one is priorities. Trump clearly doesn't actually care all that much about legislative priorities. And as Matt points out over and over again, the top three priorities for GOP is tax cuts, tax cuts and tax cuts.
I just have a hard time believing that repealing Biden policies is going to take priority over other issues (not sure it will pass but there are tons of true believer pro lifers who are going to press their luck to get a full abortion ban passed for example).
Most likely scenario is the tax cut bill contains particular provisions that repeal some of the clean energy subsidies; not great but also probably not disastrous to transition to green tech.
I think we have no concept for how completely supine this Republican Congress will be. Above all, politicians respect winners. And to have Trump come back from the dead and lead them to the smashing victory they just achieved, well, it's hard to imagine anyone outside of Lisa Murkowski saying no to him on anything.
"The dead speak! Somehow, Palpatine has returned . . . ."
That would be bad for Texas
Texas has a self-contained transmission system (run by ERCOT) so I'm not sure any federal legislation would apply to it anyway.
After that whole winter power fiasco they have been moving to connect more with neighbors. As their grid greens the incentive to skirt EPA regulations disappears. The Texas GOP is surprising pragmatic and responds to businesses that want to export energy (they already did this with wind.)
Solar panels might be turning the cows gay but that doesn’t stop Texans from installing them if it makes them money.
They're still pretty darn far from being connected to other grids.
They like being independent of FERC.
Absolutely. Trump is in position to benefit from all of Biden's work.
The sad reality is that inflation hurts 100% of people a small, but visible amount. Unemployment hurts the people who are unemployed (say 5%) a huge amount, but everybody else (95%) feels very little pain. Politically, it pretty much never makes sense to allow inflation and the Phillips curve pretty much tells us that the tradeoff means higher unemployment when exogenous economic events occur.
On top of that, the people who would have been unemployed, but are not, do not realize that they have benefitted.
We need to reject that trade off, it's objectively worse! There needs to be a better way to talk about and manage inflation but I don't know what that is.
< a huge amount >
I don't think that's the case. Best I can tell the more narrow cycles between lower and higher unemployment rates just create longer churn between jobs and the labor force participation rates follow longer, more macro trends.
Strange game….the only way to win is not to play.
That is Fed mistakes control everything. "Stimulus," fiscal policy generally, does not affect macroeconomic outcomes. although voter and many commenters on this Substack think it does. It affects the composition of demand between saving and investment and between sectors but not the total which the Fed controls as it operates a Flexible Average Inflation Target.
The echo of this I hear in the write up <<Yes, do bring this guy back AOAP>> is that the Biden Administration suffered first from the excess over-inflation in 2021-23 (specifically the failure to start raising the EFFR back in Sept 2021) and then again by the failure to start reducing the EFFR in December 2023 and the (still low and only up from record lows) increase in unemployment.
I don't know if a concerted effort by the Administration to distance itself from the macroeconomic results was possible. It seems that it would have been worth a try at least not to have seem to get drawn into the debate over whether inflation in 2021 was "temporary" beyond expressing confidence that _the Fed_ would make sure that inflation was temporary, no more than it thought necessary for the recovery. Also in retrospect I wonder if it was wise the to label the CO2 emissions reduction bill the "Inflation Reduction" Act. That sort of reinforces false public perception that the Administration can affect inflation.
"That is Fed mistakes control everything. "Stimulus," fiscal policy generally, does not affect macroeconomic outcomes."
If the Trump administration went absolutely wild and abolished the Fed completely. Would there be no macroeconomic outcomes?
Build an image as an outsider who "fights for you," and the policies are less important. Become seen as an inside and squish, there is no policy that will win.
Biden is the only "insider" coded presidential candidate to win since Bush Sr. in 1988. And he probably doesn't win without the combination of Covid and Trump fatigue.
I think this reality says a lot of very negative things about voters (they're morons.)
That’s not my intent. I really dislike judging voters — the What’s the Matter with Kansas premise. In a democracy people can choose their candidate and the dimensions they use to choose between candidates. It’s condescending when people declare that everybody should vote on “the issues.”
I disagree with many peoples’ choice, but respect their right to choose however they wish.
Options are also hindered by how much the possible win-win scenarios are disbelieved or disallowed. Things like "Increase supply of X through targeted deregulation and automation and trade."
High unemployment didn’t hurt Obama enough for his election. Maybe some but not as much as inflation hurt Harris.
This article is much more useful than the thousands of think pieces on why democracy is bad actually because people are stupid sexist racists.
It's lucky people weren't racist or sexist in 1776 so American democracy was able to get off the ground.
I think a possible difference now is that people in the past tended to vote along the lines suggested by the (relatively) intelligent writers of the newspapers they read whereas now more people vote along the lines of whatever shit they read on the internet. This could be a mechanism that makes voters effectively dumber.
I’m not a historian of political speeches but can anyone confirm that they have indeed gotten less sophisticated much like the grade level of the writing in newspapers?
I guess I can't answer anything about your specifics, but people were really dumb back then, too, and much more often illiterate and or drunk on top of that.
And going back to the 18th and 19th century, the press, as I understand it, operated a little more like the press of today than the press of 1990. Many highly partisan papers existed and used their reach to whip up riots. Robert E Lee's own father was the victim of one such Baltimore mob that was angry over an insufficiently patriotic response to the War of 1812. They poured molten wax into his eyeballs.
Sometimes I forget how much more violent people were a century plus ago…
I wonder what turnout was like in the 19th century both overall and by demographic.
It was crazy in so many ways. One of the reasons Lincoln got almost no votes in the south is that county officials had to agree to put you on the ballot (or something like that). Of course we also know women and black people couldn't vote, and some states still had property owner limitations earlier on.
There was also a lot more actual, meaningful fraud where corrupt officials were just adding zeros, and stuff like that.
There was a close election in BC the other day where a couple of ridings went to automatic judicial recount because the vote differential was under 100. Good to see some progress over the decades!
brilliant
I do think a male candidate would perform better. That is not why Democrats got a shellacking. Calling voters dumb stupid racist sexists shows how out of touch Democratic infospheres have become.
The phrase "voting against one's interests" (and all its variations) needs to be expunged from the discourse forever.
“What’s the Matter with Kansas” officially dead.
what's the matter with kansas is fully reversed, lower income people prefer to cut taxes and cut medicaid.
In the sense not to speak it (since it very much exists)?
It does not exist. What does exist is someone else misidentifying what the voter has chosen as his/her "interests".
Not in this case. Voters have consistently been cleat in polls and other reporting that the economy has been one of their top-most concerns.
Yes, in this case. For we have no idea how they define "the economy" or what policies they think should be implemented to support their version of "the economy". Higher taxes, lower taxes? More regulation, less regulation? Either answer could be how they define their "interests".
Polling exists, but (as we have just seen), it isn't very good at sampling people who don't trust pollsters. And repeating the message that voters are too dumb or naive or misguided or whatever to vote for their interests is a bad tactic.
It exists in the sense that you have decided what other voters' interests are for them, which is probably why they don't vote for your preferred candidates.
How do you know?
We can see it. One example: people complain about the economy they’re currently in. They see the fix as Trump despite the evidence being that his tariffs, as proposed, would royally fuck those voters rather than continuing the Harris status quo.
Interesting that you can ascertain the precise values of each voter.
Do you think that is true generally, or there was something special about this election?
> According to a meta-study by Susanne Schwarz of Swarthmore College and Alexander Coppock of Yale, voters (particularly if they are Democrats) marginally favour hypothetical female candidates.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/03/crypto-bros-v-cat-ladies-gender-and-the-2024-election
Oh voters are definitely stupid. That's been constant forever though.
Are there really a lot of "democracy is bad" takes coming from the left atm? What do they propose it be replaced with?
I apologize ahead of time for bringing this topic up, because it's led to some vitriolic debate at SB, but I do think it would be good if the left pulled back on "expand voting, always" mentality that's prevailed over the last half century. I don't think we should go back to poll taxes, but always encouraging everyone to vote whether or not they are mentally sound, have a felony record, or even have an opinion seems like it doesn't actually help democracy. Ditto with ballot initiatives.
That said, this might be a great time to begin pushing to abolish the ticking-time bomb known as the electoral college and replace it with the popular vote, or at least eliminate the possibility of faithless electors or legislatures overruling their own states' resuls.
Democracy is Bad isn't the headline but if you say the problem is voters are bad and elections allow stupid people to elect evil people you are implying Democracy is bad. It's a distraction from any sort of critical self analysis. So much of what I am seeing is just distraction and victimhood mentality. I mean, we can smell our own and liberals are real pro's at neurotic gender and race based analysis in place of actual work on stuff.
For the most part I agree, but as far as actual work, what is there to be done? Saying stuff like "voting against their own interests" sounds gross and snobby, but the people most dependant on Medicaid and social security just voted for the candidate and billionaire backer who've explicitly put it at risk. Maybe it was always true, but it's especially true now that the majority of voters really can't be reached through policy and issues alone.
The Democratic brand is just toxic now to middle-America and below. It's a problem of marketing, which I don't think the Dem party apparatus is currently constituted to handle well.
The problem is that Trump has "said" he is going to protect entitlements and, in fact, make them even better though smart business style management!
We interpret this as typical anti government schlock looking undermine the welfare state and I don't think we are wrong.
But it isn't true to say that Trump ran on bulldozing social security or entitlements.
I've said elsewhere, the perception among a lot of people is that Republicans are basically now more like old school Democrats and Democrats are college campus activists who tell you to call your abuela "Latinx".
But people extremely close to Trump openly said that they intend to go after entitlements.
Drive me absolutely crazy. Trump gets a pass even though powerful, influential people next to him say these things, whereas Harris gets tarred with something some Oakland CA council person or the head of What The Hell Is That think tank says.
That may be what Fox-influenced voters think but let's not perpetrate this absurdity here.
To be fair, Harris did say some absolutely crazy things back in 2019. That made it hard for her to separate what current crazies are saying from her campaign.
It isn't fair that Trump can just lie and people will take the bait but that's a common political ploy, he just does it in a far more offensive and mean spirited way.
I don't think I'm perpetrating absurdity, I clearly said that I think he is trying to undermine the welfare state.
Yeah, the problem with good marketing means basically being good at lying. He didn't openly run on bulldozing entitlements, but it doesn't matter what he openly supports, his voters will see whatever they want to see. But that $2 trillion in cuts can only come from one place.
And I think it's good that the Democrats at least on the surface try not to sink that low. Like you said, their problem is more the lies they tell themselves.
The question is which direction will the Dems go, Yglesian centrism or embracing their leftist populist elements? Some of whom hold politically toxic beliefs. Because this election shows that voters don't really trust Dems when they tack to the center either. It's a cultural gap that seems impossible to bridge, at least in the short term.
Yeah all these problems seem insurmountable in the short term. Just like Republicans felt in 2012 or in 2020. The thing is, they are not and the voters can be forgiving and coarse correct.
The essential question democrats have to answer is “who do we work for as a political movement”. If the answer is “we work for Vassar post grads” then we are fucked.
the thing is new suburban/educated democrats who casually follow politics largely believe the Orange Man is Bad, are you (or Democratic operatives, or whatever) going to tell them that's wrong or Democrats should trim their sails on it? Because it sure seems like the Orange Man is Bad to me. He seems pretty bad. Do you believe Trump is good? How can the party be marketed to people who think Trump is good?
A lot of people in "middle-America" think Trump is good, but I really don't see how you are going to get mainstream Democrats to trim their sails on something obviously correct to reach voters who are obviously wrong.
I think in the end this problem will go away because Democrats will win the midterms and then Trump won't win again. But I also get frustrated with people acting like Democrats are "out of touch" when they generally just hold sincere and correct beliefs about the future of the country.
I agree, he is bad. But a message of just orange man bad clearly doesn't work. Especially when he can just point the finger right back, and say we are bad in a way that marks us as clearly culturally the other to what resonates with middle and working class America. Framing this as good vs. evil just doesn't work when they have more affinity for Trump's vibes.
I agree that things will swing back, the problem doesn't fully go away when Trump does. The data shows these cultural divides are just getting wider. To your last sentence, I do believe that Democrats are directionally correct about the best way forward, but, to Matt Y's earlier made point, there are plenty of incorrect ideas and elite misinformation on our side too. Saying we're out of touch is more a call to acknowledge that we don't have the right to be as sanctimonious as some have been. Because normal voters hate it.
Sure. but i guess i have trouble calling people "out of touch" for correct ideas. Especially when they mostly aren't meaning to engage with politics as political operatives.
I don't think we'd make the same statement on immigration or free trade--if you are pro immigration or pro free trade those are correct beliefs but are essentially known to be politically unhelpful. So what we say in those cases isn't that economists are out of touch, its just that this is unhelpful for democrats to run on so we choose to talk about other stuff.
If Democrats were truly going to be ruthless about winning, they should be doing at least a little bit of voter suppression. Cutting down on early voting, being open to voter ID laws, etc. It's super clear high turnout doesn't benefit Dems now and probably won't for some time. I'm not saying they should do that... but maybe they should.
I'm not saying they should do it either. But in terms of spending limited political capital, there's better things to prioritize. Trade voter ID laws for something meaningful.
I've said here before that the experience of working as an election official really has changed my mind on the voter ID topic. In practice, I just don't get the impression that it is dissuading a lot of people (hell, we had over 90% participation of registered voters on Tuesday). If it has any meaningful effect in increasing trust in the process, it's probably a good trade IMHO.
It's relatively minor but has been a major place I disagree with the democratic party for a long time. Every normal person when asked if you should have an ID to vote just shrugs and says it makes sense. I understand there's a unique history here but it's not 1950 anymore.
I got here eventually. Better late than never.
The thing is that Republicans have moved on from voter ID to putting cameras in elections offices while ballots are being counted, that's their new version of trying to prevent Dems from "cheating."
I truly don't care as long as they're the ones paying for the cameras
agree
I have no idea if this is the right strategy for the Democrats. But what I do admire about the Republicans is their ruthlessness about winning. I'd like for the Democrats to share some of that ruthlessness (within the law of course!) and not care so much about playing nicely.
In other words, for the Democrats to behave like the Republicans actually picture them doing.
I think there's nothing wrong with expanding the franchise, but there's a couple basic election reforms I'd like to see for people to have a fighting chance at being informed voters. Overall, I want to see simpler elections.
1: One election per year. The US just has too many special elections and other off-cycle elections. We should have our elections on the November day so that people don't just miss elections from having to keep track of March or June stuff. If that means primaries a year in advance of regular elections, that seems fine to me.
2. Fewer elected positions. I voted for Parks director, Water Board, and multiple transit agency boards in this election. It seems crazy that those are all elected positions when even relatively informed people like me develop an opinion on them by reading their profiles on vote411 over a couple minutes. It feels like these positions would be much better if they were appointed via an interviewing process rather than elected.
3. Reforms on initiatives and referenda. I'm in California and I had 10 ballot initiatives to vote on in this election, which is pretty normal for my ballots over the years. It's too many, and some of the ballot measures are really confusing. I don't know exactly what the reforms should be for this process, but I wish that at the very least, the ones that make it to the ballot were clear and easy to understand.
Ironically, in states with ballot initiative processes, you could fix #1 and #2, but you'd have to make #3 worse first.
it's not that Democracy is bad, it's just that in a two party system party elites need to take some responsibility to avert the worst outcomes (and if these means taking a dive in a general election, those are the responsibilities of being an elite). Behavior of Republican elites through this whole thing has been absolutely despicable.
I think structural forces are being underrated. Once the internet existed the bipartisan consensus of the 20th century was going to break. Republicans just capitulated very fast in a frankly galling manner. Trump probably could've been averted in a number of ways, but something like him was going to happen.
No matter how mentally unsound you think a group is, I don’t think they’re going to be *anti*-correlated with getting at meaningful moral and social facts. (Sure, in any one election nearly half of people vote the wrong way, but I’m talking about correlations generally.) And it’s only if someone is anti-correlated that their vote makes things worse.
I personally think that ex-felons and people who don't have any ID are probably anti-correlated.
In general, less information, less mental soundness, less IQ, less wisdom or experience and more anti-social life choices ought to correlate less with moral or wise choices.
I feel like the above is fairly uncontroversial, if you were looking for life advice on a decision, you'd prefer to go to an informed, mentally sound, smart, wise person who has lived a good life.
Of course it's much more trouble than it's worth to try to limit voting rights on any of the above, but when we're debating marginal decisions, I think it's good to keep in mind.
I agree that those groups are going to be *less* correlated with good ideas. But I think they will still be *positively* correlated. Being actually *anti*-correlated is hard.
If I was only allowed to ask one person, I would obviously ask the one who I trust most. But if I have a chance to ask many people, with importantly different perspectives, then it’s very valuable to include even the ones that are noisy, particularly because there will be a few issues that they have importantly different perspectives on, and the ones they are noisy about they’ll just cancel each other out.
Multiple things can be true. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say sexism and racism were factors and that women and racial minorities are going to get hit harder by Trump administrative policies, and that that makes some women and people of color feel unprotected and abandoned by the electorate.
I don't dispute that there were voters, probably millions of voters, who were dissuaded by Kamala Harris's sex and race.
However, I think it's worth pointing out that in an alternate universe, the GOP ran their middle-aged non-white woman former administration official candidate against our super old white guy former president. In that universe, Nikki Haley beat Joe Biden by ten points.
Those are legitimate feelings and I don't want to under rate them. I'm just much more focused on the solutions part and how to win back the electorate. The anger, fear and sorrow are understandable but, at least for me, generally useless for clarity in motivation.
I think it’s just really fresh because we’re two days after the election. Jumping straight into problem-solving mode is admirable, but I don’t think it needs to come at the expense of calling people stupid for having those feelings or at the expense of recognizing that sexism and racism were factors.
That's a fair point but how you react in loss is often well remembered by your opponents. We should just be mindful of that fact and not rush to call all Trump voters racists and sexist. We are going to need some of these people to win future elections.
I just don’t think you’ll make friends or get traction telling women they shouldn’t say the truth (sexism was a factor) because it’s politically inconvenient. Identity politics seems to be the only factor in this loss where centrists are saying “it’s true but you shouldn’t SAY it” and that makes the sexism and racism seem even more pronounced.
I think you can say it without saying those are broadly supported ideas within the Trump coalition. I think that’s a minority of weirdos and lord knows we on the left have our own weirdos too.
Meanwhile, Trump just announced Susie Wiles will be his Chief of Staff -- the first woman to serve in that role. I assume you will be happy with this? Or is your solidarity with "women and people of color" dependent on them agreeing with our politics?
It is time we abandon the demographic dissection of the citizenry and talk about people as people rather than as mere representatives of their sex/race/nationality. It is turning people off and losing support for our policies.
I don’t think being glad that individual women are having some opportunities in Trump’s admin negates that this was a loss for women generally, facilitated by a disregard for women’s rights broadly.
That wasn't my question. Are you happy with Susie Wiles being named as Chief of Staff? Or do you look at it as I do -- a MAGA person was named as Chief of Staff and the fact that she is a woman is irrelevant.
Her chromosomes don't matter to me. Her policies are what matter to me. But when we frame the Harris loss in terms of "sexism and racism", it doesn't interrogate why we lost. It is copium. Margaret Thatcher is revered on the conservative side. So is Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Amy Coney Barrett, etc. To varying degrees, I think those people are wrong on important topics. But their wrongness isn't related to their sex or skin color.
This is a really simplistic and binary conception of sexism. It’s not just “women can’t get ahead.” It’s “women are judged differently than men and their needs and rights are deprioritized,” as I explained above.
Sexism and racism are two of many factors in an multicausal loss, but they are factors. That isn’t copium. Copium is pretending sexism and racism weren’t factors because idpol is lame.
The voting public also holds "simplistic and binary conceptions" of a lot of things, but that is who we have to win over.
Less opprobrium for flunking economics, particularly when your MSM pundits also flunk. :)
I feel like I’m the only person who thinks this fairly “uniform swing” is good news for Dems. It means there are lots of persuadable voters who will come back in 2026 when they get fed up with Trump!
While it certainly would provide a nice narrative to say “the problem was that [group X] drifted away from the Dems” - the uniform swing (especially when combined with relatively strong Dem downballot performance) suggests this was just one of those “fire the head coach” nights. As Matt has pointed out many times, incumbents worldwide are losing - everyone is mad about the rate of inflation and general handling of post-COVID society. Harris was a mediocre candidate, tied to an unpopular president, in an anti-incumbent environment. Sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand.
One silver lining is that the electorate might be more elastic than people have previously asserted
Right. The bigger problem for Dems is continued racial depolarization. There aren't enough educated voters to make up for continued attrition of minorities. But that's a good thing is every other possible way, and politically, might open up the GOP to immigration sooner than we think.
According to exit polls (so take with a grain of salt) age depolarization is also a problem. CNN says the youngest voters shifted right while Dems won the over 65 vote. But 20% of those voters will not be around in 4 years.
Racial depolarization poses one challenge for Democrats. Another is if, as seems to be happening, Trump makes it acceptable once again to be a Republican in good standing and also be pro-choice on abortion.
For a long time, Democrats have been able to essentially hold hostage voters who can’t stomach the Republican position on abortion and gay rights, but otherwise would prefer Republican policies on economics. By breaking the 40-year logjam on abortion and returning that issue to state elected officials, and forcing Republicans in many states to pay a price for being too far from popular opinion on abortion, in retrospect it may turn out that Trump did the Republican Party a big favor.
I don't think that the GOP is going to be able to fully extricate itself from abortion as an issue. It will continue to be a problem for the party at the federal level.
Trump has unique protection on that point because voters understand that he's a philandering New York billionaire who obviously does not give a shit about "pro-life" and never has. But when genuinely tradcath JD Vance steps up to the plate, does he get the same leeway from voters? I'm not so sure.
A big part of Trump's success has been that he can pander to religious voters without alienating non-religious ones because religious voters like the pandering & non-religious ones (correctly) perceive it as insincere pandering.
This sounds like a good problem to have in the grand scheme of things. If the GOP adopts every broadly popular Democrat position many Dems may well vote for the GOP, but in exchange you get the Democrat policies.
This is also why, politically, it's been a huge mistake for Democrats to let voters have Democratic priorities piecemeal via ballot initiatives. Why vote for Democrats when you can vote Republican to stick it to the libs and also protect abortion access by voting for a ballot initiative?
Honestly a good thing. Spoils and patronage systems are bad, and it would be better for everybody if Democrats genuinely prioritized everybody instead of salami slicing demographic and interest groups.
Unfortunately Trump is all in on spoils and patronage, while Democrats were more meritocratically open with their tokens and quotas.
Sure, but my point is that it turns out there wasn’t actually much difference in the swing among racial groups (though it seems like Hispanics may have moved toward the GOP a bit more than others). Everyone moved against the Dems - white, black, Asian.
You could read that as racial depolarization, but more realistically it’s just an unhappy electorate. Personally I think the latter is a much better outcome than if we had seen (eg) black voters move away from Dems while white support remained the same.
I take your point, but pre-election polling, exit polls and voter registration data has all been point towards racial depolarization. White voters may have actually remained the same, or at least did much less than other groups.
Here's CNN's exit polls for example, which show black voters moving away from Dems while white support remained the same:
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/politics/2020-2016-exit-polls-2024-dg/
Again, I know exit polls are not to be fully trusted. But polling and voter reg data also showed this.
Fair, and to be honest I thought there was going to be more depolarization than there was. But looking at Jed’s table it does seem that most types of communities moved toward the GOP at roughly the same rate.
We won't know for sure until we get more granular verified voter data. For now all we can do is guess based on what social scientists call "ecological" signs. For example, if an all white county moved right, we can be pretty confident it was white voters going right, whereas, it wouldn't necessarily tell us if men moved more than women or vice versa.
But when I mentally combine the "ecological" county and state shifts with pre-election polling, exit polling and voter registration data, it seems likely that the real story is immigrants and / or 2nd generation folks moving right. Probably more so than by what we might guess "ecologically" just by looking at how much the Bronx or LA moved.
My logic is I see from polls that white support overall remained about flat, yet many all-white rural counties shifted right a little bit. So some very significant share of whites must have moved left. But they don't show up on the map because their POC neighbors, especially in immigrant communities, moved much farther right.
Wait for the granular exit data to see if that's correct, but that's my guess.
That is good news. The bad news is that a lot of damage will be done, some of it irreversible, before the Dems get that chance. Twenty years after the GWB trifecta, we're still living with the consequences of their worst policies, and this trifecta could well be worse. Also, I would expect the Republicans to use this opportunity at least try to Orbanize future elections (guys like Vance and Musk in particular will be focused on this project), though I'm not sure how successful they'll be.
yeah this is what I was telling my kid this morning. My wife is a more casual politics follower than I am and relatively catastrophic about the whole thing. I was like we have had really, really bad presidents in the past. We will likely get past it. But when we have especially bad presidents they have permanent effects. At least for me it's really about the terrible policies they are trying to implement that might be impacting us for decades than about the psychic scars of "who we are as a country." Because the median voter doesn't really know anything about politics and is pretty fucking capricious with their vote choice.
"why was he so bad?"
"well, he started a war for no reason."
Yes of course, it’s always better to win an election than lose one. And I have many of the same fears.
But in terms of winning the next election, I think the Dems would be worse off if the loss was solely attributable to (e.g.) white suburban college educated voters defecting back to the GOP. That would suggest they’ve got a more intractable problem. The fact that it was nearly everyone, everywhere (other than exurban Atlanta?) says it was more of a general malaise, and the thermostat can turn quickly on who gets blamed for that.
I think they'll have a hard time Orbanizing elections. The US is too big and too politically distributed.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't be concerned about it, or that they won't try. I just don't think that they'll succeed.
the other thing is that Trump appears to have unique popularity among at least some set of his voters, and is also very old.
Right, but that's precisely why a guy like Vance would take a particular interest in this. Maduro has zero charisma but he's been able to stay in office long after Chavez's demise.
If I were aspiring Orbanist, I would try to do this by getting the media (both the big internet platforms and the networks) to play ball, partly through cajoling their executives and partly through legal and regulatory threats.
Based on recent numbers, our media is so despised and distrusted that it’s falling apart and being replaced with no assistance from government officials. It seems to be getting replaced by something much more atomized.
Having seen the actual election results now, how much of our media was telling us anything helpful or realistic? Were they focused on important issues that affect large numbers of Americans, or Liz Cheney firing squads and Haitian house pets?
Republicans still have enough animus for them that they may do something overt, but the smart thing to do would be to stand aside and watch them keep digging the hole they find themselves in.
Over a 8-12 year time period, this is definitely better for dems
1) A Harris victory would likely have led to getting killed in the 2026 midterms followed by a republican president in 2028. Now, dems will probably be favored in both (at least in the House in 2026)
2) The strength of Trump's victory will (hopefully) require a reckoning among democrats. A victory would have rewarded some of their worst instincts
3) It's clear that having open primaries without a candidate preemptively clearing the field is essential for either candidate to find the best candidate. A Trump win means that the democrats will have a true competition in 2028 but the republicans may not (depending on how Vance performs and is perceived in the future). A Harris win would have led to no real primary in 2028 and possibly 2032 (if she somehow eked out a 2028 win)
Making people fight it out in primaries refines candidates and helps the cream rise. That’s how we got our most popular candidates, in 1992 and 2008.
They cleared the field in 2008 and Hillary nearly lost to what started out as a protest candidacy. Harris fell flat on her face in a primary, then ended up being the nominee anyway and the results are what they are.
I think Democrats in general need to get over this notion that any disagreement of discouraging word will sink the whole enterprise. When it comes to primaries, if you want to find out who the best players are, you have to roll the ball out on the court and let them play some games.
I agree with some of this but I really don’t think going from 51% of the vote to ~48% of the vote requires a “reckoning”.
A 3% change is small as a percentage of the total electorate, but it’s large as a percentage of swing voters. Because of this, I don’t see the left’s current path leading to a win in the near future.
Democrat victories since 2016 have largely been reactions against Trump, not positive affirmations of their vision or policies. This election was different and democrats should be honest with themselves about that.
Under the circumstances I think it does. There's a difference between losing by that margin to Bush in 2004 (who was still popular at that point) and Trump in 2024 (a two-time popular vote loser who was deeply unpopular.)
Funny you mention that...I think this was a trap election. Basically, whoever won it has a huge and unmanageable budget deficit. They have to manage this on the tail end of huge economic upswing with uber low employment, going into a demographic situation that will likely create a high interest environment (increasing the cost of borrowing) and will also have to figure out how to fund all the entitlements (think medical insurance, SS, Medicare, Medicaid) and somehow find money for defense.
Basically, this was a no-win situation for whichever party won.
If the Democratic Party can move back to center (I am not saying far right...just maybe like Obama in 2012 or so), they can be positioned to absolutely clean up.
My fear is that I have zero faith in the party to do that. They seem to be unable to resist their leftward nut jobs and the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders/Lina Khan crowd (not I am not saying that Warren is nut...I disagree with many/most of her policies but she is presents at least legitimate views).
So what I think we will end up with is a crazy Dem party that vacillates between defund the police/anarcho-protesting/Warrenesque economics and a populist/authoritarian Republican party. The only thing the two will find common agreement on is bad/populist economic ideas.
you are not the only person
Uniform geographically but isn’t the swing disproportionately big with Hispanics? Do we need some think pieces about this?
"It means there are lots of persuadable voters who will come back in 2026 when they get fed up with Trump!"
It means there are a lot of persuadable voters would COULD come back in 2026. IF IF IF you can persuade them
The history of thermostatic public opinion suggests it really doesn’t take much.
Fair enough
The biggest problem I have seen through work (White House directives and memos) is how much Democratic leadership and priorities is dominated by activist mind worms. Democrats don’t even have an ear for people without college (Harvard) degrees any more. The party needs to stop listening to the self anointed intelligentsia.
I found the culprit!!!
“ One Harris aide called for more diversity among decision-makers, pointing to a far too-white leadership makeup of Harris’ campaign and Biden’s former campaign. The campaign did have campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and former Rep. Cedric Richmond as a senior adviser, among others.
“There was a huge gap in leadership of color, up and down the system that I think played to some of these blind spots,” the person said. “I just want to see more honesty and a little less whiteness ... I think that if we are able to kind of look within ourselves and see the talent that is already there, then there can be a new generation of leadership. But it’s going to be tough. This feels like a decade loss. This is really bad, and we have to decide where we’re going to go from here. We have to restructure the whole thing.”
Yes, my precious darling insufficient DEI in the Harris campaign was surely the problem.
There's actually a grain of truth there since (as Matt has written) white Democrats are further left than blacks or Latinos. So having more of the latter might help you develop more moderate, normie-friendly messaging.
They don’t select staff from the set of all Black people. Only the wokest of wokesters.
You can get a staff with all of the races, skin shades, and sexualities on God's green Earth together and it won't matter one wit because they all went the same Ivies and/or SLACs.
You mean Syracuse and Howard?
That is a very fair point and I certainly exaggerated. I do think that the observation stands, that no matter how racially diverse a group of college grads may be they are still most likely to share the perspective of college grads, and not be particularly in tune with the attitudes and interests of non grads with the same racial background.
This morning in my inbox, the student newspaper blames Democrats poor showing on their "treating people from marginalized communities as props instead of people." The list includes the usual alphabet soup and now also Palestinians.
I get it, I was young an idealistic once. But if your takeaway from this election was that Democrats lost because they used Palestinians as a prop, you are living in a reality that is distinct from my own.
They still produce the same cultural mindset, by and large. If they were community college grads it might be different.
Probably could get most of the way there by hiring some people who went to state schools and majored in something outside the soft sciences.
There's a failing on the left in not realizing how much more things like education, income, neighborhood, religion matter in comparison to race. Like BZC said, if assuming someone has a diverse opinion because of their census category is sort of kind of racist in itself, and it's terrible to watch the left fall into that trap again and again.
Given that educational polarization increasingly seems to be THE fundamental root of Democratic underperformance, I think the single most effective strategy the Party could undertake would be to increase the ranks of non-college-grads at any every level - candidates, staff, and Party leadership. Maybe someone's already suggested this, but if so I haven't encountered it.
Sounds like a good idea. Alternatively, I keep in mind that GOP leadership is also largely very college educated. They are mostly ivy-league lawyers, too, but somehow they’ve figured it out. I don’t know how to copy them so I like your plan better, but it’s worth noodling on the trick the GOP has pulled off.
Only some of the left have that.
Of course, but it's broadly acceptable enough. For example, I work with this lawyer who always talks about diversity in this way: "If your team all looks like me, you have a diversity problem."
And that always offends me because of how essentialist and reductionist it is. Does my multi-racial child count? Does she look sufficiently different to be on the team? Or too white to count as diversity? Do the adopted Black kids in my neighborhood count as diverse, although they're growing up in white families in one of the best school districts in my state? It gets icky and people feel like it's perfectly acceptable to say in left wing circles.
David Plouffe? Stephanie Cutter? Jennifer Dillon? All those people who supported the campaign's outreach to Liz and Dick Cheney, and featured Republicans all over the place?
Who were these leftist campaign people who sunk the Harris effort?
I'd say that some anonymous (fourth-tier?) campaign aide complaining that the campaign wasn't diverse enough shows how far from a DEI campaign the Democrats ran.
Again, maybe they couldn't overcome an inbred view of Democrats among the electorate on this marker in one election and it will take longer to change people's minds, but we have to admit that the campaign really really tried to do so.
Yeah, but she tried to spend three months being a completely different person than she was in 2020, by bringing on board one of the least popular names in American politics. How much did anyone believe any of it? Do even Democrats feel like they know who she was going to be? She was going to be not-Trump, but beyond that?
What was that unpopular name that she brought on?
I think her shifting from her 2019 positions may indeed have hurt her, perhaps less because she was hiding her true self and more that voters didn't know what version of her to believe. (My opinion: the 2024 version is truer to her positions than the ones she was probably forced to take in 2019).
The 2019/2020 Democratic primary campaign really set the party back. I hope we never make that kind of mistake again.
The problem is that we have video evidence of the stances she took in 2019 and no evidence of her describing which stances she has changed her mind on and why. All we have are "sources close to the campaign" or reading the tea leaves to determine what she believes today that she didn't believe 5 years ago.
The only way to expunge the 2019 primary from our history is to confront those stances and explicitly repudiate them. Otherwise, they will remain stuck to the Party for a long time.
Yes. She should have strongly repudiated them. A terrible own goal.
You do it by starting off in a Reagan-like self-deprecating way: “Yes, those were some really bad takes on my part. And you can see how well I did in the primary with them. I almost made it to Jan. 1 and rolled up zero votes!”
And then, pivot: “In the past four years, I’ve learned a lot from our current President and from touring the country and talking to Americans in all ways of life, and after learning so much, I’ve changed some of my earlier positions. What do you do?”
Cheney. I just don’t think she’s popular with anyone outside the MSNBC audience.
It seemed like a reasonable strategy to me, to try to turn some of the remaining Reagan Republicans. It just turns out that there aren't any. The Republican party is MAGA through and through.
I was just speaking generically, not necessarily commenting on the specifics of the Harris campaign (even if that was what the original quote was about).
Harris significantly underperformed Democratic senate candidates. This happened in Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin.
Biden was a fool for choosing her as vice president, especially at 77 or 78.
Yep. Political malfeasance driven by identity politics.
Another way to look at the Harris choice, though, is that she is just a classic ticket-balance/faction-placation choice. Black voters (still - the statistical movement there will turn out to have been tiny, unlike Hispanic voters) and women are the Democratic base. Presidential candidates of both parties have been using the vice-presidency to placate the presidential candidate's perceived weaknesses with one end or other of the base from time out of memory. E.g. Andrew Johnson for Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt for McKinley, John Nance Garner for FDR, Nixon for Ike, LBJ for JFK, Mondale for Carter, Bush for Reagan, Bentsen for Dukakis, Quayle for Bush. May be a good idea, may be a bad one, may end up with a vice president not anyone's ideal choice to assume the presidency - but who else was Biden supposed to pick in order to reassure his core constituencies?
if he had to pick a black woman, stacey abrams is smarter and a better speaker
And not from California. I love my state, but there is a reason the only presidents we've made were Republicans. Our Democrats are accurately perceived as further left than the country so it's always going to be a massively uphill battle for them on the national stage.
A very liberal friend has pulled his support of the groups. His theory is the relentless left wing advocacy has become counterproductive and serves to alienate voters and move them to the right. And obviously if you’re funding them to move the country left and they are moving it right - it’s time to pull the plug.
Lines up with this…
“The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly seems to be between professionals associated with ‘knowledge economy’ industries and those who feel themselves to be the ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy – including growing numbers of working class and non-white voters.”
I think this analysis is persuasive and deserves some amplification.
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/contextualizing-the-2024-election?triedRedirect=true
I started reading his book last week (which that post is an excerpt of), after he barnstormed my podcast feeds, and it crystallizes the criticisms I've heard from across the ideological spectrum by describing "symbolic capitalists" as a like-minded cohort. What's great about that framing is that it is cuts across the familiar groupings of race, class, income, political ideology, etc.
What's great about it "symbolic capitalists vs. physical capitalists" is that it groups people by how they participate in the economy and then points to a pattern in how they respond to major shifts in society throughout history. It's not just an analysis of the modern knowledge economy and it is more specific than economic winners and losers. He argues that even wealthy physical capitalists feel like 'losers' in a world increasingly dominated by symbolic capitalists, who are themselves captive to an elite group of super-progressive activists.
It occurred to me ask which interview of him you’d recommend.
I first came across him with this essay in American Affairs that I found careful, comprehensive and fair-minded
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/
And yet Nicholas Kristof in the NYT is preaching the importance of donating to these groups. I don’t think the groups are going anywhere. These groups thrived during Trump 1 and I’m sure they will do the same in Trump 2.
The problem isn’t their funding, the problem is a lack of Dem elected officials and staffers with the cajones to tell them to go kick rocks when they show up at their office claiming to represent millions of voters
Need more people to get personally involved in actual Democratic Party organizations (local parties or whatever) and fewer people to donate to Groups.
Or just less explicitly partisan organizations. Getting involved with a YIMBY group that isn't explicitly left just improves the country and bankshots into better politics from both right and left.
I thought you meant to say YIMBIY group? Favoring NIMBY is vile heresy in the eyes of all True Slow Borers 😊
i don't think nimby groups even call themselves that. maybe something like neighborhood historic preservation society.
I did mean YIMBY! My bad, thanks
I don’t know…I take it as a bellwether. I can imagine sensible big donors thinking the same thing. Am I actually helping?
What exactly is "the groups"? I keep seeing it being used, but it is essentially impossible to Google. Is it ACLU+think tanks?
I'm not sure if it's think tanks? I take it more to mean activist style non-governmental organizations.
mostly immigration/enviro advocacy groups is what i usually see referenced
So like HRC? Sunrise Foundation? Planned Parenthood? CAIR?
I'm probably not the right person to ask. I think it means various progressive non-profits, especially ones that seem to have outsize influence relative to their actual popular support among the people they claim to represent.
From what I understand, they often operate similarly to lobbyists. A senator or congressman wants to know what Black people think, so they call up the NAACP. Or the NCAAP calls them to complain, on behalf of Black voters. Is the NAACP an accurate reflection of the interests of Black people in the year 2024? I don't know the specific answer, but I could imagine they could easily not be. It's not like every Black person votes on what the NCAAP does every year, or donates to them en masse.
Who knows, maybe the NCAAP is very much in touch with Black people, but surely at least some of "the groups" fit this out-of-touch description, especially given that working in a non-profit governmental org is not a standard career or interest.
There is also the billionaire funding angle. Many of these groups are funded by rich people with their own peculiar set of issues. And if you have enough money it’s easy enough to make it feel like that issue is more important to voters than it actually is.
I wonder how much this change of approach will take hold. I interact with actual conservatives, moderates and normies sometimes and it seems clear to me that the progressive wing's approach over the last eight years *isn't producing results*. Everything they've gotten has been from spending down political capital earned by being normie.
Burn the America hating communists!!!!
Essentially priority #1 for Democrats should be eliminating homelessness, graffiti, litter, general low level crime, in Philly, Milwaukee etc..
Harris is going to end up with 8-10 million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020. Trump's vote total will be pretty close to his 2020 total. What was it about 2020, the pandemic, or Biden himself that motivated millions more people to vote for Biden who couldn't be bothered to vote in 2024?
I think we should wait until all the data is in. The MAGA folks I know are pointing to what you say as evidence of widespread fraud in 2020.
I'm not claiming there was any fraud in 2020. But those MAGA people beg the question, if Dems could easily cast millions of fraudulent votes in 2020 why couldn't they do so this year?
Yes, let’s shape our discussions around what some people might think. Surely that’s a great way to live.
I was hoping that a positive take away from 2024 was that we just solved Election Fraud and that it was a one time card trick in 2020. Trump started in early on Tuesday night about massive fraud in Philly, but I think someone told him to cool it because it was apparent early on that he was going to win. But this WHERE ARE THE MILLIONS OF BIDEN VOTERS question will be the kernel that keeps it in play for future use. Like if Shapiro trounces Vance in 2028 will the ITS RIGGED play work again? Are Democrats so inept that a tightly coordinated nefarious conspiracy of thousands of cheaters can only be coordinated every eight years?
NYC and CA count very slowly. We don’t know what the final totals will be yet.
Actually would be a good second layer to this analysis, did Trump gain more share in counties with more turn out down more?
How do you know that it isn't just less voter turn-out overall but with a larger percentage of people that voted for Biden switching over to Trump?
We almost certainly know it is that, not what he said.
The answer of course is that Biden's left-wing policies engaged millions of low-propensity voters, and when Kamala Harris swung back to the center those voters stayed home.
I think 2020 was a pretty energized year for the Dems. Add to that the fact that COVID basically created a period where Dems were more likely to have free time (living in areas with lockdowns and more stringent social controls) and Reps were more likely to be living more or less like they did before COVID (granted with higher mortality) and it seems like getting more people voting Dem was probably going to be a given.
I know in Portland at the time there were tons of people who really appeared to be at the protest to drink, eat BBQ (they had a BBQ truck most nights at the downtown protests) and pick up on members of the opposite sex...it was a social justice bar scene. When there was nothing else to do, and people felt very unempowered, things like voting, protesting, were probably pretty appealing.
XY vs XX.
At least, it's a hypothesis.
Now that we're a day in, two pieces of anec-data I've been seeing:
- In 2016, everyone I knew went to Facebook to complain about racism, sexism, etc., etc.
- In 2024, there are still plenty of those, but half are "Democrats really screwed up this time..."
People aren't as surprised this time because they're able to see how others made the leap.
And there has been no shortage of people over the last year saying "I've always voted for Democrats, but I'm fed up and no longer in that camp".
Given that Kamala would have held the blue wall if she had swayed 1 point of the electorate (thereby gaining 2 points), I think Woke hangover + bad candidate quality is easily enough to explain this.
I know the economy has been tough, but I think a better candidate could have won even with that disadvantage.
Hard to see what a better candidate could have done if they were a Democrat. Democrats were happy with what Joe Biden did, how would a Democratic candidate succeed in denouncing everything the Biden administration did and promising a complete break without losing some enthusiasm among Democrats? The fact is that working people have different priorities, they are not impressed with fighting global warming. At this point they don’t seem to care much about health care, maybe they don’t believe in it, they don’t believe in government. They were clearly just mad, not the sort of thing a better candidate could have overcome. Obama would have lost.
"denouncing everything the Biden administration did" is a strawman.
Gretchen Whitmer:
- Didn't support decriminalising the border
- Didn't support banning fracking, an important industry in a swing state Harris lost by 2 points
- Is the Governor of MI, a swing state Harris lost by 1.5 points
- Wasn't VP to a President with a -18% net approval rating
I'm not sure if that'd've been enough. But I find it hard to be sure it wouldn't have been. And if not Whitmer, other Governors were available.
I don't mean to dump on Harris. I feel she should take pride in the campaign she ran. She just carried a lot of liabilities that ultimately proved insurmountable.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/
i like walz myself, but am surprised ``she should have picked shapiro'' isn't more of a thing right now (not even coming from silver). he would have done better pushing back against vance during the debate, and they could have focused more on michigan and wisconsin. maybe we'll settle on this more once the final count is in.
i like whitmer a lot based on the few interviews i've heard with her, but yeah, she needs to go through a primary to see how that plays out. maybe next cycle?
a michigan vs ohio race would be epic.
Should Harris get a pass for accepting the nomination? When Biden stepped aside, he and Harry’s both had horrible approval ratings, Harris was tied to an unpopular administration, and Harris was complicit in covering for Biden during his mental decline. All of these vulnerabilities were obvious in July. Wasn’t it arrogant for her to think she was the best candidate?
i'm assuming the campaign had contingency plans for what would happen if biden was to step aside (or worse), and they went with something approaching that, which is why they were able to spin it up with her at the top so quickly (she would have been doing a lot of the campaigning even if biden was still at the top of the ticket).
based on what was going on after biden's debate, I'm also guessing that the only other person who had an appetite for trying to run at this late stage was newsom. he was the only one other than harris campaigning for biden after the debate, he did that debate with desantis, he was somewhat openly miffed that there wasn't more of an open process at the convention, etc. i'm pretty confident that he would have been worse.
the rest (shapiro, whitmer, ... ) showed no appetite for it and didn't seem to have a plan.
so no, i don't think taking responsibility for the hole the democrats found themselves in counts as arrogant.
biden, on the other hand, is a comically tragic figure. he had two jobs, to rid us of trump and to pass the torch. his arrogance led to a spectacular failure on both counts.
I don't think, by July, there was sufficient time, practically speaking, to pick anybody else. To get that, Biden needed to announce he wasn't running back in 2022, and allow a proper primary to take place.
When did it seem that she thought she was the best candidate? What I saw is that she was told she should be the candidate, no one else tried to do it (or even had a path to), so she did it.
If she had stepped aside, others would have come forward
As a Pennsylvania resident (granted in Philadelphia) I think about fracking zero percent of the time. People that care about fracking are probably just the frackers themselves in those rural areas that would vote for Trump anyway. I don't think PA voters are unique outliers with fracking at the top of their list of issues along with inflation and crime.
I rather doubt many voters were up on those specifics. Probably Harris’ greatest liability was the simple fact that she was an affirmative action hire, Biden choosing her (and his Supreme Court pick) on the basis of race and gender. A competitive primary starting in 2023 might have picked a stronger nominee (or it might have been Harris), we just don’t know…I think it’s happened in the past that a popular governor has entered the national stage and basically flopped right out of the starting gate, so we just don’t know. I suspect the GOP would find something to hang on Whitmer.
I just can't agree with this at all. She has a compelling story, is self made from middle class roots, and was elected as both AG and a senator from the most populous state. Or do you think all CA constituents vote based on DEI considerations? They just sent white guys to the Senate and the SF mayorship, so it seems unlikely
I’m not suggesting Harris wasn’t qualified, I’m saying that Biden announced that he would only choose a black woman and therefore made it look less like she earned it. I’m saying Biden did her no favors by making his pick some sort of payback for black women supporting him. It would have been better if he’d just chosen her as the most qualified person to be his VP.
I will add as a Michigan native who has followed Whitmer for over 20 years, the woman has an intuitive mastery of communicating with non-college voters (i'll abbreviate as NCV). "Fix the damn roads" got her elected in 2018 in large part because it was a simple message that signalled to NCVs that she understood them. Read her NYT interview: She's invariably plain-spoken rather than flowery and I think it comes across as authentic. If you've heard her speak, she also has a very strong Michigan accent which I think might serve as another nonverbal cue that "she's like us." I'm not as familiar with Shapiro, but I imagine he has similar communication traits.
Kamala had 3 problems.
- People wanted change, and Democrats ran the person with the _weakest_ claim to change: Biden's VP!
- The majority of Democrats have moved on from far-left policies, but there's no shortage of video clips where Kamala is beclowing herself.
- Kamala is a very poor off-the-cuff speaker, and it makes her come across as dim-witted and insincere.
If you picked (1) a sharp person, (2) who was not in the White House the last 4 years, and (3) didn't have such a terrible woke paper trail, that person could have run with _exactly the same positions Kamala ran with in 2024_ and not had any of her key problems.
There are governors who could have done this. (Not Newsom)
Just to elaborate your point, first, Kamala could have helped herself by being authentic and by explicitly renouncing her goofier past positions. She chose to do neither. And second, proposing Newsom as candidate feels like the B-grade horror movie where the girl decides to open the door to the basement. You just want to scream out "NO!"
I feel like a candidate that previously endorsed goofy positions is a problem in itself.
Granted, but an explicit disavowal would have gone a long way to detoxify.
As would putting literally any daylight between her and Biden. People kept saying they understood why she didn’t but, really, do they? Because, if so, we need to burn this party to the ground. Prioritizing cocktail party invites over winning the presidency is dumb as hell.
Maybe, but this would have required Biden to step aside much earlier, like December 2022, in order to give candidates the time to ramp up a campaign.
Given the timing of his decision, Harris turned out to be by far the best choice.
2008 Obama won because he was chosen through a primary process because they liked his vision for the country. If he were thrust into a campaign in July as a low-profile vice president with just the talent, not the vision, he probably couldn't have won either.
I really don't think it's the case that competitive primaries are always better. The competitive primary in 2020 was not helpful at all. Neither was the 2016 primary. I can think of examples going both ways in state elections. And the other thing is that you can't just conjure up a competitive primary. Somebody else has to want to run, and I think it's doubtful that anyone better than Harris would have challenged Harris.
it would have done many things, among them making the republican primaries more competitive and with trump emerging from them with less unified support, having to engage in debates and maybe even not emerging at all.
locking in a situation where the president is unable to communicate and his vp is perceived to be incompetent drove all kinds of support unto trump that he wouldn't otherwise have had. kennedy would have been defeated in a primary instead of taking his support to trump, and his grievances would have at least been aired if not addressed. the vp would have shown herself to be a good campaigner in 2022, driving the message on dobbs, and much more tech friendly than biden. shapiro, buttigieg, and whitmer would make their own pitches in their own ways. there would have been options for a bunch of tech and finance types to spread out their support instead of flocking to trump. even musk might have made somewhat different choices (as far as I can tell, he first supported desantis, then weighed his options, and did not go all in on trump until early this year). zuckerberg and bezos may have made different choices, as well.
pushing a good chunk of the country towards trump and then, only after they are all in, trying to drive home just how bad he really is, is a bizarre and divisive strategy.
Don't worry, the usual suspects will do more than enough race blaming to make up for the shortage elsewhere. (A certain segment of online left intellectuals appears to be going with, "Latinos are no bueno": https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1854105411395207440 )
That guy is the worst. He also trashed white women. Nothing more than a shock jock.
Ehhh I don’t think this is true. People really seemed to want to punish the Dems at the presidential level for [insert grievance here]. “Whitmer woulda lost” is the new “O’Malley woulda won.”
DEI hiring needs to stop. Biden should apologize to America for choosing Harris based upon her race and sex. The Democratic establishment has betrayed us and must repent and clear the field for a new generation of elites.
<And there has been no shortage of people over the last year saying "I've always voted for Democrats, but I'm fed up and no longer in that camp".>
I'm seeing / hearing so much of this too. Shoot ... I voted for a Republican (US House seat #10) for the first time ever because Brad Schneider is such a woke evangelist.
I guess a losing candidate is by definition "bad" but I thought she ran a damn good campaign, especially given the immense time pressure she was under.
I know that story caught on since election night, but I've crunched the numbers, crudely, by putting them in a spreadsheet and eyeballing the vote shifts. I don't see it. The swingiest swing states have more or less the same results as their peers - ie, Arizona and Nevada swung like NM did, and Mich, Wis and PA swung similarly to Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota.
At the most their might be a 1% difference or so, but I fear this story will become conventional wisdom based on incomplete election night results and lead to mistakes down the road. It's definitely worth revisiting once full state results are in and being cautious about spread that narrative until it can be confirmed or disconfirmed.
What does your spreadsheet say about NY-22? I posted this in a top-level comment, but it seems to be a huge outlier in the narrative that everywhere Dems spent money (i.e. the IRA, CHIPS, etc) still shifted right. NY-22 flipped to blue and it wasn't particularly close, plus the district is a big recipient of CHIPS money. Micron is building a fab north of Syracuse that promises to bring thousands of jobs. This is my hometown and I'm keeping an eye on it with the idea of maybe moving back if things trend in the right direction.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest I have that level of detail. I was just looking at states to see if being a swing state mattered and to find out which big regions shifted the most or least.
I wish I had that data!
Agreed that 1% is nothing to sneeze at. I just think it's good to properly weigh how much was spent vs what was achieved so that we're realistic about what's possible 4 years from now, and beyond.
Harris saying she would not have changed anything from the past four years was a massive mistake. Anyone could come up with something and make some type of argument on why.
The Democrats also need to take a real hard look at how they talk to voters, specifically their choice of words and their tone. Far too many continue to shame voters over the littlest things when often that person doesn’t know what they are taking about because they don’t spend 200 hours a week on social media. Harris was better than others on this, but far too many in the party made this job hard for her.
I disagree.
The party’s elite is wasting its time doing that. They need to take a real hard look at how to permanently exit politics and never speak of it again.
i think her disagreements with biden such as they were, were not in places where people would like them to have been (immigration, gaza, economic policy) but in biden shunning some traditional sources of democratic support (i.e. parts of the business and tech community). but yeah, her response on the view was a uniquely bad answer.
Interesting data! Since there is not a great correlation between local economic performance and the swing to Trump, I would propose voters who listed the economy as their top concern were either a) Republicans who had internalized Fox News talking points about the ecomomy, and b) voters still mad about inflation. As to the latter (why are they still mad when inflation is getting better?), I would propose that when an economic shock of any sort hits, voters look to punish the incumbents rather than to evaluate calmly the causes and who has a superior plan to address the issues going forward. Back in 2008, I don’t think people voted D on the strength of Obama’s economic proosals, it was just people mad about the economic collapse voting to toss out the incumbent party, and in this case it was largely the same. Lastly, the urban shift towards Trump to me says these were voters upset about crime/quality of life issues or voters reacting negatively to wokism.
People are mad about inflation because prices remain inflated, and barring massive regressive tax increases and interest rate hikes are not going to fall.
Prices ~never fall. There's only been deflation in two of the past 70 or so years.
Specific prices fall. General prices / overall costs do not.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000074714
The economic shocks are pretty systematically correlated between urban and non-urban areas with a donut hole effect of higher percent increases in outlying areas than in the core. A large part of this is remote work and started in 2020, but urban disorder could have increased it as well. So teasing geography from economics and social issues is going to be extremely difficult
When people say inflation really what they mean it shit costs too much
It was widely understood that voting for president only "mattered" in a small number of swing states. So for example voters who felt uninspired by either candidate may have been more likely to stay home in non-swing states. Might this be muddying the waters regarding what influenced vote shifts? Are the results unchanged if you consider only swing states?
I've looked at the numbers on vote shifts (but not turnout) state-by-state, and it appears to me that the swing states shifted very similarly to their less competitive neighbors or peers.
Great analysis.
My question is: how much of this Hispanic swing is actually an immigrant swing? If we had the crosstabs, would we see Armenians, Koreans, Nigerians, etc... shifting just as much as Hispanics? Unfortunately, we tend to group people of all these disparate backgrounds into super "Race" categories that obscure as much as they illuminate. But in many ways a "white" Persian and a "black" Senegalese might have more in common with each other than they do with their census group.
These other ethnicities tend to live in many of the same places as Hispanics, so I think their vote shifts probably get missed and partly mistaken for the Hispanic trend. My theory is 2024 was more about working class immigrants, and especially their 2nd gen children, moving right. And that's why we see diverse areas like the Bronx, Maryland suburbs and Southern California move right, but less immigrant heavy metros like Seattle, Atlanta, Colorado Springs and Pittsburgh not as much.
This seems like an interesting point, especially given how many aggrieved online right-wingers think that any support for immigration is just a clever plan to ensconce democrats forever.
They don't think it is a clever plan. They think it is a foolish plan.
The real estate piece of this analysis, and overall economic is going to be confounded by the strong donut hole pattern in post-covid real estate and job growth. Due, in large part to remote and hybrid work, highly dense and long commute center cities have had lowest increase in real estate prices since the pandemic and less job growth since.
On the other hand the largest increases in real estate prices are places taking in educated remote and hybrid workers who are likely to disdain Trump and Dobbs.
Since this is pretty systematic across the country, it's going to be tough to untangle the economic and real estate causes from geographic.