I'll just say that by far the most obvious thing D's could and should have done to bolster their coalition like a decade ago was drop gun control from their agenda. Yes it'll piss off people in states they already won by 30, but it would help them literally everywhere else. It's a high cultural, low practical salience issue. And it's been clear for a while that it's a lost cause in the courts anyways. Sticking behind assault weapon bans, and capacity limits and "ghost gun" hysteria is an all downside proposition that hurts them in exactly the places they need to stop bleeding votes.
As Democrats write off more and more states I find the arguments about senate/EC bias less compelling.
To an extent, at this point the entire debate hinges on the idiosyncratic unpopularity of republicans in California. If Republicans gain there (or Democrats fall) you’ll see the skew disappear.
Moreover, it’s one thing to argue that Democrats are the more popular party nationally but their votes are grouped inefficiently. As this ‘inefficiently’ starts to just mean “in California” they begin to resemble any regional party in a parliamentary system whose vote share outperforms their seat total.
The Bloc Québécois is not the victim of a bad system but of their own intentionally targeted appeal.
If anything, the “Emerging Demographic Majority” seems pretty squarely pointed at the GOP right now.
The Democrats simply cannot govern well when more than half the coalition has economic interests pointing at “don’t govern well and enable rent-seeking.” It is aiming to govern well out of sheer inertia, but the future of the party is woke suburbanites campaigning for cheap service labor and a higher SALT deduction.
The GOP, meanwhile, is governing *badly* out of sheer inertia, and the seeds of change are there as it seeks to respond to the shifting make-up of its electorate.
If the Democrats can get a single, serious climate change bill done before they morph entirely into the party of professional class moralizing and status quoism, they’ll have met my meager expectations.
At which point the country’s future rests entirely on what sort of populism the Republicans come to embody: Fidesz, PSUV, or New Dealer?
I hate describing the Senate or Electoral College as "biased against Democrats". They are just not. The rules about winning in both situations have been clearly defined and Democrats, knowing what it takes to win, have chosen to pursue a suboptimal coalition building strategy.
It gives me flashbacks to being a Timberwolves fan in the Flip Saunders 2.0 era. Amongst the many reasons they lost all the time was shooting by far the least amount of three pointers by choice. The team made a horrible strategic choice and paid for it over and over again. At least with them though, the fans were smart enough to realize that they were shooting themselves in the foot and not blame the league for biasing the game against them by introducing the three pointer decades earlier.
As Democrats, we have no one to blame but ourselves for how difficult we've chosen to make it for us to win.
This analysis makes Dem leadership's risk aversion and status quo bias all the more frustrating. They're staying the course on a sinking ship. The popularists and progressives disagree on the solution, but leadership doesn't seem to recognise there is a problem.
Climbing back on my hobby-horse, I'll just note that the weakness of our political parties make any kind of change a very difficult collective action problem.
The "Democrats" are a loose brand/coalition, not any kind of coherent political entity that is capable of coordinated political action when it comes to messaging, policy or setting priorities.
Instead there are a bunch of individual actors and interest groups acting in their narrow interests and trying to argue that success for the party as a whole depends on everyone else in the coalition adopting those narrow interests.
This is also how you get and maintain the structural disadvantage the Democrats currently face. A normal political party would seek to compete in the system as it exists with the goal of being a majority party. What constitutes the Democrat party has no ability to do that. There is no leadership with any authority, much less authority that can force the various factions to play nice for the greater good.
Fundamentally, this is a much bigger problem than the trends discussed in this post and is actually what underlies so much dysfunction in our political parties.
It's certainly *possible* that Republicans will end up with a filibuster-proof Senate majority and the presidency after 2024, but this article is doing a lot of 'extrapolating from recent trends without much acknowledgment that they could go into reverse'. Like, maybe we just see a bit less alignment between Senate and POTUS vote, and in a few years we look back on 94.5% as a high water mark. Or maybe Biden becomes more popular between now and 2024. Equally, maybe everything continues on exactly the same trajectory and it's a complete disaster. But as we should be able to remember from the silly optimism about the 'emerging Democrat majority' a decade ago, trends have a habit of not panning out exactly as they appear they're going to.
If Biden's approval is still roughly the same in 2024, and he runs, then I reckon the best chance to win is to have Trump be the nominee and hope the public remembers why he's unacceptable.
I know it bit us in the ass last time to hope he's the nominee, but making the election about him is the only way to make it not a referendum on Biden.
And that's the best case scenario, another Biden term where he's unable to do anything ambitious legislatively. Le sigh.
let's not undersell America's thermostatic desire for divided government (not the same as ticket splitting). Assuming the Republicans take both houses of congress in 22, obviously the Democratic agenda will be dead but also it will immediately handicap the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, especially if it's Trump.
The bigger issue for the Democrats is there isn’t an obvious tactical pivot they can make to fix their unpopularity. Their Left leaning base already thinks they’re shills who will sell them out at the first sign of trouble and believes the solution is to pivot left. I don’t think they will buy into a pivot back to the right (meaning the center). On the flip side of the coin I’m not even sure what pivoting the Dems could do to shore up their support among moderate voters in the first place. Democrats have little credibility.
Democrats simultaneously need to sell their left leaning base on a more moderate agenda while also pivoting to the center in order to fend off defections. The problem is the party is awful on earned media attention and staying on message. The Republicans have done a great job portraying the Democrats as leftist extremists, and there are lots of Democrats who unfortunately ARE leftist extremists. Furthermore they get all the attention and drown out any paid for ads the Democrats can get.
The best thing might be for the Democratic Party to split with AOC leading the leftist part and Joe Biden leading the moderate one. That allows the Democrats to portray themselves as a more viable alternative to the leftist extremists. Basically what Eric Zemmour did for Marine Le Pen in the recent French election. The Democrats and the DSA need each other, and unfortunately the DSA is dragging down the Democratic Party. Their message is actively hostile to the voters the Democrats need to win. On the flip side the Dems can’t govern unless the DSA consents.
It’s a bad cycle just like what we see with Orban in Hungary and Netanyahu in Israel. The only solution is to outlast the populist takeover and we can’t do that unless the DSA agrees to put aside its priorities for generic, boring, candidates. We basically need this coalition to persist until 2028, which just isn’t going to happen IMHO.
It doesn’t help that Biden, while having some good political skills himself, is old and not great at messaging. On the bright side in 2020 you could basically read into him whatever you wanted (which let people build him as a vehicle). In 2024 he won’t have that luxury.
The biggest issue I see with the Democratic Party is branding. On most issues, their points are reasonable... popular... desirable. On the local level, Democrats have plenty of moderate, patriotic candidates, but they don't seem to get the same media coverage as the AOCs of the party.
For instance... I was just in Los Angeles with my Brother and Sister-in-law. They are educated, affluent, west coat liberals (I love them)... they have been talking about buying a house, and my sister in law was telling me how they don't want to buy a house in a neighborhood with "flags" at first I thought she was talking about Trump flags.... but no. She doesn't want to live in a neighborhood with American Flags. Now... she is a Moroccan immigrant, and they have different standards of displaying patriotism. But as a dedicated liberal Democrat, she automatically associates anyone displaying an American flag as "other"
It's not only having potential losses among sitting Dem senators, but also possibly losing to defeatable Senate Republicans.
The big target is Wisconsin's Ron Johnson who is very unpopular. My question is whether the Democrats are poised to pick up that vulnerable seat. Are they likely to have a good candidate? The favorite right now is the lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes. I know little about him, other than that he's a Bernie supporter who narrowly won his position in 2018. Is he a good choice for a state like Wisconsin? Is there a more suitable candidate running for the Democratic nomination?
I'd love to hear from any Wisconsin experts here. It would be a shame if the Democrats blew this great opportunity by picking an unsuitable candidate.
I saw a pretty shocking map the other day that (aside from Texas), every single state gaining college graduates voted for Joe Biden. The West Coast, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Maine, Maryland, New York, Mass, Rhode Island and Virginia. So the Senate problem will just get worse and worse as more and more people with means and education leave the conservative states
Also, I don’t think it even matters who wins the Presidency via vote? Republicans we’re very clear with their votes last time that if they control Congress they’re going to install Trump as President whether or not he wins. Nothing about the stupid laws have been fixed, and Republicans have only gotten more unreasonable since then. If it’s all done legally, do we really think Biden and other Democrats have the courage to resist?
I already know that after the Dems get destroyed both the left and the center will blame the other for why it happened (and they'll both be kinda right).
I'll just say that by far the most obvious thing D's could and should have done to bolster their coalition like a decade ago was drop gun control from their agenda. Yes it'll piss off people in states they already won by 30, but it would help them literally everywhere else. It's a high cultural, low practical salience issue. And it's been clear for a while that it's a lost cause in the courts anyways. Sticking behind assault weapon bans, and capacity limits and "ghost gun" hysteria is an all downside proposition that hurts them in exactly the places they need to stop bleeding votes.
As Democrats write off more and more states I find the arguments about senate/EC bias less compelling.
To an extent, at this point the entire debate hinges on the idiosyncratic unpopularity of republicans in California. If Republicans gain there (or Democrats fall) you’ll see the skew disappear.
Moreover, it’s one thing to argue that Democrats are the more popular party nationally but their votes are grouped inefficiently. As this ‘inefficiently’ starts to just mean “in California” they begin to resemble any regional party in a parliamentary system whose vote share outperforms their seat total.
The Bloc Québécois is not the victim of a bad system but of their own intentionally targeted appeal.
If anything, the “Emerging Demographic Majority” seems pretty squarely pointed at the GOP right now.
The Democrats simply cannot govern well when more than half the coalition has economic interests pointing at “don’t govern well and enable rent-seeking.” It is aiming to govern well out of sheer inertia, but the future of the party is woke suburbanites campaigning for cheap service labor and a higher SALT deduction.
The GOP, meanwhile, is governing *badly* out of sheer inertia, and the seeds of change are there as it seeks to respond to the shifting make-up of its electorate.
If the Democrats can get a single, serious climate change bill done before they morph entirely into the party of professional class moralizing and status quoism, they’ll have met my meager expectations.
At which point the country’s future rests entirely on what sort of populism the Republicans come to embody: Fidesz, PSUV, or New Dealer?
I hate describing the Senate or Electoral College as "biased against Democrats". They are just not. The rules about winning in both situations have been clearly defined and Democrats, knowing what it takes to win, have chosen to pursue a suboptimal coalition building strategy.
It gives me flashbacks to being a Timberwolves fan in the Flip Saunders 2.0 era. Amongst the many reasons they lost all the time was shooting by far the least amount of three pointers by choice. The team made a horrible strategic choice and paid for it over and over again. At least with them though, the fans were smart enough to realize that they were shooting themselves in the foot and not blame the league for biasing the game against them by introducing the three pointer decades earlier.
As Democrats, we have no one to blame but ourselves for how difficult we've chosen to make it for us to win.
This analysis makes Dem leadership's risk aversion and status quo bias all the more frustrating. They're staying the course on a sinking ship. The popularists and progressives disagree on the solution, but leadership doesn't seem to recognise there is a problem.
Great post Simon. This is basically what I’m trying to tell my Dem friends. The base case is quite bad and we should be worried!
Climbing back on my hobby-horse, I'll just note that the weakness of our political parties make any kind of change a very difficult collective action problem.
The "Democrats" are a loose brand/coalition, not any kind of coherent political entity that is capable of coordinated political action when it comes to messaging, policy or setting priorities.
Instead there are a bunch of individual actors and interest groups acting in their narrow interests and trying to argue that success for the party as a whole depends on everyone else in the coalition adopting those narrow interests.
This is also how you get and maintain the structural disadvantage the Democrats currently face. A normal political party would seek to compete in the system as it exists with the goal of being a majority party. What constitutes the Democrat party has no ability to do that. There is no leadership with any authority, much less authority that can force the various factions to play nice for the greater good.
Fundamentally, this is a much bigger problem than the trends discussed in this post and is actually what underlies so much dysfunction in our political parties.
It's certainly *possible* that Republicans will end up with a filibuster-proof Senate majority and the presidency after 2024, but this article is doing a lot of 'extrapolating from recent trends without much acknowledgment that they could go into reverse'. Like, maybe we just see a bit less alignment between Senate and POTUS vote, and in a few years we look back on 94.5% as a high water mark. Or maybe Biden becomes more popular between now and 2024. Equally, maybe everything continues on exactly the same trajectory and it's a complete disaster. But as we should be able to remember from the silly optimism about the 'emerging Democrat majority' a decade ago, trends have a habit of not panning out exactly as they appear they're going to.
@Simon Bazelon is Emily your mom?
If Biden's approval is still roughly the same in 2024, and he runs, then I reckon the best chance to win is to have Trump be the nominee and hope the public remembers why he's unacceptable.
I know it bit us in the ass last time to hope he's the nominee, but making the election about him is the only way to make it not a referendum on Biden.
And that's the best case scenario, another Biden term where he's unable to do anything ambitious legislatively. Le sigh.
let's not undersell America's thermostatic desire for divided government (not the same as ticket splitting). Assuming the Republicans take both houses of congress in 22, obviously the Democratic agenda will be dead but also it will immediately handicap the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, especially if it's Trump.
The bigger issue for the Democrats is there isn’t an obvious tactical pivot they can make to fix their unpopularity. Their Left leaning base already thinks they’re shills who will sell them out at the first sign of trouble and believes the solution is to pivot left. I don’t think they will buy into a pivot back to the right (meaning the center). On the flip side of the coin I’m not even sure what pivoting the Dems could do to shore up their support among moderate voters in the first place. Democrats have little credibility.
Democrats simultaneously need to sell their left leaning base on a more moderate agenda while also pivoting to the center in order to fend off defections. The problem is the party is awful on earned media attention and staying on message. The Republicans have done a great job portraying the Democrats as leftist extremists, and there are lots of Democrats who unfortunately ARE leftist extremists. Furthermore they get all the attention and drown out any paid for ads the Democrats can get.
The best thing might be for the Democratic Party to split with AOC leading the leftist part and Joe Biden leading the moderate one. That allows the Democrats to portray themselves as a more viable alternative to the leftist extremists. Basically what Eric Zemmour did for Marine Le Pen in the recent French election. The Democrats and the DSA need each other, and unfortunately the DSA is dragging down the Democratic Party. Their message is actively hostile to the voters the Democrats need to win. On the flip side the Dems can’t govern unless the DSA consents.
It’s a bad cycle just like what we see with Orban in Hungary and Netanyahu in Israel. The only solution is to outlast the populist takeover and we can’t do that unless the DSA agrees to put aside its priorities for generic, boring, candidates. We basically need this coalition to persist until 2028, which just isn’t going to happen IMHO.
It doesn’t help that Biden, while having some good political skills himself, is old and not great at messaging. On the bright side in 2020 you could basically read into him whatever you wanted (which let people build him as a vehicle). In 2024 he won’t have that luxury.
The biggest issue I see with the Democratic Party is branding. On most issues, their points are reasonable... popular... desirable. On the local level, Democrats have plenty of moderate, patriotic candidates, but they don't seem to get the same media coverage as the AOCs of the party.
For instance... I was just in Los Angeles with my Brother and Sister-in-law. They are educated, affluent, west coat liberals (I love them)... they have been talking about buying a house, and my sister in law was telling me how they don't want to buy a house in a neighborhood with "flags" at first I thought she was talking about Trump flags.... but no. She doesn't want to live in a neighborhood with American Flags. Now... she is a Moroccan immigrant, and they have different standards of displaying patriotism. But as a dedicated liberal Democrat, she automatically associates anyone displaying an American flag as "other"
Note: I love her and we have great conversations.
It's not only having potential losses among sitting Dem senators, but also possibly losing to defeatable Senate Republicans.
The big target is Wisconsin's Ron Johnson who is very unpopular. My question is whether the Democrats are poised to pick up that vulnerable seat. Are they likely to have a good candidate? The favorite right now is the lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes. I know little about him, other than that he's a Bernie supporter who narrowly won his position in 2018. Is he a good choice for a state like Wisconsin? Is there a more suitable candidate running for the Democratic nomination?
I'd love to hear from any Wisconsin experts here. It would be a shame if the Democrats blew this great opportunity by picking an unsuitable candidate.
I saw a pretty shocking map the other day that (aside from Texas), every single state gaining college graduates voted for Joe Biden. The West Coast, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Maine, Maryland, New York, Mass, Rhode Island and Virginia. So the Senate problem will just get worse and worse as more and more people with means and education leave the conservative states
Also, I don’t think it even matters who wins the Presidency via vote? Republicans we’re very clear with their votes last time that if they control Congress they’re going to install Trump as President whether or not he wins. Nothing about the stupid laws have been fixed, and Republicans have only gotten more unreasonable since then. If it’s all done legally, do we really think Biden and other Democrats have the courage to resist?
I already know that after the Dems get destroyed both the left and the center will blame the other for why it happened (and they'll both be kinda right).